- - How Neal Stephenson’s Lamina1 and Weta Workshop Are Using ‘Artefact’ Web Game to Launch ‘Truly New Original IP’: ‘Almost a Post-AI Mythos’

Jennifer MaasNovember 8, 2025 at 5:30 AM

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It’s been one week since prolific author Neal Stephenson and “The Lord of the Rings” VFX studio Wētā Workshop launched web game “Artefact,” what they hope will be a seminal piece of media in the entertainment landscape to come.

Housed on platform Lamina1, “Artefact” is described as “a collaborative worldbuilding experience” that “invites players to step into the aftermath of the Spike — a fizzled singularity that tore the internet apart, ended the reign of AI megasystems, and forced humanity to rebuild through new, decentralized systems.”

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The goal here is to experiment with the process of IP creation and owndership when driven by fandom. It’s the flagship project for Lamina1, one of several “Spaces” planned by the platform run by Stephenson and co-founder and CEO Rebecca Barkin.

“With ‘Artefact,’ you have a really, truly new original IP, almost a post-AI mythos,” “Artefact” executive producer Ryan Gill told Variety. “We just don’t have much of that. And when it does move into adaptation of other Spaces — film, television, book, all this stuff — the organizing principle will stay at Spaces with all the people that were a part of it early on, and really have a foundational understanding and a participation. And it’s a vehicle for how to prove that out, really, and how IP can be built from that natively and shaped through that. And that’s what Spaces will do for other IP as well.”

“Artefact” gameplay begins with players acquiring a thumb drive and booting up their rig — a salvaged machine stitched together from CPUs, drives, and scraps of machine code — to go in search of artefacts, evolving digital entities capable of storing and transmitting lost knowledge. Players are working together to find artefacts as they continue to appear across Lamina1, while building trust within their player communities, known as Phyle, in order to uncover the great mystery at the center of the game.

If that sounds like a lot, the “Artefact” team is aware of that, and they’ve spent a great deal of time considering how to make it as easy to play for as many people as possible.

“When we’ve worked on taking existing IP and trying to turn it into interactive IP, that’s sort of how you get people to move from passive consumption into, how do I interact and create with the world?” Barkin said. “It’s a really tough battle, because sometimes people just want to consume. So we had to think about different barriers of entry and different ways in for different types of profiles of people and players. And one of the reasons why we decided to allow people to contribute PDFs or images or things like that, it’s just to lower the barrier of entry. Of being able to insert yourself and your ideas into a game world, because otherwise you’d have to be a developer to do that.”

Seven days after “Artefact’s” Oct. 31 launch, there are currently 372 listed members in the game’s community on Lamina1. Barkin says those players may have a leg up in the long term, having been part of the community from Day 1, but that’s far fro the only way to interact with “Artefact” as it grows.

“There will be different entry points for new people to keep coming into the game when they’re comfortable,” Barkin said. “And I think that’s an important piece of it. We debated this a lot, in terms of the rollout strategy of, how do people get in? And if minting is your way in, how do we make sure that — because word of mouth is really going to be our best asset — that there’s new entry points all the time for people to come into the game. Maybe not with the same advantages that those early people will have, but still in a way that’s really enjoyable and accessible.”

Gill likens the “Artefact” format to two tried-and-true methods for entertainment: procedural and serial.

“Looking at the paradigm of episodic storytelling, because streaming has really taken over so much now people are used to episodes and binging and all this kind of stuff — in the video game sense, it’s kind of combining that, in a way,” Gill said “We have procedural and serial. We have this in phases.”

Gill says the procedural portion will see each phase of the game be “another space of the world that you can go to and you interact with people, and there might be side missions and things that you help out with.”

“It’s kind of combining an episodic way of telling stories and then blending that with what we’re used to feeling like a video game feels like, but really, at the core, it being like a literary narrative experience,” Gill said. “You get the richness of a Neal novel, for example, but it is experienced in a much more dynamic and immersive way. And this is not fixed. This is like a pilot episode — episode one of Season 1. And it is very much going to evolve, and we’re not going to be the ones that determine all the ways that it evolves.”

The “Artefact” team has made it so those decisions will be up to the creator community.

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Source: “AOL Entertainment”