The SCP Foundation Wiki as Meta-Worldbuilding: Focusing on the Post-Mimetic Properties of Media Software

This study compares mimetic worldbuilding and post-mimetic worldbuilding, using the SCP Foundation Wiki as an example of the latter. While mimetic worldbuilding centers on the real world to construct a single, coherent, and fixed setting, post-mimetic worldbuilding instead focuses on a system of semiotic signs, testing multiple permutations within a simulated environment. In this context, we conceptualize the SCP Foundation Wiki as a form of worldbuilding software —specifically, a type of media software—and explore its software-like properties to reveal how they connect to the Foundation’s unique approach to worldbuilding. The key elements we examine—templates and tags—respectively provide the structural framework and the retrieval mechanisms for post-mimetic simulation of worldbuilding. The SCP Foundation’s approach to worldbuilding pushes post-mimetic simulation to its extreme, resulting in a distinctive multiverse that diverges from normal post-mimetic worldbuilding. By intensely focusing on the expansion of “the grand nonnarrative”, the SCP Foundation inadvertently spawns numerous smaller worlds that fail to fully accommodate these non-narratives, leading to parallel proliferation and fragmentation. At this juncture, we adapt Manovich’s notion of the “meta-medium” to the concept of worldbuilding, reinterpreting the SCP Foundation Wiki and thereby proposing the idea of “meta-worldbuilding.” Meta-worldbuilding encompasses both the post-mimetic foundation and the spontaneously expanding the grand nonnarrative—and the worlds they generate—along with the software structures and cultural mechanisms that drive this ongoing process of creation.