> In a way that’s not s super surprising observation: obviously a world created through the work of a single author (or a few) will not be as complex as one created through the interaction of 8 billions of humans, plus billions of past humans, plus natural phenomena. Naïvely we might even expect a fictional world to be at least 8 billion times less complex than the real world, whatever that means. Maybe Tolkien got 0.000000000125% of the way there, and all other authors who tried got 0.0000000001% or less.

I'd imagine that an MMO with robust and numerous autonomous AI NPC's each with a sufficient context window could potentially achieve world building at a much higher resolution and fidelity.