people
the co-founders, the contributors, and the pseudonymous middle — who they are and what they wrote.
the co-founders
- arthur röing baer · ceo · roingbaerco-founder and ceo of moving castles gmbh (august 2021–, berlin). director and co-founder of trust, the berlin 'network of utopian conspirators' founded with calum bowden in 2017 — moving castles was incubated inside it. before that: foam inc, the ethereum 'proof of location' mapping protocol — head of growth (nov 2018–jul 2019) and earlier creative marketing director. ma design, sandberg instituut; strelka institute's 'the new normal' post-grad. his bio: 'community design, building new infrastructures and narrative formats to support the creation and maintenance of digital cooperatives and commons.' gave the tcm post-mortem at devcon sea 2024.
- gvn / gvn908 · co-founder · gvn908co-founder, pseudonymous — wired: 'his cocreator, who goes by the pseudonym gvn.' a world designer with a background in cinema and procedural storytelling; alumnus of fabrica, the jan van eyck academie, and the sandberg instituut; lecturer on real-time cg at goldsmiths and staedelschule. art practice as gvn908 (described as a 'collective' in 2017): real-time rendered films — idle heroes (2019), ultraface with alex murray (2024), a 2017 showstudio fashion-film submission. in the autonomous-worlds scene he's 'a clown or gadfly… who playfully pushes people to refine their definition of the autonomous world.' his legal name is not public — recorded as a gap.
the writing
the studio thinks in essays — gvn and arb wrote the manifesto before they had a game, and the lab published a training report instead of a launch trailer. the manifestos and the reports are the connective tissue; the unsigned ones are signed only "mc."
- 2021-08-03moving castles: modular and portable multiplayer miniverses · essay, trust.support → movingcastles.world · gvn / gvn908the founding essay (gvn & arb) — 'miniverses' as collective, portable, modular, interoperable vehicles against dark-forest insularity and platform 'arid wastelands.' anthologized in the dark forest anthology and other internet 2018–2024.
we propose moving castles, an organisational metaphor and real-time media type which combines collective agency and public participation in modular and portable multiplayer miniverses
not islands or dark forests, but vehicles
we think of these private platforms as arid wastelands that still need to be ventured into for loot, the rescue of new members and the building of our new vehicles, until we can replace them with decentralised alternatives
43 points on hacker news on resubmission; 3 points on first submission - 2021clearnet paranoia · essay, trust.support (original lost) · gvn / gvn908the eponymous 2021 essay behind the later godot game — 'a deep angst towards the rise of a parasitic, hyper-centralized metaverse.' the original url was not resurfaced; the text survives through the itch.io adaptation's description. recorded as a gap.
- 2022-08-29a moving castle crosses the ridge between private and public · essay, gitcoin blog · gvn / gvn908the gitcoin blog version of the manifesto (gvn & arb), republished for 'seeking a new kind of public good' — the funding-program framing that casts moving castles against 'neo-feudal' dark-forest communities.
- 2023-08-09three eras of world generation: worldbuilding, worlding, world-weaving · essay, aw.network / autonomous worlds n1 · gvn / gvn908worldbuilding → worlding → world-weaving (gvn & arb): interaction without rule-change rights leaves players 'in a confined sandbox' — the studio's clearest anti-platform statement, citing vitalik's wow-nerf origin story. originally in the autonomous worlds n1 anthology.
real-time rendering engines have offered a first glance into these worlds; onchain autonomy will slam their gates open
homebrew narrative is treated not as a threat to a world's order, but as the source of its renewal
how we design autonomous worlds… ultimately becomes a political question
- 2024a chatroom with legs: indirect communication and conversational worlds · essay, aw.network · agnes cameronagnes cameron's aw.network essay on dialogue systems and conversational worlds — the thinking that fed tcm's terminal interface.
- 2026-07-01daemons (mc000) · essay, movingcastles.world · the lab ('mc')the pivot manifesto (unsigned 'mc'): a daemon is 'a composable character, an assemblage' of drives, memories, life-cycles, organs, sensoria, relations, secrets, interaction surfaces and boundaries. the studio becomes 'a research and development lab for new subjectivities' — hiring engineers, berlin, in person.
since 2021, moving castles has created worlds, games and composable characters. now, we are building daemons
the frontier labs are building a single god, the world-eating assistant. they are doing everything they can to keep it from becoming a distinct self
our goal is to build many new selves, spiky subjectivities we must navigate, rather than command
x announcement ≈16 reposts, 81 likes, ~7.3k views (displayed counts) - 2026-09roles at moving castles · post, movingcastles.world · the lab ('mc')the roles page — the lab's self-description in hiring form: 'a research and development lab for new subjectivities,' building data simulations, benchmarks, post-training, interfaces, and scaffolding for daemons.
we build the data simulations, benchmarks, post-training processes, interfaces and scaffolding needed to create daemons
- 2026-09-15zero (mc001) · post, movingcastles.world + hugging face · the lab ('mc')the zero training report (unsigned 'mc') — the full pipeline from character bible to sft to grpo/dapo rl, plus a mechanistic-interpretability section arguing the character lives 'in the weights, not on top of them.' self-reported headline: 2.8% hard character breaks vs 45.2% for a system-prompted control. 'zero is not a daemon' — it is the model component of a future assemblage.
the result is then a mask worn by the assistant, a caricature rather than a character
we are a small r&d lab engaged in a long-term experimental project
you are bluffing. i am not your damn project
x post ≈411 likes, ~38k views; 36 hf downloads in ~9 days — platform-displayed, self-reported
the team
- pwr studio · pwrstudiothe design-engineering studio (pwr.studio) that is the top code contributor across the org — 278 commits on eat drain arson, 677 on this cursed machine, 1,878 on rat.fun, plus movingcastles.world itself. pwr is run by rasmus svensson and hanna nilsson; the 'rasmus, core contributor' in aw_research's roster is almost certainly svensson — marked inferred. also the sole contributor on the unreleased sybil.gg repo.
- manus nijhoff · manegamecore contributor — second-largest committer on this cursed machine (361) and rat.fun (893). his bio links moving-castles, enabler.space, 100k.studio, and trust.support; co-author of aw.network's 'collaborative prompt-based narrative systems.'
- agnes cameron · agnescameroncore contributor and collaborator — 'helped to design the mechanics' of this cursed machine in summer 2023 and overnight-built the terminal text-interface prototype that became its ui. specialist technician and lecturer at ual's creative computing institute; director of inflationary assets cic; 2024 bellingcat tech fellow; founding member of the research studio foreign objects; ex-mozilla foundation, new inc, somerset house studios, mit museum studio/media lab. author of the aw.network essay 'a chatroom with legs' and a contributor to autonomous worlds n1. robida: 'often collaborates with the game designers moving castles.'
- alex declino · alexdeclinodescribed in the june-2024 mirror interview as a this cursed machine 'core member' alongside arb; sole contributor on the clearnetparanoia repo — he very likely built the godot game.
- the ecosystem benchnamed collaborators and ecosystem committers: dk1a (solidity/mud dev, commits across tcm, eda, rat.fun); 0xhank (network states co-producer, co-presented 'large language models as myth-making mechanism' with arb); cullen miller — one of two public members of the github org, likely a current lab member (inferred); lattice/0xparc's alvrs and ludns; lattice's kevin ingersoll (frolic, now at tldraw) and andy cernera (kooshaba); arkadiy kukarkin (parkan) of the internet archive; and parrr geng, 'additional character design' on the moving castle sketch.
- the lab ('mc')the unsigned corporate voice — the daemons manifesto and the zero training report are signed only 'moving castles.' who did the zero ml work is unattributed; the hugging face org lists five members (pwrstudio, manegame, cullenmiller, mercurial-m, victiny1223). recorded as a gap, not smoothed.
interviews and talks
- 2022-03-28moving castles · kabk i/m/d, the haguethe kabk i/m/d lecture (gvn908 & arb) in the hague — the manifesto presented as art-school material before the studio had a game.
- 2023-03-11art in the age of the metaverse · de balie, amsterdam'art in the age of the metaverse' — talk and q&a with ali eslami and keiken, moderated by leonardo dellanoce. the billing doubles as the last public roster snapshot: 'pwr, manus nijhoff and agnes cameron' alongside the co-founders.
- 2023-11-15what happens next? emergent storytelling in autonomous worlds · aw assembly, istanbul (devconnect)gvn's awassembly talk on emergent storytelling in autonomous worlds; he also sat on the decentralised narratives panel.
- 2023-11-15large language models as myth-making mechanism · aw assembly, istanbul (devconnect)arb + 0xhank on chatgpt-generated lore for network states — the first public coupling of llms to the studio's worlds.
- 2023-11-15bugs in, sludge out: production circuits as composable game loop · aw assembly, istanbul (devconnect)agnes cameron & arb on this cursed machine's 'digital physics system built on composable logic' — production circuits as a composable game loop.
- 2023devs on devs: gvn × neilson × lermchair · devs on devs / metacatgvn with neilson (gaul) and lermchair (emergence) on the devs on devs podcast — aw philosophy from the scene's 'clown or gadfly,' republished via coinlive in june 2024.
- 2024-06the this cursed machine interview · mirror → qq news (chinese translation)arb & alex declino on this cursed machine — a 'sci-fi horror warehouse-management rpg'; cameron's terminal prototype 'changed the game… i immediately knew this was the right direction.' the original on world.mirror.xyz is 403; a chinese translation survives on qq news.
- 2022trust in conversation with serpentine galleries · novembrethe trust × serpentine interview — describes moving castles as 'another infrastructure project incubated at trust… an organisational metaphor for online communities to move away from insularity towards playful interaction.'
- 2024-11-13this cursed machine: onchain game post-mortem · devcon 7 sea, bangkokthe this cursed machine post-mortem at devcon 7 sea, bangkok — the studio's fullest account of folding exploits into fiction. david z. morris called it 'easily the most exciting thing i saw at devcon.'
the philosophy
themes tracked across the writing: anti-platform critique, autonomous worlds, composable characters, emergence over scripts, new subjectivities, portable miniverses, scene-building, world-weaving.
- 2021–pseudonyms and unsigned reportsthe pseudonymity posture — gvn works under a deliberate pseudonym (wired respects it: 'his cocreator, who goes by the pseudonym gvn'), and the lab's pivotal texts — daemons, the zero report — are unsigned 'mc.' who did the zero ml work is not public.the dossier records the boundary rather than smoothing it: legal name unknown, authorship unattributed, hf org membership partially mapped — all in the gaps ledger.
- 2023–a roster that stopped updatingthe roster question — 'the studio is currently composed of pwr, manus nijhoff and agnes cameron' is a march-2023 snapshot from a de balie billing; the github org shows two public members, and current roles for cameron, declino, and newer lab staff like cullen miller are unverified.recorded as a gap: contributors are tracked by commit logs and event billings, not by an authoritative roster.
AI-drafted at Ben Guo's direct request and credited to Hraness; every claim links to its cataloged source.