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World Building

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Emissaries Guide To Worlding

James Stuber’s Blog

Well-built worlds enable new stories. Games and fiction are forms of worldbuilding (or ‘worlding’ as Cheng says), but not the only ones

Institutions, religions, and life itself are Worlds unto their own–real Worlds where we can choose to play or shape the rules ourselves.

“A World is a reality you can believe in: one that promises to bring about habitable structure from the potential of chaos, and aim toward a future transformative enough to metabolize the pain and pleasure of its dysfunction.”

Relationships, friendships, and love are all forms of Worlding

Four different kinds of people (masks) required to World

  1. The Director: shapes the World’s container and narrative, giving birth to an idea
    • The container must be bound enough to enable creation but surprising enough to encourage narrative
    • To be the Director requires good taste: knowing what you like and what you dislike gives rise to an opinionated view on what your World should look like
  2. The Cartoonist: reduces the complexity of the world by creating understandable characters and structures
    • Characters help make the Director’s ideas comprehensible.
    • “A character is good when a child can pick out its features and draw their version of it.”
  3. The Hacker: pushes the boundaries of the World, using exploration and ‘meaningless’ play
    • The Hacker’s job is to experiment, to play, and to create “New” art. Why? Because they can.
  4. The Emissary: serves the World by ensuring its continuation
    • “A world wants to emerge as an infinite game: one that keeps on going, invites new agents to keep it in play, is fertile with surprises, and continues to generate unexpected meanings”

Crucially, each of these masks can be worn by a single person: the Artist

“It requires the Artist to abandon any sense of a coherent self and take on a different kind of psychology. One that moves between the artistic masks that already exist unevenly inside us, letting each contribute to the creation of a World.”

World Seed

  • the world seed
    • “It is made so that the created new worlds do not require one large server, but can run on multiple smaller servers.”
    • “All games using The Seed as their game engine allow conversion of one account in a Seed-based world to another.
  • infrastructure that operates at different pace layers

Graph View

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