Emissary's Guide To Worlding

A World is an artificial living thing, but a living thing nonetheless. It is ongoing, absorbs change, and attracts players to help perpetuate it.

People don’t just want the spark of a World, they expect to discover a World fully formed, inhabit its complexities, believe in its potentiality, and continue to generate meaning from it.

An interactive container needs a hack because only a hack can set the container apart and evoke the magic specific to the World. In the absence of a hack, and later, in the absence of any strong characters, the restaurant is just another restaurant, never an evocation of some greater spirit, never a World that can come alive.

The first response is to ignore Reality and hope the problematic parts go away. The second response is to attempt to reduce Reality back to an earlier manageable state. Neither works sustainably

Stories are how we gain a sense of control of the future because they supply us with a role in the story, a vector of meaning at every beat, and the promise of more meaning to come.

"Drama" means problems that trigger interesting new paths in a World, that arouse its members in unexpected ways, without causing total collapse.

By stripping down existing worlds to their underlying systems and rules, and by refusing the seduction of meaning, the Hacker sacrilegiously discovers the actual and effective means to give the World its magic power. Great hacks, whether a law of physics or a flaw in security, are the basis of new experiences and new modes of expression that can ch

now you are intending to create something that is necessarily complex, unresolved, alive. You’re aspiring to fulfill the promise of a World: to create something that can survive its creator and continue to generate drama. With this decision made, your masks have a secure place to accrue their time, energy and creativity. You are choosing to create

Andrew Hunt says: ‘Simple rules lead to complex behavior. Complicated rules lead to stupid behavior.’