World Building

First, your world should exist predominantly in the present. Yes, a history is important; and yes, there are dreams of a future; but most of your storytelling effort should be focused on what’s happening right now, and what exists today.

The world will include many things, but it needs one in particular: purpose. Inside the world, it needs to be really obvious what our goals are, and why we want our push our system into a new state. You fill your world with familiar storylines and tension and characters, highlighted or re-framed compared to the real world, that give everyone a real... See more

there needs to be a strong concept of the arrow of time. What is it that causes time to advance? What is entropy in your world? This concept, maybe more than anything else, is the foundation on which your world gets built.

System problems cannot be fixed in one step, nor can they be fixed in a sequence of linear steps. Why not? Because when systems find a steady state – which is probably where you’re encountering them, if you’re setting out to change something – they’re “steady” not because they’re static, but because they’re dynamically held in place by feedback loo... See more

You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there.

It’s not enough to tell one good story; you have to create an entire world that people can step into, familiarize themselves with, and spend time getting to know. Initially you’ll have to walk them around and show them what’s in your world, but your goal is to familiarize them with your world sufficiently, and motivate them to participate, to the p... See more

odds are money isn’t the most important form of currency. Reputation and social capital will be an important unit of currency almost everywhere; people trade favours and stake their reputations when they want to get things done.

Your success here will depend entirely on how successfully you can tell stories, and how successfully other people can repeat those stories, both to themselves and others.Your North Star here has to be: are other people retelling this story successfully?Port cities around the world are more similar to each other than they are to their inland counte... See more

Everyone’s job is world-building, even if they don’t realize it.”