To run a world is to be responsible for its edges as much as its centre. Its ending must be part of the design. A World Runner tends to its aliveness, yes, but also to its thresholds. To its arrivals, and the departures.
Full Show Notes: https://thejaymo.net/2025/04/12/2508-leaving-worlds-behind/
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Leaving Worlds Behind
Since I began writing about Worlds, there’s been an empty placeholder in worldrunning.guide called The End of a World.
All it says is: “We must be prepared to confront the reality of a world’s ultimate demise. What is the aftermath of a world’s collapse? What lessons can World Runners learn from these experiences when they are examined?”
It’s sat empty for years. Probably because it’s hard to imagine the end of worlds when one is so invested in their flourishing. To contemplate a world’s ending is… well, existential.
I bring this up because, during a recent game design workshop on Discord, we used a deck of prompt cards to kickstart our discussion. The three keywords we drew were: reverse, city builder, and care.
We landed on the idea of a reverse city builder. What would a game look like if it was about dismantling a fully functioning world? A game about endings — not growth. Not construction, but careful deconstruction. Attentive. Deliberate.
As the conversation evolved we started reimagining the 4X strategy genre. What’s the opposite of explore, expand, exploit, exterminate?
It was a generative discussion. But I kept thinking about worlds as a medium, and how a World Runner has a duty to attend not just to a world’s coherence — but to its ending.
My thoughts drifted to my friend Dougald Hine’s book At Work in the Ruins and his frequent invocation of Federico Campagna’s line : At the end of a world, we must “no longer concern ourselves with making sense according to the logic of the world that is ending, but leave good ruins, clues, and starting points for those who come after.” And also Vanessa Machado de Oliveira’s book: Hospicing Modernity.
So. With all that in mind, some initial thoughts on the ending of worlds.
As I’ve written elsewhere: every world needs a ritual of welcome. But each also needs a ritual of ending.
By “world,” I don’t just mean digital communities, games, or online platforms — but a world as medium. Something with a coherent inside and a clear outside. A space where meaning metabolises and coheres.
We invest real time in worlds. We learn their logics, become fluent in their symbols, and navigate their physics. They bleed into us. Their stories shape how we think, how we relate, how we present ourselves. We develop World(Views) inside them.
But what does it mean to exit a world? In Hospicing Modernity, Oliveira talks about the need for “disinvestment.” But there’s never a clean break. There’s no “outside.” Exiting one world means moving into another. A process of disidentification. Decompression.
When we lose a world — a digital community, a fiction, a protocol, a political frame — we must grieve. Grieve the loss of an ambient we. And yet, many world endings go unmarked. Platforms vanish. Projects pivot. Communities fracture. Ontologies dissolve, often without ceremony.
This is where ritual becomes essential.
As Oliveira writes, to hospice the ending of the so-called ‘modern world’ we must “assist in the death process with attention, discernment, and integrity.” Just as rituals of welcome orient us into new meaning, we need rituals of departure to honour disorientation.
Without ritual, departures become abrupt, traumatic, or incomplete. People get stuck — carrying the Brainworms of one world while floating adrift in the next. Still attuned to physics that no longer operate. Just look at how Twitter people behave on Bluesky.
A ritual of departure helps mark the threshold.
Departures come in many forms, but I see three:
Individual Departure: Stepping away from a world that continues. Maybe from burnout, changing values, or slow drift.
Collective Departure: The world ends for everyone. A final chapter. The sunset. The end of shared meaning-making.
Partial Departure: From core participant to peripheral lurker. A fade-out. A disentangling.
Each of these deserves its own grammar of care.
If we are serious about worlds as a medium, we must design intentional exit ways.
I can only point to behaviours I’ve seen. Online they look like: the final post, the thank-you note, the rage quit. Or zipping files and saving archives. Some people follow cooldown protocols: slowly reducing presence instead of vanishing.
In collective departures, what matters is time. Time to prepare, time to remember. You see rituals like archiving projects, final explorations, or the closing of shared lore. The canon, once open, closed. The infrastructure — the physics of the world — may be preserved.
In our own world we all experience final events: the last dance at the disco, a shared silence, a closing ceremony. We do these things because they matter.
Rituals of ending don’t have to be solemn. But they must be real. They need to make sense inside the world, and speak to its participants.
When we understand World(View)s as perspectives embedded in worlds-as-medium, the stakes shift. Every medium shapes what can be thought, said, or done. To step in or out of a world is no simple UX decision, it’s metaphysical threshold design.
Modernity, Oliveira reminds us, thrives on the illusion of continuity — that progress is endless, collapse avoidable, and change always a fix.
But some things must be ended, not solved. A ritual helps us name what is ending, and gently initiates us into the new. Mediums and the media they contain are always composted, not discarded.
To run a world is to be responsible for its edges as much as its centre. Its ending must be part of the design. A World Runner tends to its aliveness, yes, but also to its thresholds. To its arrivals, and the departures.
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