01 // 21st century worlds are a medium entirely new to humanity
What is World Running?
World Running, akin to show running in television, is an emerging discipline concerned with guiding and overseeing the development, maintenance, and ongoing evolution of worlds.
Worldbuilding is all the rage. But what do we do with these worlds once they have been worlded into being? How do we continue to nurture and care for them after their original creators have stepped aside?
My primary thesis: all techno-social systems should be seen through the lens of worlds. They are hybrid environments, sympathetic to the people, places, and technologies that simultaneously inhabit and constitute them.
Worldbuilding, virtual worlds, entertainment worlds, media franchises, corporate org design, theme park design, XR/VR, volumes, escape rooms, tabletop games, undirected play, very large organisations, hybrid and mixed reality storytelling — and much more besides.
World Runner was coined in 2020 by analyst Matthew Ball, in a now-deleted tweet, as a portmanteau of worldbuilder and showrunner. In time I believe the term will come to encompass a great deal more.
My own route into it merged career interest management consulting and organisational design, plus my long involvement in Solarpunk and its fandom logics, and a deep grounding in the metaverse and other worlding technologies.
World building is a hobby. World running is a vocation.
02 // The essay collection
worldrunning.guide 📘
A lightly edited collection of essays, most originally published here and on Permanently Moved since 2020, gathered into one continuously updated document.
It is a living Google Doc rather than a website, because it is a work in progress — proudly part of The Doc Web. Save it as a PDF and read it offline if you’d rather.
03 // The questions
My research is organised around 6 questions. I use them in my own work as a World Runner.
What is a world?
We know worlds when we see them. But what are they? What does it mean to build one, and what are the building blocks of a virtual space?
Who loves the world?
Worlds are nothing without the people inside them. How do we read a world, move through it, and decide what winning even means?
Who made the world?
Every world has a history and an owner. Where the metaverse came from, who has tried to sell it, and what the last land grab teaches us about the next.
What’s beyond the world?
The edges of a world, and what leaks across them. Worldviews, brainworms, presence, and the little computer people now moving in.
Who runs a world?
The discipline itself. Administration is not a dirty word — lore is a lens, bureaucracy is a technology, and someone has to hold the whole thing together.
How does a world end?
Worlds close, servers go dark, and audiences move on. Endings are part of the practice too — the last question, and the one most often ducked.
04 // Where the research goes
Two projects so far have come out the project
The Web Was a Side Quest
My first non-fiction book, and the companion project to the essay collection. It traces the long history of worlds from the origins of modernity, through Dungeons & Dragons and its influence on computers, up to the so-called Metaverse of today.
The book speculates on post-modernity, and on how the fusion of these ideas might be what computers have been for all along.
Worlds: A Walk Through is the short version, given as a talk.
Cultural Fracking
The entertainment industry keeps drilling old intellectual property for whatever is left in it. Cohesive worlds have to be built before that practice poisons the groundwater and leaves the cultural landscape — its own property — a toxic mess.
The term has since travelled well beyond me, including into the CMF Annual Trends Report.
05 // Talks & conversations
Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds
World running in a professional context: how myth accumulates in on-chain worlds, and what it takes to steward one.
Worlds: A Walk Through
Their history, done quick. The whole arc of the book in one sitting, from modernity to the metaverse.
Talking Cultural Fracking and World Running
A long conversation covering most of the territory at once: fracking, worlds, and where the two meet.
Fieldnotes from the Metaverse
An interview about what a decade of watching virtual worlds actually taught me, and what the word metaverse is still good for.
Mechanics and Worlding with Paul Czege
On solo journalling games, the mechanics that make a world habitable, and what a rulebook is really for.
Improv and Trust with Dr Alex Fradera
How groups build a shared reality in real time, and why trust is the substrate every collaborative world runs on.
06 // the archive
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PostFloating Worlds
Earlier this month I spoke at ‘Open Croissant’ a fringe event coinciding with ETHGlobal. What is interesting was how the event came to be.
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WEEKNOTE #329More AI Sludge + Law vs Lore
A few months ago an AI content sludge farm wrote an article / profile about me. Guess what…. It’s happened again.
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PostMyth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds
My talk on the design of ‘Myth-Making Mechanisms in Autonomous Worlds’ is one of the best talks I’ve given to date on Worlds Theory.
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EPISODE #2339Autonomous Worlds: Misusing The Money Machine | 2339
Exploring blockchain’s shift from finance to creating games in digital universes. A look at this tech’s new role in gaming and virtual worlds.
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EPISODE #2336Why Don Quixote is So Great | 2336
Unpacking ‘Don Quixote’s timeless narrative, linking its chivalric setting to modern fan fiction and intellectual property debates.
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EPISODE #2334Worlds Resemble Other Worlds | 2334
Worlds resemble other worlds and we adopt world(view)s when we recognise them. Some worlds we have agency in, others we don’t.
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EPISODE #2333Presence in Worlds | 2333
What’s the difference between experiencing Presence and Immersion in a world? Or in techno-social systems of any kind?
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EPISODE #2327World(view) | 2327
Written down this way, world(view) suggests that the world is outside of – and much bigger – than any single perspective of it from…
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EPISODE #2325The Rise of Co-Play: The Future of Multiplayer Software | 2325
I regret to inform you, for better or worse, the future of societal coordination and maybe even politics will emerge from gamer culture.
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PostWorlds A Walk Though
In May I went to Lisbon to give the opening talk at the Autonomous Worlds Summit. The first outing for some of the material…
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WEEKNOTE #296Autonomous Worlds Summit – Lisbon
I attended the Autonomous Worlds Summit last week. In the last year; unstoppable, infinitely moddable worlds built on the blockchain have become a reality
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EPISODE #2317Dial M for Metaverse | 2317
Both Choose Your Own Adventure gamebooks & phone tree menu systems are progeny of the explosion of creativity that happened after D&D arrived
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PostHiring Soon: World Runner | Design Fiction
I recently travelled to the near future. Unfortunately all I could bring back was this PDF of the job description for a world runner.
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EPISODE #2313Lore as Lens | 2313
The growing importance of lore reflects the rise of a new kind cultural sense-making and social technology.
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ShowMUDs to Metaverse: The Unreal Estate Deal | 2308
Costly virtual land in the metaverse today is a result of memory constraints on mainframes. A solution to a problem that no longer exists.
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EPISODE #2307What a Difference A(I) Week Makes | 2307
In less than 6 weeks we’ve gone from ‘OpenAI’s chatbot is weird but interesting’ to ‘Google is doomed because they’re not shipping AI search…
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AnnouncementCultural Fracking | CMF 2023 Annual Trends Report
I was interviewed by the Canada Media Fund, as they have included a *whole chapter* on Cultural Fracking in their 2023 Annual Trends Report.
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EPISODE #2303Good Taste Online | 2303
Given the affordances of different social media platforms. How does one demonstrate taste in the digital realm?
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EPISODE #2302Geocity and the City | 2302
This episode is about what happens when the metaphors we use change. But mostly it’s about Geocities.
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WEEKNOTE #274Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds
Unstoppable, Infinitely Moddable, Autonomous Worlds are coming.
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EPISODE #2242Goncharov’s New Dabloons | 2242
It’s not the truth of a cultural object that matters. But the collective truth that arises from consensus of interpretation.
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EPISODE #2239Metaverse: As Good a Word as Any | 2239
In the twilight age of Web 2, Metaverse is as good a word as any for people who wish to re-imagine the future of…
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EPISODE #2235Mickey in the Metaverse | 2235
As a symbol of the copyright regime of the 20thC. A permissive Mickey in the metaverse seems like an interesting experiment to try.
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WeeknoteIn the Other Room
After a few minutes of careful listening I said ‘It sounds like a man peeing into a bucket standing up next to a washing…