how working with world models changed my thoughts

A recovered Windows XP machine, offline since 2005. You dig through files, messages, photographs. Then MSN reconnects, and people from the owner's past start coming online. What you find changes what you can say.

Two chapters, four characters, three openings, three endings. A full run is 25 to 35 minutes. Written conventionally, this would be 40,000 words of dialogue in a spreadsheet.

the performer problem

The characters run live through Reactor while you play. A world model is not reacting to a script, it is reacting to you. The rule I set: generation is part of the interaction itself, and nothing else depends on the model behaving. Mock mode for testing, written fallbacks for the moments it fails. It is allowed to act. It is never allowed to decide.

what changed

Before this, I thought of these models as pipes. Images in, images out. Now they are performers: great at improvising, terrible at remembering. That is a very specific personality and it is worth designing for.

The best scenes are the ones I barely wrote. The ones that broke treated model output as a fixed asset. It lives at work/project sleepless.