28 Oct 2024
This is a new (temporary) series for the Founders cohort called “Thinking out Loud.”
Parts of this series will be incorporated into the official customer series later.
I suppose it’ll also be fertile ground to explore ideas that will become (layered) essays, deepening and enriching the World.
The primary idea in this series is to externalize my thinking, drawing attention to parts of this World that have remained “invisible” in the main newsletter series.
You’ll be able to emulate some of these ideas wholesale; others, if nothing else, will broaden your understanding of what’s possible through a ‘world-building’ lens.
So, in this ToL, I’ll start by explaining the idea of an evergreen World and what that means.
From my perspective (I suspect other people’s ideas about what “evergreen” means to them will differ from mine), “evergreen” means that the spine or narrative arc of the World takes everyone on the same † scripted journey.
(† There’s nuance here, but more about that another time.)
One way to think about this is similar, in one respect, to most adventure and first-person shooter games.
(Elden Ring, God of War, Grand Theft Auto, The Last of Us, The Witcher, Half-Life, Halo, Call of Duty 4, DOOM, et la.)
You don’t need to have played these games to appreciate the correlation.
In these games, developers construct a series of scripted, linear events designed to guide players through a predetermined storyline.
This structured approach means that each player experiences the same major plot points, encounters, and challenges, moving in a set progression from start to finish.
Each level, character interaction, and climactic moment is meticulously crafted to elicit specific emotional responses, ensuring players follow a carefully controlled narrative arc.
In the game/player world, while this approach offers high-impact moments and finely tuned gameplay, it inherently limits player agency. The experience is less about discovering a world on one’s own terms and more about engaging with a pre-scripted sequence.
While highly immersive, the result is ultimately a “consumable” experience that unfolds identically for every player.
The idea I want you to recognize is not the “linear” nature of game development to elicit a highly consumable and engaging experience but rather the thought that goes into making an experience transformative and how “linear” and “non-linear” combine to produce a far richer experience than either alone.
When a World is complex, the way to minimize the complexity and overwhelm of exploring and sense-making within the World is to introduce ideas to inhabitants, bit by bit, over a long narrative arc.
So, while there are similarities to first-person shooter and open-world adventure game development, our expression of world-building is also very different.
In Newsletter (Issue #5), I wrote this:
In open-world marketing, our World becomes a landscape ripe for exploration, offering various entry points tailored to individual interests — a real-life choose-your-own-adventure.
..
While conventional marketers might scratch their heads at our methods, failing to see an obvious linear path to conversion, there’s more nuance beneath the surface.
..
The marketing funnel hasn’t disappeared; it’s just evolved.
..
Now, it’s a dynamic blend of non-linear and linear paths, all functioning within the context of an ever-evolving world-building ecosystem.
Take a few seconds to consider the nuance of the bolded sentence above.
To help you appreciate the implications of this, I’ll “open the kimono” and show you how I have structured a “hidden” part of my World.
My “Rome” (at the moment) is my free newsletter join page. That’s the seven-email welcome series in yellow.
When someone joins, they’re subscribed to two sequences: the Welcome Series and an Evergreen Newsletter.
The red dot below the yellow series represents a “pause” of ten days before the first newsletter issue is sent.
The cadence I’ve settled on, which will be different for everyone, is a newsletter every other Saturday (roughly two newsletters per month).
I want to allow space for new inhabitants to assimilate this information without overwhelming them with too many emails and ideas they’ve not yet made sense of.
As I write this, I have 16 newsletters in the evergreen sequence, representing eight months of content (opportunities to connect, create and join “dots,” sense-make, and introduce an ever-expanding World that affords transformative experiences).
The two email series are the “linear” part of my (email) World that I want every inhabitant to go through, where I introduce them to ideas and themes in a sequence of progression.
As I explain in core principles 1 to 6, the world remains a nonlinear experience, where “invisible conversations” can blossom like new buds in spring.
Everyone entering and engaging with my World still has an individualized journey and experiences that feel unique and (continuously) engaging.
Think about it this way…
While I’m constantly building my World (in real-time), the experience of new inhabitants and established citizens is intentionally out of sync (yet in pseudo-“real-time” for each person).
As I write this, James, Stu, Richard, Damien, and Chaitra entered the “email part” of my World this morning.
I know they have at least an eight-month journey that will unfold in front of them. While that journey is linear in terms of the narrative arc they’ll receive (the welcome series and evergreen newsletter series), their individual experience will be very different.
What’s more, from mid-2025, there’ll be (many) opportunities for them to become a Tiny Digital World Builder when it feels right for them.
(While obvious, it’s worth making explicit: by the time James, Stu, Richard, Damien, and Chaitra reach Issue 16, I would have likely written ten more newsletters, extending them even further into the future.)
The “Engine” of a Tiny Digital World is evergreen in nature, powered by email.
Consider the freedom this affords you as the creator of your World…
Let that sink in.
I have more to say, but I’ll save that for next time.
Enjoy your week!
~ André “engine of freedom” Chaperon
P.S.
Because you won’t know this, this email is a broadcast, not a series email (part of a sequence).
Why?
While “broadcast” emails are inefficient in an open system where new leads (inhabitants > citizens) are constantly entering, we’re currently in a “closed” system.
The Founder’s cohort is closed. No one else will join again until Black Friday (for one day), then sometime in mid-2025.
By then, I would have taken these “Thinking out Loud” broadcast emails, shaped them into the customer email series for TDWB, and pulled out ideas for essays.
If you want to riff on any aspect of this email, do it here.
