It’s been all AI all the time for a long time on the blog recently, but my thinking on worlds as “the 21st century’s newest medium” keeps ticking forward. This is one of those posts that arrives because an idea has come up three times in real life in the last few weeks and when that happens it’s best to write it down.
The idea is World Literacy1.
Audiences now arrive at a media franchise already knowing how worlds work. Not that world, specially, but worlds in general. Audiences have a new fluency, with expectations and a set of standards they didn’t consciously acquire, and they can’t necessarily articulate if asked. They got them from everywhere else. This is quite new. And if you are running a world, it’s one of the most important things to understand about the room you are walking into.
A window onto a world
World literacy2 is the extent to which an audience treats a piece of media as a window onto something larger than itself. That the thing you are reading/watching/playing is a window into an implied world. The world exceeds any single text, or release.
In the 2020s, almost everyone (not just nerds!) has developed this intuition. You watch a film and you understand, without being told, that there are things happening off to the left of the camera. A history that the characters (and the audience) take for granted. Events the story refers to obliquely. Decisions that happened before the opening frame that shaped everything you’re watching.
This seems obvious now, but it hasn’t always been the case. The default relationship to fiction in the last century was: you read it, you watched it, you finished it. Sequels existed, but the implied unit was still the artefact. The technical term for the world-behind-the-text is the fabula. The inferred total world of events, agents, and history that any given story draws from. (Paul Graham Raven has a fantastic essay on fabula, worlds, and windows in relation to world building and futures work which is well worth checking out.)
The fabula always exceeds any single telling of it. World literacy is the mass audience’s intuition of exactly that.
What’s new is that this intuition is now a mass thing, not niche.
Leapfrogging
Before getting to how we got here, I want to name the mechanism most important to the rise of world literacy, because I think it’s the thing world runners aren’t thinking enough about.
World literacy doesn’t develop inside a single franchise. It develops across franchises, and then it transfers laterally.
It works like this: World A pioneers a behaviour → World B integrates it and pushes it further → audiences carry that increased literacy from World B back to World A as an expectation → World A has to respond, raising the baseline for everyone. This repeats across films, games, books, comics, tabletop role-play, boardgames. Literacy accretes, and because it compounds it can move quite fast.
This means world runners are not only competing against their own previous releases. They are competing against the literacy the audience acquired from every other world they inhabit.
What’s actually being transferred? Four quick things come to mind as part of the transferable stack:
- Cadence expectations: the rhythm of updates, events, releases. How often should a world speak?
- Governance expectations: who’s in charge? Is there a roadmap? How are things being steered?
- Interface expectations: how do you navigate into the world? Are there recaps, wikis, explainers, canon statements?
- Physics expectations: if the world has technical rules, can those rules be updated? And if they can, by who and how often? And will someone say so when they are?
Each of these can be raised by any world, and depend on world type, and once raised, the new level becomes the floor for every world the audience touches next.
It was by talking about Games Workshop that the concept of world literacy first came up in conversation.
For the first half of its history, Warhammer 40K had a fairly slow moving ruleset, edition updates every 3 years and faction-specific rulebooks that changed the meta across each edition’s lifecycle. Warhammer players are also massive nerds and were early adopters of the Internet and their world literacy had been sharpened by video game culture, Magic: The Gathering, and the internet’s collective capacity for competitive optimisation. Their cadence and physics expectations around how quickly a world should respond to its own broken rules shifted dramatically.
A new rulebook would come out, and by the weekend of the next Warhammer tournament, the game would be completely broken by some absurd combinatorial exploit of the world’s physics. (Smash Captains are one infamous example). Tournament organisers responded by writing their own tournament packs and sets of rules to respond to problems introduced by the official rules of the game.
Games Workshop had to respond, and brought tournament rules and packs in house (with lots of community involvement) and they also now release quarterly balance updates to the game. Warhammer 40k now looks way more like a live service video game than a traditional tabletop war-game. An example of the leapfrog in action. Other worlds trained the audience to expect faster physics updates, and the expectations came home.
How we got here
The leapfrog mechanism explains how literacy spreads. But the literacy had to accumulate somewhere first. It did, across roughly fifty years of nerd culture, before escaping into the mainstream.
As readers of worldrunning.guide3 will know, I date worlds-as-a-medium to the invention of Dungeons & Dragons in the mid-1970s. D&D wasn’t the first fictional “world”, but it was the first techno-social system to make world-inhabitation mechanical and ongoing. In D&D the unit of play is campaign. Your characters persist between play sessions, unlike a board game, the world doesn’t end when you close the book. It continues right along every Thursday evening when everyone comes back.
The world of D&D ran into canon problems almost immediately: the split between the official world (what the books and lore says), the real world (what actually happened at your table), and the social layer (what’s homebrew etc). This is where world literacy begins in its earliest practical form, learned not through theory but through play. The DM becomes a world runner in miniature. Keeping a world legible while allowing it to change.
Aside: I’ll gesture towards Star Trek and fan fiction here too, but it is a huge digression and not the point of this post.
Something else also arrived in the late 70s: Star Wars. Not the first property to embrace and expand a universe, but definitely the first mass-market normaliser.
The novelisation came out before the film and contained scenes not present in the final cut of A New Hope. Paratext as co-text from day one. The toys, the technical manuals, the trading cards, the storybooks were all part of the porous perimeter of the world. Jonathan Gray’s Show Sold Separately argues that all these surrounding materials don’t merely accompany the world’s ‘text’, they shape how the text is entered, understood, and valued. I’d say that they contributed to making the audience more literary in the medium of worlds. The Star Wars Extended Universe trained a generation of nerds like me in the late 90s early 00s to expect the world to be bigger than the films. I spent hours on Wookieepedia in my late teens and early 20s.
I remember when George Lucas said the EU wasn’t canon and people argued with him about it! lol. A world literate audience asserting itself.
In the early 00s Henry Jenkins was observing the rise of this literacy and wrote Convergence Culture (2006) about it. But at the time Jenkins was describing weak signals and niche fan behaviour. But he was right about where they were all pointing. Interpretation has become collective, the meaning of a work is no longer something you have alone; it’s something you assembled with others, across platforms, in real time. Lost is probably the best example of a big media property leaning into the change in literacy.
Still within nerd territory but now in the 90s, MMOs and live service games introduced wider audiences beyond D&D to worlds that are never finished. Worlds that could be created, shipped and then run. They introduced nerds players to patch notes, balance updates, seasonal events, and hotfixes. LiveOps is a named discipline in the video game industry.
Crucially with all this, once you begin to expect explicit updates about changes to the world, you start wondering why other worlds and media properties don’t behave the same way. The expectation leapfrogs.
What world-literate audiences expect
Now in the 2020s, features of world literacy incubated in nerd culture have spread out into the mainstream. Mostly because nerd culture has just become ‘culture’.
Audiences arrive to a media franchise/world with a bundle of expectations that they don’t experience as optional luxuries. Depending on the world, they expect things like patch notes, roadmaps, and canon hygiene. What’s happening, what’s happening next, and what is true now. They also expect franchise runners to explain themselves when there’s a retcon. If something changes in the established cannon, then an explanation is owed.
They expect multiple windows: novels, games, TV, wikis, merch, recaps, YouTube lore channels. These are all part of the mechanisms of the world. Though audiences don’t necessarily treat all windows as equally authoritative. They build hierarchies, show > book > tie-in comic > wiki > reddit opinion. The interesting thing is that they treat the whole ecosystem as part of the world, even while ranking its authority. Implicit hierarchy is another part of world literacy.
They also expect something subtler: the ability to navigate multiple presents at once. Modern transmedia worlds rarely move forward in a single line. They expand through prequels and sequels simultaneously and tell stories that advance the “now” of the franchise while also filling in the “then” of earlier history. The audience ends up tracking not just the present tense of the narrative, but the moving “present tense of canon”. What is true as of this week, given the latest show, tie-in, interview, game update, or retcon. Not just “what happened” but “what is currently official.” These are different questions, and keeping them all straight is a genuine cognitive skill, one that world literate audiences have quietly developed.
This is a genuinely new form of media literacy: keeping your footing while the timeline is being extended from both ends, whilst cannon is updating.
Traditional media property owners tend to read much of this as fan entitlement. But I think this is the wrong frame, although there is undeniably, a lot of entitlement out there lol. But often I think what looks like fan entitlement online, is actually the audience’s world literacy meeting mismatched world running.
The audience has been trained to expect world maintenance because they’ve encountered worlds that provide it. They’re not demanding something unreasonable. They’re applying standards they learned somewhere else.
What this means for world runners
Worlds are now habitats, and habitats require maintenance.
A world with enough surface area, with enough transmedia spread, inherits maintenance obligations whether its creators like it or not. Someone is going to define the present tense of your world. Someone is going to manage the contradictions. The question is whether that someone is you. See this post I wrote in 2024 about the Artist Yaelokre’s world running challenges.
If you don’t provide the access layer, the audience/community will, and you may not like the version they settle on. If you don’t mark the present tense of cannon people will demand it.. If you leave things up to the audience, they will argue stuff into existence, and that argument will be louder and uglier than it needed to be.
One practical implication of this: you need to think about audience literacy at the design stage, not just the launch stage. What has your audience already learned, from other worlds, about how worlds work? What has someone else’s world trained them to want from yours? The leapfrog doesn’t wait for you to be ready.
Disney’s handling of Star Wars after the acquisition is the prime cautionary tale. Not just because the new films were awful, but that the world-running was also awful. The Extended Universe was the transmedia layer that had trained a generation’s world literacy. They blew it all up without clearly communicating what would replace it, and without a coherent governance structure for the new canon. That soured the hardcore audience that had kept the franchise valuable in the first place. The audience had a relationship with that world across decades of participation. The literacy that relationship built was genuine, and Disney treating it like an environmental obstacle in its rush to culturally frack the franchise it had acquired was a big mistake. More bafflingly Disney owns Marvel, which understands all this, and still couldn’t apply any of it next door.
The mass audience
I want to be clear about how recent this is. In the grand scheme of mass media, the mass audience’s world literacy is extremely new.
About twenty five years ago I was on an overnight school coach trip to Italy, happily info-dumping about the lore of the Star Wars Extended Universe to a genuinely interested friend for several hours. When it hit 3am, and a teacher from the front told me to SHUT THE HELL UP ABOUT STAR WARS.
But the boys behind me were on hour six of talking non stop about football, which apparently was totally fine and socially acceptable. My interests as a Star Wars EU lore master weren’t yet social currency in culture.
I think being told to stop was entirely reasonable by the standards of the room, but they should have told the football lads to shut up to be fair.
Now though, people will finish the latest episode of a prestige television show and immediately head over to YouTube to watch someone like Emergency Awesome to connect the dots. They’ll check the wiki to find out more, or check out the fan theories on Reddit. The meta-commentary layer and the audience’s hunger for it is as much a part of the mechanics of the world as any lever the property owners control.
Mass world literacy only arrived recently but it’s still accelerating. If your audience seems difficult — demanding, contrary, hard to satisfy — it’s worth asking whether you’ve underprovided the maintenance layer they’ve been trained to expect.
World literacy is theirs. The world running is yours.
Erratum
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