How fictional worlds make me believe in them. This is an evergreen-ish note: I come back to it whenever a book or game changes my mind.

Threads I keep pulling

• Worlds feel real when they have constraints: water in Duna, the toxic forest in Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind.

• Ruins tell stories better than narrators: Hollow Knight, Outer Wilds.

• A city is a set of opinions: Disco Elysium.

The two sub-notebooks below go deeper.