A World With Fewer Rules
· 13 min · ·
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with rules. Not because I think rules are inherently bad. Most of them exist for a reason. Constraints can make things interesting, give structure to communities, and sometimes make creativity possible in the first place.
But I’ve always struggled with rules I didn’t understand, especially the ones you’re expected to follow simply because everyone else does. Social rules are probably the easiest example. I’ve never been particularly good at small talk. Asking someone how their day was when neither of us really cares about the answer, complimenting something because it’s the polite thing to do, following a conversation pattern that everyone seems to understand instinctively. I get why these things exist. I’ve just never felt very comfortable with them. I much prefer getting straight into a conversation about something we actually care about.
School felt similar to me. There was a predefined way to learn, a predefined sequence of things to learn, and then a relatively predefined path you were expected to follow afterwards. Again, none of this is necessarily bad. It works really well for a lot of people. It just never worked particularly well for me.
The internet did.
Another set of rules
When I was younger, Minecraft gave me something I hadn’t really found elsewhere: a place where most of the rules that seemed important in the real world suddenly stopped mattering.
I could meet someone without knowing where they lived, which school they went to, what their parents did, what they looked like, or what kind of social status they had. Sometimes I had friends I knew incredibly well inside the game while knowing almost nothing about their lives outside of it. And it didn’t really matter.
We had a world in front of us and something to do together. Maybe we were trying to build a base. Maybe we were fighting another faction. Maybe we were running a server together. Maybe we were just making something stupid. The relationship started from a shared objective rather than a shared background.
I think there’s something incredibly powerful about that.
Virtual worlds let us temporarily decide that some of the rules of reality are irrelevant. Your physical appearance can be irrelevant. Geography can be irrelevant. Status can be irrelevant. Gravity can be irrelevant. Scarcity can be irrelevant. Even identity can become much more fluid.
And that’s only the beginning.
A virtual world is a simulation, and the beautiful thing about a simulation is that everyone understands, consciously or not, that its rules don’t have to be the same as ours.
Reality becomes a design choice.
Reality as a choice
Sometimes I like thinking about the simulation hypothesis. I don’t know whether our universe is a simulation, and I’m not particularly interested in pretending I have an answer. I just find the thought experiment useful.
Our world has a set of rules that are so fundamental that, for most people, they’re practically impossible to challenge. Time moves in one direction. Gravity works a certain way. Resources are limited. We’re born in one place rather than another. Our bodies have physical constraints. Societies accumulate laws, norms and economic systems over generations.
We’re extraordinarily good at operating inside those rules, but individually we’re mostly unable to rewrite them.
Virtual worlds are fundamentally different. Inside a simulation, a rule can exist because someone decided it should exist. That also means it can potentially be changed, removed or replaced.
You could create a world with no concept of money, or one where the entire experience revolves around a carefully designed economy. You could create a world where death means nothing, or one where dying makes you lose months of progress. You could build around competition, cooperation, exploration, creation, conversation, or something we don’t even have a word for yet.
The interesting part isn’t that one of these systems is better. It’s that they can all exist.
I think virtual worlds might eventually become one of the purest forms of human expression precisely because almost nothing has to remain the way it is in the real world.
Freedom needs constraints
That doesn’t mean I want a world without rules. A world without constraints would probably become boring very quickly.
Games make that obvious. A lot of what makes a game meaningful comes from what you can’t do. Scarcity creates decisions. Risk creates emotion. Difficulty creates satisfaction. Rules create shared understanding.
The point isn’t to remove constraints. It’s to choose them.
I think there’s an important difference between living without rules and having the freedom to decide which rules you’re willing to live under. You might want to enter an incredibly structured world with a strict economy, difficult progression and very specific social rules because those constraints make the experience meaningful to you. Someone else might hate it.
That’s fine. They should be able to leave.
Maybe they’ll find another world whose rules fit them better. Maybe they’ll make their own.
Freedom doesn’t mean everyone has to design their own world. It means everyone should be able to choose the world whose rules feel right to them, and leave when they don’t.
I also don’t think most people will necessarily want to create everything themselves. Even if building a world eventually becomes as easy as describing one, there will probably still be people who love creating systems and people who simply want to experience them.
That’s not very different from today. The important difference is that the ability to create no longer needs to belong to a tiny group of people with the technical knowledge, resources and time required to do it.
What AI actually changes
We’ve imagined virtual worlds for decades. Second Life existed long before modern AI. Minecraft and Roblox already showed how powerful user-created worlds can become. Science fiction has been imagining infinite virtual universes for much longer than any of them.
The idea isn’t new.
What’s changing is who can create them, how quickly they can be created, and eventually whether they need to be fully created in advance at all.
The technical barrier is collapsing incredibly quickly. Code, 3D assets, animations, dialogue, logic, environments and entire software systems can already be produced with AI at a level that would have sounded absurd not very long ago.
I don’t think the hardest problem anymore is simply generating more things.
The real frontier is intent.
Can a system understand what you actually mean? Not just the words you typed, but why you typed them. Your taste. Your sense of humor. What you find beautiful. What your friends enjoy. What kind of experiences you keep coming back to.
Most people aren’t game designers. If you ask someone to design the perfect level, they’re probably not going to give you a perfect specification. They might give you half an idea, a reference to a movie, an inside joke with their friends and something completely contradictory.
A sufficiently good creative system shouldn’t require them to turn that into a design document.
It should understand.
That’s where I think AI becomes much more interesting than a tool for generating games.
AI doesn’t just make worlds cheaper to build. It makes worlds possible that could never have been authored in advance.
Imagine you’re talking with three friends and someone brings up a ridiculous thing that happened earlier that day. Someone says, “What if we were there?”
A few seconds later, you are.
The world appears around you, but it isn’t finished because it doesn’t need to be. As you explore, it continues creating itself. It understands what you’re doing, how you’re reacting, who you’re with and where the experience could go next.
At that point, creation and play start becoming the same activity. You’re no longer building something so that you can experience it later. You’re experiencing it while it is being created.
That feels much bigger to me than generating entertainment faster.
It’s a new way of having experiences.
A second world
I think this eventually becomes something closer to a second world.
Not necessarily a VR world. Not necessarily a digital copy of Earth. And definitely not the version of the “metaverse” where we recreate conference rooms in 3D and somehow make meetings even worse.
I mean another layer of life.
A place where you have experiences with people, where memories accumulate, where you meet humans and AI, where there are places you return to because something meaningful happened there, and where communities form around worlds with their own cultures and rules.
Some of these worlds might last ten minutes. Others might exist for decades. Some might be created for five friends after a joke at dinner. Others might eventually contain millions of people.
And because they are simulations, the possibility space is almost absurdly large.
We’re still very early. Costs are a real problem at scale. AI still misunderstands intent constantly. Most systems today are nowhere near capable of maintaining the kind of coherent, personalized, real-time world I’m describing.
But I think the direction is becoming increasingly obvious.
The technical barriers will continue falling. The more interesting question is what happens afterwards.
The uncomfortable part
There are obvious reasons this future could go badly.
The first is probably addiction. If today’s games and social networks are already extremely good at holding our attention, imagine a world that understands you personally and can generate exactly the experience most likely to keep you engaged.
Not a recommendation algorithm choosing between a few million existing videos. An environment being created specifically for you in real time.
That’s a completely different level of power.
Then there’s privacy.
For a system to deeply understand your intent, it may need to know an enormous amount about you. Your preferences, memories, conversations, relationships, reactions, maybe eventually things much more intimate than anything we currently give to software.
The same thing that could make these worlds magical could also make them dangerous. A world that knows you incredibly well can serve you incredibly well. It can also understand how to manipulate you incredibly well.
Maybe our definition of privacy changes dramatically over the next few decades. Maybe people become comfortable sharing parts of their lives that feel unthinkable to share today. Maybe privacy becomes even more valuable precisely because systems become so capable of understanding us.
I don’t know. I don’t think anyone really does.
There’s also the question of control.
If a second world becomes meaningful enough, who owns it? Who decides its fundamental rules? Can one company remove you from it? Can you take your identity somewhere else? Can you take your memories? What happens when the company running your world disappears?
The most open world imaginable could become the most restrictive one if the ability to leave isn’t real.
These questions will probably become much more important than they currently seem.
Fewer rules you didn’t choose
Despite all of that, I want this world to exist.
Actually, I think some version of it is probably inevitable. We’re going to build increasingly persistent, intelligent and personalized digital worlds whether we’re fully ready for them or not.
The interesting question isn’t whether we build them. It’s what kind of worlds we choose to build.
For me, the most important principle is surprisingly simple:
You should always be able to leave.
Leave a community. Leave a set of rules. Leave an identity. Leave a world entirely. And ideally, you should have the ability to create another one.
That doesn’t mean everyone will.
Most people might happily spend their time inside worlds created by other people. There’s nothing wrong with that. Choosing to follow rules that feel meaningful to you is itself a choice.
The problem isn’t that rules exist.
The problem is being trapped inside someone else’s rules with no meaningful alternative.
I don’t want a world without constraints. I want a world where constraints become something we can design.
A place where your identity can be fluid, where status from the physical world doesn’t necessarily follow you, where meeting someone can begin with a shared quest instead of a résumé, and where an idea doesn’t need to remain an idea simply because you don’t know how to build it.
A world with fewer rules you never asked for, and many more that you chose yourself.