World School

The school of World-Builders gathers the disciplines that model, simulate, and reshape social, political, and economic worlds. Here one studies the wonder by which simple rules generate ramifying consequence — how an iterated transaction becomes a market, how a voting procedure becomes a paradox, how a colony of identical squares on a grid becomes a glider. The school inherits from utopian writing and political philosophy, from cybernetics and complexity science, and from the long tradition of games designed to teach the player about the world by letting them remake it in miniature. The World-Builder’s craft is the discipline of stewardship: she builds models in order to understand, and understands in order to act.