Stories, worlds
& simulations
Notes on story generators, world models and simulations: how intelligent systems can hold a world together and tell stories inside it.
1976 → ∞ · Efe Anidi · London
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Essays
Ideas on story generators, transmedia worlds and intelligent simulations.
BuildTools
The engines, models and systems behind interactive worlds.
AboutWhy this site exists
Notes on storytelling, world models and the next layer of computing.
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Story generators, world models, simulation and transmedia.
Essays & field notes
All essays →Choice and authorship in AI Story Generators: why 'say anything' can break a story
When a reader can type anything, what makes a choice matter? Agency versus the illusion of choice, why branching gets expensive, and the constraints that give generated stories weight.
9 Oct 2026
From interactive film to generative universes: what world models change
How world models could move storytelling from fixed clips and branches to responsive scenes—and what latency, coherence, player agency and authorship still demand.
A field guide to Story Generators: why interactive stories start with text
Story Generators turn an authored world into a live, responsive story. Text is the medium where that new form of interactive entertainment can be built and tested today.
Classical 2D mechanics: the feel layer under generated worlds
Jump arcs, movement, tile grids, collision, fixed timesteps and cameras: the hand-tuned rules that still decide how a generated world feels to move through, and how they anchor generated content.
17 Oct 2026
Story generatorsGenerative audio for story worlds: adaptive scores, sound effects and synthetic voices
From iMUSE to text-to-speech characters: how generated sound gives a story world its voice, when to generate live versus in advance, and the consent questions to settle first.
16 Oct 2026
World models & simulationsDesigning 3D worlds for discovery: from landmarks to world models
What makes a simulated world worth exploring, and how procedural structure, AI agents and world models can make space invite curiosity rather than just provide scale.
15 Oct 2026
World models & simulationsCharacters with memory: LLM agents in living simulations
How language-model agents add memory, goals and social behaviour to simulated worlds—and why an underlying model of what is true still matters.
15 Oct 2026
Dispatches
All dispatches →
Gradium releases Phonon, a family of tiny open-weight text-to-speech models
Gradium has published 31m and 40m parameter Phonon TTS models that run on CPUs, phones and in the browser. The English 31m model is Apache 2.0; the 40m models are non-commercial.
20 Oct 2026 · Gradium blog
Dispatches
Skywork open-sources Matrix-Game 4.0, a neural renderer for playable low-poly games
Matrix-Game 4.0 keeps gameplay and physics in a real game engine and uses a streaming video model to repaint its low-poly frames. Code, three playable games and model weights are released under Apache 2.0.
15 Oct 2026 · Project GitHub
Dispatches
AMD agrees to acquire World Labs for about $8.2 billion
AMD has signed a definitive agreement to buy World Labs, the Fei-Fei Li-led company behind the Marble 3D world model, in an all-stock deal expected to close by the end of 2026.
28 Sept 2026 · AMD Newsroom
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Books
The storytelling, world-building and systems-thinking shelf.