Strip away the fandom and read Royal Road as a spec. Why is it great, and what would building it actually require?
Decomposed, the magic is four properties stacked: an open, discoverable action space; a world that absorbs your actions as lasting consequence; NPCs with their own memory and goals; and emergence, which is just what you get when the first three hold at once.
The honest status of each, in current terms:
- Generating the world is the closest. Shams et al. (2023), the Holodeck-style Infinitia, have LLMs and image models generate maps, quests, NPCs, and mechanics for an open-ended world from prompts alone.
- Local emergence works. Peng et al. (2024) get player-driven, unscripted paths out of non-deterministic LLM NPCs inside a single mystery.
- Small societies work. AI Town and the generative-agents line get agents to coordinate, with the ceiling I describe in A shared channel is not a shared world.
The gap is that nobody has these at the same time, over one persistent world, at scale. We can generate a world, or simulate a few dozen agents, or get one emergent storyline, but not all of it in a single shared substrate that thousands of agents and players alter together and that remembers what they did.
So “how to make it” isn’t a content problem, it’s a representation problem: What even is a world state? and When discovering the action space is the game done well enough that World models as shared substrate can carry a whole society. That’s the part I think is Why now.