by Gabriel Fonseca

New World Manual

A game-book for working when the machine already executes.

A → B

Start at level 0 →

The map

  1. Level 00How to playA You read manuals to understand a method and close the book having changed nothingB You play this manual: every level is a real tension, and you leave each one with a move made
  2. Level 01The platesA Working well means keeping many plates spinning — product, operations, code, people, deadlines, moneyB Working well means choosing which plate deserves your attention, because most of them already spin on their own
  3. Level 02The ChallengeA The organization explains itself with thirty concepts — project, goal, OKR, epic, task, process — and spends its energy maintaining the system instead of workingB One primitive explains most of the complexity: the explicit tension between where we are and where we want to be
  4. Level 03The systemA You have a challenge written down and treat it as a list of things to doB You see the challenge as a system: a current state, a desired state, and the forces, constraints and dependencies that keep it where it is
  5. Level 04AI as a forceA AI is a chatbot that receives detailed instructions and returns executionB AI is a force in the system: it receives a well-defined challenge and negotiates the execution, never the transformation
  6. Level 05The inherited platesA You join an organization and the plates are already spinning — and nobody remembers the challenge of whoever set them spinningB Every inherited plate has its challenge recovered, and AI helps balance what is worth keeping instead of purging everything and starting from zero
  7. Level 06The ritualA The team's ritual exists to predict how much fits in two weeks, and the execution it estimates is the execution the machine already doesB The ritual exists to choose which tension deserves the next two days, and leaves an artifact anyone can inspect
  8. Level 07The spec mazeA Specifying is the only known way to agree on what will be built, and the spec pulls in process, which pulls in tooling, which asks for more specB Specification is recognized as an agreement between humans — necessary when there are many hands, dispensable when the challenge is clear and the machine can propose
  9. Level 08The real gameA The thesis lives in posts and conversations; the real work that sustains it has no shape you can showB The real work is played as a system of Challenges — each with A, B, forces and proof — and this manual is the first published board

Inventory