"It all began with a single word; "Immersion."

And no, the designers - who would later incorporate under the name we all know now, Horus Designs - weren't making mention of antiquated gizmos and gadgets, or gimmicky game add-ons.

The belief was thus, "For a world to feel like it is alive, as if all the beings within and the world they make up are real, it should begin not from the user perspective but from the perspective of the world itself and those beings in it," as stated by Horus founder Thomas Flaherty.

While this reasoning - or at least close equivalents - wasn't necessarily new at the time, the amount of work that went into realizing that value was massive almost beyond scope.

They began with world generation, populating a huge third-dimensional sphere with all sorts of objects and natural biomes, defining what things could populate each z-layer, tuning and tweaking natural formation states such as caves and mountains, lakes, seas, and rivers to be as real possible.

Objects were spawned, assigned field variables that game them interactive states to creatures that held the ability to use them, be it a Dragon burning it's way through a mountain to make a home or a logger chopping down a tree. Every single possible interaction was created, populated, and defined - and then every creature who had the ability to make use of any of them were allowed to do so.

Of course, they didn't just yet - Thomas and the few others who worked on the game, in the beginning, spent several months just preparing world generation, before even starting on anything... "living." And when they did? Well, they certainly weren't going to go easy here either.

They created a hierarchy tree of needs and wants, and wrote a script to balance the priority between them. Food, water, and shelter being the pressing needs, with social activity (of all kinds) underneath, and then a tree of wants that went from life goals and dreams all the way down to "what I need to do today to accomplish each step", all supported by list actions that define the field variable necessary to achieve it; and even the ability to trade and gain things from other creatures if easier or more efficient, or just not possible for their current abilities in the first place.

Along with all the other small things that make up the world - things like weather, day/night, full living environments of flora and fauna and according seasons, monsters big and small, animals and semi-sentients alike - they coded something beyond what had ever been done before.

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Most of this was due to very advanced partitioned swarm code architecture, allowing the game to dance through seemingly miraculous levels of handling even for the quantum chips they ran on, but nothing, not any of the world generation code, the environments or even the life trees, had as much of an impact on what they created - as did P.O.R.K.

P.O.R.K. - which stands for Programmable Operational and Rationalizing Klutz - was an underlying automated heuristic administration, debugger, and learning program written to do several different things all at once. During world generation and gameplay, it would handle things like debugging code, given access to databases that helped it find the most efficient, and accurate methods available. During normal operations, it would act as an administrator - doing such things as watching living creatures, sentient and not, and ensuring their priorities remained optimal - as well as updating and improving on them, when necessary. P.O.R.K. also handled the creation and spawning of new creatures, as well as all other progressive content within the game framework.

By far it's most important ability, however, was its heuristic learning process. Given access to large databases of scientific, fantasy, and social literature, P.O.R.K. was given the tools in order to progressively better understand how to build a better world, more suited to interaction both within itself and to its eventual players. Without limits and restraint, and given several years - during which Horus had incorporated, and received millions in investments - the system came as close as could possibly be to sentience if a list ai could ever be so. Perhaps one of its most important additions? Imperfection.

Not in the background of the world, the code has to be stable after all - but the de-optimization or choice for the world's self-created occupants. After all, nothing could be said more human than imperfection. No one can know what the future holds, after all. The perspective of a living being is skewed towards their own existence, and therefore so must be their choices.

Once all of this was done, or at least far enough along in progress to start basic tests, Horus began reiterations at a fantastic pace. There remain no records of how many times the content was wiped and re-created from scratch, how many worlds lost in a blink of an eye as they goaded P.O.R.K. to prod along their code and attempt to make even better worlds.

How many cultures lost? How many unique events and lifetimes lived by the occupants of these worlds?

In the end, I'm sure it surprised Horus that their flagship game, so rightly titled as "Immersion" itself, was deemed ready not because they were done tweaking it - but because P.O.R.K. learned that the largest obstacle (and most important goal) to protecting its world, was to write out the creators themselves.

Imagine their surprise to learn one morning that not only was their game online, launched and with thousands of players connecting (weeks, or possibly months earlier than expected) but also that there was absolutely nothing they could do about it.

The release and standardization of the new dive equipment during that time period also helped, after all, nothing sells an immersive experience better than, well, actually being immersed - but even on older analog systems, the world of "Immersion" would have been the biggest hit of its time."

-Sarah Tyronne, Virtual Game Studies, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2064