Shared Play
Familiar social structures for participation across families, schools and communities.
Community BingoPuppeteer
Infrastructure for experiences that happen together.
A production system for preserving causality and continuity across participants, devices and time.
One domain can be staged across different clients, runtimes and topologies without becoming a different system.
In production since 2018 · an ongoing research series.
The Architectural Center
State is local. Continuity is not.
Most systems preserve the resulting state of each interaction. Shared experiences need something more: a continuity that survives across sessions, services and clients.
Conventional
Session AScreen AState A
Session BScreen BState B
Session CScreen CState C
Meaning reconstructed across boundaries.
Puppeteer
- Participant actions
- Shared causal program
- Coordinated manifestations
- Continuous domain experience
One shared continuity, organized around causality.
The system preserves local results, while continuity must be rebuilt across sessions, services and clients.
How It Works
One flow, from action to shared experience.
First the steps, then the whole system: follow one cause from a participant's action to a shared experience that advances.
- 01
Participants act
An action happens — and is recorded as an operation, not just applied.
- 02
Puppeteer interprets
The action is evaluated against the rules, history and current condition of the experience.
- 03
Consequences are coordinated
Some consequences are immediate, others deferred — reaching one participant, many, or the shared environment.
- 04
The experience continues
Each participant receives the manifestation it needs while remaining part of the same event.
ONE CAUSE, FOLLOWED THROUGH
The Model
Five parts, one coordinated system.
The parts do not run in a line. They form a cycle held together by continuity — the model comes first, the descriptions follow.
- 01
Participants
The people taking part, from any device or location.
- 02
Actions
The decisions and inputs participants make — recorded as operations.
- 03
Rules
The logic that decides what an action means and what it produces.
- 04
Causal Journal
A record of what happened, so the experience can be reasoned about and replayed.
- 05
Manifestations
What each participant receives, produced from the journal.
The value of Puppeteer does not live in any single component. It lives in the contract between them.
Once the coordination model is defined, it can support very different manifestations.
Experiences
One domain. Many ways to experience it.
A Puppeteer domain is not defined by its screen, host or client. The same identity can be staged for a community activity, a browser experience, an automated participant, a shared display or a distributed environment — different productions of one stable domain, not different systems.
Executable Worlds
Controlled environments where actions produce visible and persistent consequences.
Sunny HollowCollective Systems
Experiences in which many participants contribute to one evolving condition.
Shared narrative · collaborative simulationThe Asset
One architecture. A growing technical asset.
An architect can admire an idea. A sponsor needs to know what exists. A partner needs to see what can be transferred.
Each layer is reusable on its own. Together, they make Puppeteer inspectable, extensible and transferable.
Executable ExperiencesProduction infrastructure and working prototypes.
Client Adapter ModelEvery client — human or automated — reaches the domain through an adapter.
Staging IndependenceThe domain travels across clients, hosts and topologies without changing.
Validation & ObservationBehavioral, semantic and continuity checks.
CompilationMethods for turning models into manifestations.
Canonical SpecificationsWorlds, states and transition contracts.
Architectural ModelOperations, participants, causality and replay.
Research FoundationsA growing architectural research series.
The Research
One evolving architectural argument.
A growing series of papers traces Puppeteer from its foundational distinction between operations and values toward its implications for replay, continuity, participants and infrastructure — and it continues to develop.
Proven
A production system with a research foundation.
Not a prototype waiting to be proven, but a working architecture that keeps compounding.
A growing body of papers
Canonical world models
Executable prototypes
Validation contracts
In production since 2018
Inspect the architecture.
If you are evaluating an architecture for shared, continuous or multi-participant systems — or considering it as a strategic asset — we would like to understand what you are building.