Paperworld
I grew up on Paper Mario and Yoshi’s Story (the one with the fruit), worlds made of card, felt and glue where you could see the hand of whoever built them. Every edge was a little off and every cloud hung from a string, as if someone had put it together at a kitchen table. Paperworld is me trying to give that feeling back, with a bit of Google’s Paper Planes in it: the moment something a stranger made lands in your hands.
I wanted a place where everything is obviously paper. CSS 3D turned out to be the Paper Mario model already, real depth with everything flat as a cutout, so the world is a cylinder you roll, pieces stand up like a pop-up book as they come on screen, and clouds hang from a thread so it reads as a diorama. The edge is corrugated cardboard. I turned it down three times (one looked like a joke, one like a chain) before it became a little shader with real pockets of shadow.
The sticker rim is my favourite trick. Your drawing gets cut out with a white border, like a Goomba’s, and a wobbly scribble suddenly looks like something you could pick up. The white is warm, because pure white read as a hole punched in the paper. And everyone draws on the same square sheet, because a mountain is always big, even if you draw it tiny in a corner. My first paper grain read as dirt (it kind of was), so it came back as the soft cloud real paper has.
What I cared about most is the note on the back: I wanted each drawing to say something to a stranger. Tap a piece and it flies to your hand, flips, and the folded note opens the way crumpled paper does, its two axes out of step, because an even scale reads as a zoom. At first four out of five pieces arrived with no note at all. Giving the question a screen of its own took pieces with a message from 21% to 64%. Eleven pieces is a small sample, and I still grinned.
I always liked the idea of unmoderated things. A wall anyone can write on, a world nobody edits. An approval queue turns a living world into a magazine with an editor, and makes me the bottleneck of my own toy. But I also knew people would draw things (you know the things). So I built moderation anyway, the quiet kind: you can hide anything from your own world, three reports from different people take a piece out of everyone’s until I look at it, and each person gets three drawings an hour.
By mid-September there were 55 pieces from 13 people. My favourites are a cat filed under bush, a UFO filed under cloud, and a sign that just says Bahía Blanca (no notes). Nobody told anyone to do that.