The Little Learning Library

“A few books well chosen, and well made use of, will be more profitable than a great confused Alexandrian library.”
— Thomas Fuller

I’ve always loved those little VW camper vans from the 1970s. I always revelled in the storied mythology of my parents taking one to Jackson Hole on one of their first dates. My mother had just come to the US from Spain and my dad was smitten, and wanted to show her America. I imagine them flying down the long stretches of American highway into the Teton mountain range, landing in the elk reserve, sagebrush rustling for as far as the eye could see.

This morning I was journaling in a coffee shop and I saw one of these vans parked outside. They always catch my eye. I peered inside. It was a small library. This teal, wood-paneled snapshot of yesteryear was packed to the brim with books. There was a single leather seat to sit inside and read. It was a roving bookstore, a learning library on wheels. Yesterday I was in a gorgeous, towering bookstore with shelves three stories high. I usually prefer those. But this little library on wheels had everything I needed. A whole world, the size of a couch.

My dream is to have a library of learning games like that. A van's worth. Enough to transport every kid in the world somewhere worth going.

Let’s imagine what might be in that little library.

MicroSurvivor. Imagine being small enough to live inside a single drop of water. You are a bacterium. You need food. You need to escape predators. The droplet is an entire ecosystem. You are learning biology by being biology. There is no quiz. There is no lecture. There is the visceral knowledge that comes from surviving inside the thing you are studying.

Illumination. Light becomes your toy. Bend it, refract it, scatter it. Solve puzzles that turn into demonstrations of how the universe actually works. You do not learn physics. You wield it. By level ten, you can explain why the sunset is red, and you will not have realized you were ever in a physics class.

The New New Way Things Work. Inspired by David Macaulay's beloved book, this is a thousand-puzzle universe of mechanisms. Shrink to the size of a gear inside a car engine. Repair a sewing machine. Operate a catapult. Each puzzle reveals the science underneath. The game is impossibly large. No studio could ever fund a single team to build it. A swarm could build it, one mechanism at a time, for years.

Seven Minutes of Terror. Perseverance is descending to Mars. You are the AI inside the rover. The signal home takes too long. You are alone. Navigate atmospheric entry. Deploy the parachute. Time the rockets. The seven minutes feel like seven years. When you land, you have learned what it took NASA twenty years to build.

The Magic School Bus. Ms. Frizzle was always an AI tutor. She just lived in a yellow bus instead of a book. Imagine the show as a game. You shrink with the class. You step into the bloodstream. You dive to the ocean floor. You travel to the surface of the sun. The franchise has been waiting forty years for the medium that could do it justice.

Kinetic Masterpiece. You step into an old inventor's workshop. Wood, brass, leather. She hands you your first set of gears. An hour in, you have built a small machine that drops a marble through a sequence of levers and bells. By level ten you are designing sculptures that breathe and chime and dance. The game is physics. The game is engineering. The game is also art. The lines between the three were always artificial. The game restores them.

City Lights. You stand on a rooftop in Hong Kong. The skyline glitters before you. You have access to the lighting controls on every tower. You write code and the city becomes your canvas. By level five you have made the Bay Bridge pulse like a heartbeat. By level twenty you are orchestrating a light show across the entire Dubai skyline for a holiday. You are not learning to code. You are painting with the city.

EcoFarm. You inherit a plot of land. You plant. The crops fail. You learn why. You plant again. This time you intercrop. You introduce pollinators. You watch the soil come back. By the third season your farm is alive in a way the neighboring fields are not. You did not study ecology. You became a farmer.

I have a folder full of these. Give creative teachers, parents and students a prompt and they’ll brainstorm more incredible ideas than we could ever manifest. The library is not empty for lack of imagination. It is empty for lack of a way to build.

The kinds of games that need to be in this library cannot be built by any one studio. Not at any scale. Not with the budgets required to make games kids actually want. The market does not fund educational games. I know how hard it is. We tried with The Endless Mission. We tried with Terminal Two, a collection of small learning games. We tried everything we could with the budgets we had. And we ran out of money on every single one.

The one exception I've seen happened recently. We invested in a game company made up of the entire former Fortnite leadership team, who have decided to use their superpowers to build educational games. They have raised more than $300 million. Even with 120 people working full time for years, they can only produce so much. And what of all the games they will never get to? Fortnite itself, their prior team, has hundreds of people and an annual operating budget likely in the high hundreds of millions of dollars. All for one game.

The path to multitudes is to empower. Roblox has spurred 50 million experiences. How? They built a tool. But those games are small experiences with little craftsmanship. They are popular not because they are sophisticated, but because they are social.

The community model changes that. The moment a great game can be built by a swarm of contributors, alongside a small studio holding the vision, the math changes. Levels by the hundreds. Characters by the thousands. Quests, dialogue, music, art, all flowing in from people who would never have been hired and never would have applied. The budget that used to be impossible becomes possible. The library starts to fill.

This, in the end, is what Endless Studios is. The thing we are most focused on is teaching young people to build, so they can thrive in the AI economy. That is the most important thing we do. But the byproduct of all that building is the library. A van's worth of games and worlds and immersive experiences, built by the swarms of young people we taught to build. Each one a doorway into something worth learning.

A few at first, then a few hundred. A few thousand soon afterwards if we succeed. Each a window into a world a child can step into. Each made by a community of contributors who learned to build by building it. Any of them could perhaps be funded. The library, never.

The 21st Century Reader

At the beginning of this book, I wrote about an ancient Reader I found in a box of old books. It was the textbook of an 1860s classroom, and it left me speechless. In a single small volume, it taught me about the lungs, made me want to raise my kids more actively, and left me awestruck at the magic of a blood cell. It taught elocution. It taught poetry. It taught reverence. We have kept the worst parts of 19th century education and lost the magical parts. We have also failed to layer in what 21st century technology actually makes possible.

So I started imagining. What would happen if we taught from those Readers again, supplemented by everything our era can do? You read the poetic language about the lungs and then you step inside them. You traverse the bronchial network. You witness an infection. You zoom in further, fold the proteins of an antibiotic into place, and watch it bind. You make the choice that decides whether the patient lives or dies. The Reader gave you the wonder. The game makes the wonder real. And delightful.

I asked a question at the beginning of this book: if we could distill the best of our ancestors and fuse it with the best of today's tools, what would the modern Reader look like? The best of the 19th century and the best of the 21st. Together. Someone already answered the question. He wrote it down thirty years ago, in a science fiction novel from 1995. It has been my holy grail ever since.

Daisy’s Primer

After my brother Devon died, I had a dream about his daughter Daisy. I was with her, but I could not speak to her. I knew I needed to reach her somehow. I needed to help raise her, even if I could not be with her every day. My brother won’t be able to see her either. In my dream it felt like he was trying to get through to her. He told me that he couldn’t wait for her to try my technology. The wind blew. I started crying in my dream. Deep crying of the sort that I have only done since Devon died. She is seven now. She has been without him since she was two. In those tears I begged, please help me build what Daisy needs.

It took me years to realize that hers is the story of a girl in a book that I read long before any of this. The book was an inspiration for the ultimate Endless dream. The girl’s name is Nell. She too has no father. What changes her life is a book that teaches her, raises her, loves her.

The Diamond Age

Long, long ago, in the era of Endless OS, when we were building an operating system to educate kids in faraway countries, I used to dream of a device full of all of the magical tools that could unlock the potential of children all around the world. If we could build it and put this little device into a young person’s hands, they could be guided, educated, lifted by it. And it could happen for millions of kids. I chased that dream with all of my soul. It was my dharma. To this day, it still is.

I was describing this dream to our VP of engineering at the time, sitting by the coffee pot in our office. He told me, “You’ve read The Diamond Age, of course.” “The what?” “The Diamond Age. It is what you are describing.” I read it on my next flight to Guatemala.

In The Diamond Age, a neo-Victorian lord commissions a master engineer to create A Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer, an interactive book designed to raise his granddaughter into a thoughtful, educated, subversive young woman. The engineer, John Percival Hackworth, secretly makes a second copy for his own daughter. But that copy is stolen, and eventually it falls into the hands of Nell, a little girl from the lowest rung of society.

Nell’s life is hard in the way that children’s lives should never be hard. Her mother, Tequila, cannot protect her. Her mother’s boyfriends are cruel and abusive. Her father, who stole the book and gave it to her, is killed. She's left with nothing good in her life but her brother and The Primer. She sits down to open the one inheritance her father gave her:

“Once upon a time there was a little Princess named Nell who was imprisoned in a tall dark castle on an island in the middle of a great sea, with a little boy named Harv, who was her friend and protector.”

The book has been watching and listening, and it pulls her world directly into its narrative.

“Princess Nell and Harv could not leave the Dark Castle, but from time to time a raven would come to visit them….” “What’s a Raven?” Nell said. The illustration was a colorful painting of the island seen from up in the sky. The island rotated downward and out of the picture, becoming a view towards the ocean horizon. In the middle was a black dot. The picture zoomed in on the black dot and it turned out to be a bird. Big letters appeared beneath. ‘R A V E N,’ the book said. ‘Raven. Now, say it with me.’”

The Primer teaches her to read by making the letters part of the adventure: she has to learn them to follow Princess Nell's story. Literacy arrives not as a chore but as a key to a kingdom she desperately wants to enter. This book goes on to teach her in ways her parents cannot.

This book goes on to raise her in ways her parents cannot. When Nell cannot process a trauma that has happened to her, the Primer does not explain trauma abstractly. The apartment becomes the Dark Castle. Her fear becomes a quest. The book’s miracle is not that it distracts her from reality, but that it helps her metabolize reality into story.

In one sequence from when she is older, Princess Nell arrives at Castle Turing, a dramatized computer. Its gates, chains, messages, and rooms are physical metaphors for computation. She is locked in a dungeon and has to communicate with someone calling himself the Duke of Turing by sending messages on a heavy chain. Nell is trying to determine whether the being on the other side is human or machine. The Primer is teaching her computation, recursion, formal systems, and the limits of machine intelligence. But it is also teaching her a deeper question: who has been on the other side of my book? The answer, eventually, is Miranda. A woman. A surrogate mother of sorts. The Primer was not merely an intelligent machine. At its deepest level, it was a conduit between Nell and a human who loved her.

The Endless Primer

The chats about pedagogy in The Diamond Age look like the sorts of chats that we have had at Endless for years. “What is a game but a drill that’s dressed up in colorful clothing?” the character Dojo asks. Another says, “This implies, does it not, that in order to raise a generation of children who can reach their full potential, we must find a way to make their lives interesting.” Then he asks: “Do you think that our schools accomplish that?”

When I read those lines years later, I felt like someone had reached across time and stolen the words from my manuscript. Jonathan was right that day by the coffee. This was me.

The book is by Neal Stephenson, the same author who coined the term “metaverse” in Snow Crash. During all the metaverse fever, I never really understood why everyone wanted to build the metaverse and not the Illustrated Primer. The Illustrated Primer was always the one worth building. Yet I have only ever encountered two people who also dreamed of creating an Illustrated Primer: Michael Crow and Mark Naufel. We are trying to build a college worthy of that dream with both of them, at ASU and USV.

I imagine the day we have it. What it might look like for all the Nells of the world.

She is four. The story she is reading reads back. She points at a word she does not know, and the book asks her what it might mean, given everything else on the page. She guesses. The book tells her she is close, and shows her why. The page comes to life as she reads, in a sort of collaborative creation process. Her voice breathes life into a world coming alive.

She is seven. She wants to build a treehouse. The book becomes a workshop she can walk into. She is between two oaks with a tape measure and a small budget and a problem. How tall, how wide, how much weight. She does not know. The book does not tell her. By Sunday she has built it. The arithmetic she did to get there is not a worksheet. It is a treehouse.

She is eleven. A girl at school said something cruel about her, and she has come home crushed. The book does not cheer her up. It asks her what she thinks the other girl was feeling. She says she does not care. The book waits. After a while she says, maybe. Maybe the other girl was scared. The book asks her what she might say tomorrow. She rehearses three versions out loud. None of them are perfect. She picks the one that feels most like her.

She is fourteen. She is contributing real work to a real game. A studio in São Paulo needs a level designer for a side quest, and she has been training for this for two years inside the book without quite knowing it. Her first submission is rejected. The book walks her through the rejection. Her second is accepted. She is fourteen years old and a piece of a world she made is shipping in a game that ten thousand children will play.

She is seventeen. She is mentoring a four-year-old now, a little girl in a far-off country who, like her, is also growing up with the sadness of loss.

This is the Illustrated Primer. A guide. A journey. Embedded with every subject the schools teach and every skill the schools forget. Patience. Craft. The discipline of finishing something. The courage to start. Now that the world has given us modern game engines, today’s AI and swarms of creators, we have everything that we need to build all of this. All it will take is a community to help us build it.

Daisy was born long after I started dreaming of the Illustrated Primer. I began imagining it for a young girl in Guatemala. And for the gaggle of girls I met in that dusty roadside village on the way from Jodhpur to Udaipur in India. The girls whose only hope was to step into a world like the ones we wanted to create and come out dyed by the bright colors we put into it. Worlds upon worlds, taking them by the hand to a better place by teaching them to take themselves to that better place.

Our vision at Endless has always been: The Whole World, Empowered. Every child. The ones with parents who cannot teach them. The ones with no parents at all. Until every child has a way to be raised well, the generational train of trauma rolls on.

I didn’t realize that one day my brother’s daughter would be one of them.

In The Diamond Age, the Primer is commissioned by a neo-Victorian Lord for his granddaughter. It lands in the hands of a girl from the ghetto. I live in a lovely Victorian home now, but I began building this for girls like Nell. For children whose lives were hard in ways children’s lives should never be hard. It’s as if my story is somehow reversed. Now that has shown up in the life of the little girl in my life.

The Children Who Build the Primer

One belief has changed since that coffee with Jonathan. I no longer think the Primer is what most changes a life. What changes a life is becoming one of the people who builds it.

Imagine the sequel to The Diamond Age. In it, Nell builds a community where a hundred million girls like her are learning to make the Primer themselves. They are bustling about, finding their passion project, plugging away at something that in any other era of history would have drawn gasps for the magic that it is. They are building worlds, collaboratively, that will teach the younger children. They aren’t the readers of someone else's illustrations. Their hands are on the pen.

This is the Endless Future. One in which everyone gets the pleasure of learning to create the kinds of things we see in The Diamond Age.

We live with the mistaken assumption that abundant things are rare. We believe it takes geniuses like Hackworth to make an Illustrated Primer. It doesn't. It takes millions of Nells.

The mission is not a product we ship. The mission is the act of a young person building. That is what teaches them to thrive.

So my goal has shifted. It is no longer to build the Illustrated Primer. It is to teach the Nells of the world to build it for their younger selves. And in the building, to learn to thrive in the world they are entering. If we can do that for a few hundred million kids, they will build the better world we all want to inhabit. If we can do that, we can shift civilization. That will be the greatest gift I can give to Daisy, to my children, and to all children.

There are many doors into that mission. Build with us on Endstar. Build in Unity or Godot. Contribute to a community game or join a professional studio. Start a studio that builds within our community. Earn a degree with us at ASU or USV. Bring this into your classroom. Every one of these is a step toward the same future. Every one of them puts a young person's hand on the pen. This is why I wrote this book. To bring you to it.

You, the reader. The student. The teacher. The parent. The administrator. You are the reason this mission will come true. When you step in and learn to build an Illustrated Primer, you will build the very skills that will let you build a better world.

Daisy

Daisy looks so similar to my son Jude that Google Photos thinks they are the same person. We had wanted a baby girl. We tried four times and got boys. Daisy is like the daughter that we always wanted. But in the day to day, I am not able to give her what her father would have given her. She lives far away, in places that I cannot reach. After Devon died, I made him a promise. I would take care of his baby girl. I have tried to do that in every way I know how. Somehow, this feels like one of them.

It's still years away. But someday, I hope to be able to give her our Illustrated Primer. Our Endless Book. And I hope that, one day, Daisy also realizes that there was a human who loved her on the other side all along.

This is for a girl who will one day grow up to be a very special young lady.

Devon, Daisy. This is for you.