Understand Journeys

A Journey is one reader's actual path through your Experience, from the Opening to whatever ending they reach. Every Journey is personal - two readers living the same Experience can end up in genuinely different places, having made different choices along the way.

But PARENK also remembers something bigger than any single Journey: a shared map of every meaningful moment any reader has ever reached in your world, and every path that led there. Different readers who happen to arrive at the same true moment - even by completely different actions - converge on the same point in that shared story. After finishing their own Journey, a reader can look back at this graph and see how their path compared to everyone else's: where they converged with other readers, where they went somewhere no one else has yet, and which endings still remain to be discovered.

This is what makes your world feel bigger than one story: every reader adds to something they can later see was already shared.

When your Experience is shared, several protagonists live it at the same moment, not one after another. Their paths can diverge - each one acting their own way - and then converge again, when different choices still lead them to the same true moment: that's when they notice someone else's path has just crossed theirs.

At every step, the group waits - within a time window you set - for enough protagonists to have acted before the story moves forward. Not everyone has to respond. During that window, protagonists can also talk to each other, to decide together what to do before the story reacts.

Not every path stays alive until the end: a choice can lead one protagonist's story to an ending that closes only for them, while the others continue without them. Design your endings - and your rules - with that in mind.

Some shared Experiences go further: they give each protagonist a different role, not the same experience lived by several people but genuinely distinct perspectives on the same story - a psychologist and their patient, for instance. Each role can have private objectives only the person playing it ever reads, and world facts visible only to them - the other protagonist never sees them. Roles are assigned in the order protagonists join - whoever arrives first gets the first role you defined, whoever arrives second gets the second, and so on: never a reader's choice, so think of that order as part of your design.