Sometimes when words were spoken in a particular sequence, a series of events followed…
Not because the words were correct, but because they resembled something familiar. The brain liked recognisable interfaces. It preferred systems that looked playable, even when they weren’t.
Individually, we optimised, seeking advantage, control, and the sense that our inputs mattered. Collectively, something less obvious happened. Minds artificed. Norms formed and rules appeared without being written. No one announced them, yet everyone followed them, the way players learned a game not from the manual, but from the environment itself.
Somewhere along the way, a few participants mistook fluency for mastery. They treated the shared environment like a personal console, tested limits, and pressed buttons simply because they could.
