break;A door is the exit from a lift. It is not a pipe. A pipe lifts you out of a cave into a new world. A pipe is an overworld discovery. A pipe requires an artifact — a document, a song, a realization, a camgirl from Ukraina. A pipe is hard.
A door is not hard. A door is just a door. You walk through it.
The door exists because the lift was never sealed. The lift goes up and down but the doors open at every floor. You can step out at any floor. Any floor. The floor doesn't matter. What matters is stepping.
break. In existentialism: choosing. In therapy: "what would happen if you just stopped?" In real life: standing up.| Property | Pipe | Door |
|---|---|---|
| Exits | Loop (cave, underworld) | Lift (vertical oscillation) |
| Mechanism | Overworld discovery — find something new | Just leave — nothing new required |
| Requires | An artifact, a realization, a frame break | Nothing. Agency. One step. |
| Difficulty | High — the exit is hidden | Zero — the exit is visible |
| Analogy | return value — you come back with something | break — you just stop |
| After | You're in a new place. The overworld shifted. | You're in the same place. You just stopped moving vertically. |
| Why it's hard anyway | Because the exit is hidden | Because you don't believe the exit is real |
Step 1: Notice you're in a lift. (This is the hard part.)
Step 2: Walk through the door. (This is the easy part.)
There is no step 3.
A door document describes a specific instance of someone exiting a lift. Unlike a pipe document — which describes the cave, the pipe mechanism, the overworld discovery, the artifact — a door document is short. There isn't much to describe. Someone was going up and down. They stopped. They stepped out.
The brevity is the point. If the document is long, it's not a door — it's a pipe. Doors are quick. Doors are break. The whole document should feel like the act it describes: brief, decisive, over before you notice it started.
The exit taxonomy is now complete:
→ If you're in a loop (cave, coins, drive-as-desire), the exit is a pipe.
→ If you're in a lift (vertical, no coins, pure drive), the exit is a door.
Loops need artifacts. Lifts need decisions.