The challenge of sci-fi, fantasy, and immersive storytellers today: build a ground-breaking new world that audiences will want to spend time in, are able to interact with (and even change), and that also has the potential for long-term social impact. As audiences crave more agency and interaction, story world-builders have to be flexible, proactive, and wildly creative. The panel will feature creators of a TV zombie apocalypse, the live performance world of "Sleep No More," the Wakanda Dream Lab, and the Meow Wolf Multiverse. They'll offers insights into current and future world-building trends, as well as tangible ideas on how to start building new worlds, how to design for interactivity, and how the act of creating alternate realities can fuel profound social change in the real world.