http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Software_transactional_memory
It's a heavily researched topic right now. The Worlds concept, as far as I can tell, is actually more general than STM and what you described. In STM, there's the global state everyone can see, and then there's local states that try to commit atomically to the global state. With Worlds, I don't think there's one true global state. I think it would give you more explicit control, which I'm not convinced would be a good thing.