Worldbuilding for Game Designers

Our modern world is dominated by giant media companies, and increasingly they don’t so much sell story, characters or gameplay as they do their setting. Fictional worlds are big business and represent big value to companies and audiences alike, and they are increasingly expected and demanded by both. As yet, however, the art of building worlds has only been taught to writers of novels or films. The same worlds are frequently used across different modes of media, but successfully adapting them to games or building them for this purpose requires a specific approach.

Unlike all other artforms, games mandate participation, with the audience stepping into the world of the game and taking on the roles that the rules and pieces demand of them. Likewise, whenever an audience engages with a fictional world they are inherently playing a game of make-believe and imagining themselves within a different context. This makes worldbuilding and gaming a perfect match, with each element giving more power to the other. This book unlocks exactly how the two disciplines are entwined and work together and how a designer can harness that synergy to the best effect.

This text is composed of short, focussed chapters that explain every step of building a compelling world, from getting your first ideas to moving towards publication. It also provides a deeper understanding of the how and why of world creation and why worlds have so much power over us as players and as people.

Features:

Covers every step of world creation from getting ideas to seeking publication

Comprehensive analysis of the field

Inspirational tricks to break blocks or find new angles

Practical exercises at the end of every chapter

Simple and accessible material for every kind of game or game designer

Steve Dee has worked in games for thirty years as a designer, writer, editor, journalist, consultant, organiser and educator. He has won five ENNIE Awards for RPG design, most recently for CHEW: The Roleplaying Game, and he has won Best Non-Digital Game at the 2024 Freeplay Awards for The Score. His card game There’s Been A Murder has sold over 100,000 copies and been translated into three languages. He is the president of Tin Star Games.

CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design

Series Editor:

Geoffrey Engelstein

Thematic Integration in Board Game Design

Sarah Shipp

Graphic Design for Board Games

Daniel Solis

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems

Amabel Holland

Worldbuilding for Game Designers

Steve Dee

For more information about this series please visit: https://www.routledge.com/CRC-Press-Guides-to-Tabletop-Game-Design/book-series/CRCGUITABGAM?

Worldbuilding for Game Designers

Steve Dee

Designed cover image: Shutterstock

First edition published 2025

by CRC Press

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and by CRC Press

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© 2025 Steve Dee

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ISBN: 9781032862293 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032856810 (pbk)

ISBN: 9781003521914 (ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914

Typeset in Minion Pro

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Contents

Foreword

Acknowledgements

Introduction

PART ONE General Principles

CHAPTER 1 ◾ Worlds Must Be Built to Purpose

CHAPTER 2 ◾ Setting Exists to Communicate Mechanics

CHAPTER 3 ◾ Worlds and Games Are Built on Narratives

CHAPTER 4 ◾ Worldbuilding Is Character Building

CHAPTER 5 ◾ Astrology Not Astronomy

CHAPTER 6 ◾ Realism and Believability

CHAPTER 7 ◾ Keep Asking Questions

CHAPTER 8 ◾ Question Everything

CHAPTER 9 ◾ Reality Is Your Muse

CHAPTER 10 ◾ Keep Asking People

CHAPTER 11 ◾ Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty

CHAPTER 12 ◾ Embodiment and Anthropology

PART TWO Breaking Ground

CHAPTER 13 ◾ Intrinsic and Extrinsic Expression

CHAPTER 14 ◾ Start Small – And Finish Small

CHAPTER 15 ◾ Go Big and Go Home

CHAPTER 16 ◾ The Richard Scarry Interrogative

CHAPTER 17 ◾ Gods and Monsters

CHAPTER 18 ◾ The Map Is Not the Territory

CHAPTER 19 ◾ Genesis and the Bible

CHAPTER 20 ◾ Top Down…

CHAPTER 21 ◾ And Bottom-Up

CHAPTER 22 ◾ The SpongeBob Technique

CHAPTER 23 ◾ Good, Evil and Other Popular Brands

CHAPTER 24 ◾ Psychographics and Psychodrama

CHAPTER 25 ◾ Plot Armour and Railroading

PART THREE Developing Your World

CHAPTER 26 ◾ Never Say Never Again

CHAPTER 27 ◾ Pipe and How to Lay It

CHAPTER 28 ◾ The Slice of Life

CHAPTER 29 ◾ Signs and Signifiers

CHAPTER 30 ◾ Synecdoche and Statistics

CHAPTER 31 ◾ A Game Is a Map

CHAPTER 32 ◾ Teaching and Example

CHAPTER 33 ◾ The Jimmy Olsen Blues

CHAPTER 34 ◾ The Ray Arnold Principle

CHAPTER 35 ◾ Filling the Fractal

CHAPTER 36 ◾ Borrowing, Stealing and Appropriating

CHAPTER 37 ◾ Lawyers, Puns and Money

AFTERWORD

INDEX

Foreword

WHEN I WAS… I don’t know, two or three years old, we had a rug on our living room floor that had a brown stripe. That stripe became a road. The tiled edge of the fireplace it surrounded was a cliff, or sometimes a glacier. Unfathomed passes and ravines lay in the foothills of the sofa cushions. I built, in play, a world around me that didn’t really exist. I have never committed that world to writing (except, I suppose, now), but I’ve put down many others since. Some worlds just happened spontaneously, like the road on the rug. Others were more deliberately constructed. I have believed in them all.

As Steve Dee, energetic and perceptive as always, remarks early in this book, worldbuilding has become something of a thing in recent years, a discipline, a specialisation, a form of art or craft at least, in its own right. It is a skillset valued by the builders of games, creators of TV shows and the writers of books and is subject to both celebration and intense criticism. But though it might now occur as a plus on CVs, and while we may lazily trace it back via obvious landmarks like Tolkien and Herbert, Lucas and Gygax (who both built worlds and provided the means for building), the truth is that it is older by far, predating the term itself, and perhaps predating even any conscious awareness that it is taking place. And it is remarkably common.

We all do it, to a greater or lesser extent. We ascribe meanings and values to the world around us, sometimes in wilful contradiction of objective facts. We make our own worlds comfortable and fashion them to suit ourselves. My personal world is not “the real” world and neither is yours. Moreover, we do it to escape, in daydream and fancy and fantasy. It’s the reason we read and play games, it’s the reason we watch TV and movies and it’s the reason we embark on any creative endeavour. It’s also, let’s not forget, the basis of humour, because jokes work by imaginatively realigning the bare facts of a situation. Worldbuilding doesn’t just date back to classical texts or paint on the walls of caves, but it dates back to every childhood and every playful act of make-believe.

Everything we’re talking about – books, games, comics, TV, films, jokes – is propelled by imagination, an instrument most of us learn to play in early childhood. The imagination of make-believe can be subtle and slight, or it can be elaborate. It can make a stick into a sword, or a sand pit into a mountain range, it can seed myths in the local woods or give voices and involved histories to each and every one of your action figures (while smoothly accepting that GI Joe is so much bigger than Greedo). It can make you spend hours on the living room rug drawing maps of places that have never existed, and never will.

The thing that unites all acts of worldbuilding is that they involve places that don’t exist at all. Except, of course, they do. They do, now that you’ve drawn the map. Imagination and make-believe are happy diversions for most people. For those who approach imagination with a more professional glint in their eyes (which, I presume, will be most of the people interested in the contents of this book), worldbuilding requires one ingredient that is usually lacking from childhood play. A child needs only to convince themselves or, at most, a few close friends. On a more industrial level, worldbuilding has to convince an entire, and often critical, audience.

The greatest imagined worlds are many things: they are compelling, vivid, involving, intoxicating… but most of all, they are convincing. Making the unreal believably real is the true trick. Steve – and I believe he’s immensely qualified to do this – has set out in this book to break down the techniques and concepts of worldbuilding and explain how best to accomplish it with the requisite authenticity. To make imagination really work and persist, you need to give it rules, guidelines and consistency. Unbridled imagination tends to burn brightly but briefly.

But if “industrial imagination” seems like another 21st-century horror (and it is), out to harness make-believe into commercial employment, and confining it with regulations and rules, Steve is also quick to remind us, repeatedly, that it should be free and fun. Its playfulness is what makes it so appealing and powerful. These guidelines are invaluable and inspiring, but they should always remain guidelines. Play with them and, in the event of a tie, let make-believe beat sense.

We all taught ourselves to play, a long time ago, and even if we’re a little rusty, a book like this can help us to remember how it’s done, the pleasure of doing it and the reward of encountering the worlds that it builds.

Dan Abnett, Maidstone,

United Kingdom, December 2025

Acknowledgements

WITH GREAT THANKS TO Geoffrey Engelstein, for trusting me with the world.

Introduction

MY FRIEND MATT AND I love to talk about worldbuilding. We’re old hands at it now: the two of us have some fifty years between us in the game industry and have worked on dozens of worlds and properties and designed many on our own, for publication and for fun. Matt is primarily a fiction author who ended up writing lots of novels and short stories set in game worlds. I’m a game designer who has written both rules and fiction but only published my fiction inside game books. He reads everything he can find but rarely gets to play. I play games two or three times a week but read sparsely. It makes for good discussions: the same passions, but with different lenses.

A few years ago I was pitching a world to Matt. A central concept was that performing magic always cost blood or bones: yours or someone else’s. As a result, only those powerful enough to acquire sacrifices or rich enough to pay to have hygiene and doctors were likely to use magic, as well as those rare few who are desperate enough to hack at their own flesh. Matt replied that if he was writing that in a novel, he would have one faction or character unlock the secret of magic without that cost, and the plot would hinge around this new discovery causing shockwaves throughout the world. I said that you wouldn’t want to do that in a game world, because it wouldn’t be fair to have a strong concept up front and then break a core rule straight away. Or to give one faction or player option an additional power or an escape clause.

And so the idea for this book was born.

Worldbuilding is very popular right now, as a concept, as a marketing buzzword and as a product even on its own. Popular media is always hungry for something that can be sold over and over again; the simplest way to do that is to sell a universe. The huge success of science fiction and superheroes at the box office have primed mainstream Western audiences for the strange, and hungry for new worlds to explore. The brands of Star Trek and Star Wars dominate the media landscape, and although the rules of those worlds are mostly established, they need strange new horizons to explore. The comic franchises are so keen to reinvent themselves out of the rules they have set for themselves they have crashed various universes and franchises together, and hop between them all – and the audience has no trouble with this at all.

Games, particularly digital ones, have been ahead of this trend for a while; roleplaying games arguably codified the entire idea of simulating a fictional place. Wargames have thrived on their worlds, turning them into prose and film media as often as things have gone the other way. Games have a head start, in other words, but as yet most worldbuilding advice is not written for game designers. Much of it is written for authors and as we have seen there are some key points of divergence in needs. Some of it is written for the “game masters” of roleplaying games, the worldbuilders who mostly only perform to a very small audience. It is of course worth noting that everything from The Wheel of Time fantasy series (now a TV show as well) to The Expanse (ditto) began as roleplaying game worlds – and The Expanse has now been the basis of several games. So we can see that the writing for game masters and authors is very useful to game designers! The need for a work with this particular focus is clear, but let us not suggest that there is nothing to be learned from the rest of the field.

Another area where one can find worldbuilding tips is in the hobby of worldbuilding for its own sake, as an intellectual exercise. Some of this is historically based, such as imagining what might have happened if a certain hinge point in history went another way. Others explore scientific principles being changed or how such principles might lead to different outcomes than on our blue planet. Still other worldbuilders focus on tiny slices or parts of a world. “Conlangers” love to build fictional languages that make sense and follow rules. Some mathematical puzzles start with creating groups where the central assumptions of our number systems don’t hold. I’m a big fan of fictional media inside media, or when whole crowds of individuals buy into shared fantasy creations presented as if they were real such as with Goncharov.¹

If there is a name for these passions when grouped together, it does not seem to exist. Conlangers do not, as far as I can tell, overlap greatly with the scientific worldbuilders, nor they with the students of alternative history. Few of those, I imagine, would have considered the Goncharov game as part of their interest or activities! And yet I find that in all these different ways there is a united sensibility: everyone loves the idea of “what if”, and that is worldbuilding’s alluring elixir. Make-believe is, I would argue, the human pastime, and one of its faces is to pretend the world around us is not as it is, or was, or to imagine what it might be. Changing stories to suit our needs is of course as old as stories themselves; only a world so driven by marketing and copyright control as our modern one would conceive of such a thing as “canon” in fiction. Equally old are tales of when the world was different: an age of gods or dreams or a fairyland just beyond the hills.

In a sense, worldbuilding is really just another kind of mask-play, but instead of putting the mask on ourselves we put it on everyone else. How funny, we think, for us to remain the same but everything else to be different. That must be why the people here are so strange. Worldbuilding is admitting that much of who we are is because of the mask we wear of our environment. It is understanding that we might be someone else in another world. It is embodying the Other, which is why roleplaying games particularly and games in general are so linked to it.

All of which leads me to the other reason this book came to exist: worldbuilding often is represented as something that is very mechanical rather than playful. Breaking the rules of physics, going against what is “believable” in history, violating popular assumptions of human behaviour or failing to consider every possible consequence of a decision are often seen as a reason for a world to be weak, poorly formed or to have outright failed. There is of course good and bad worldbuilding, but we have grown too fond of worldbuilding as an exercise in accuracy and establishing one’s mastery over the subject matter. Criticising worldbuilding is plagued by the same bugbear. Cohesiveness, comprehensiveness and consistency are key cornerstones of the artform but that is not the same as saying one must respect the laws of physics. Tex Avery, the great animator of the Road Runner cartoons, was a phenomenal worldbuilder and his disregard for the laws of physics is a key part of his genius. We might not think of Tex Avery as a worldbuilder; that is a big mistake. Hopefully, this book can do something to amend this.

More expansively, though, I would like to perform a small course correction to the field. Worldbuilding should never be allowed to become mechanical, or dull, or driven solely by our modern ideas of historiography and a clinical scientific narrowness. Such impulses have made folks afraid to worldbuild lest they be mocked. And cautious worldbuilding is a terrible mistake. Worldbuilding is the art of absolute inversion and even subversion. It should be wild and free. It should be imaginative and boundless. More importantly – most importantly – it should be fun.

You can even think of it a bit like a game.

Notes for the Reader

Worldbuilding is a neologism; its correct form in English is not yet established. Sometimes it is two words or one word with a hyphen. We have decided herein to make it one word without a hyphen.

The first ten chapters of this book were originally written for a blog series for the Indie Game Developers Network website (https://www.igdnonline.com/blog). Those chapters have been substantially modified and expanded for this book.

This book is written for an intended audience of game designers, and it is assumed they are familiar with a wide collection of games as well as related media and elements of pop culture that intersect with gaming and gamer culture. That said, as subcultures become increasingly deep and siloed and general “nerd” culture becomes an ever-larger array of non-overlapping hobbies, it may be important to provide some definitions. Note that these are not complete or exhausting definitions, and there are increasingly games being made that crossover between these categories.

Board Game/Tabletop Game

A board game or tabletop game is a game played competitively or cooperatively by one or more players. They follow the rules, using the pieces provided as instructed, to try to achieve a goal. There is typically some element of luck and some amount of strategy or choice, but some games have no luck and some children’s games have no choices. Tabletop games include card games, party games, abstract games, strategy games, euro games, deduction games and thematic games. Examples include Monopoly, Catan, Scrabble, Pandemic, Magic: The Gathering, Wingspan and Star Wars: Outer Rim.

In some cases, the term tabletop game is used to include board games, wargames and roleplaying games.

Wargame

A wargame is played competitively usually by two players playing in direct opposition. Each player fields an army of figures, with the rules determining the permitted composition and size of the armies. Like collectible card games, it is often played in tournaments. Examples include Warhammer Fantasy Battles, Warhammer 40,000, Infinity, Undaunted, Bolt Action and Star Wars: Legion.

Roleplaying Game/Tabletop Roleplaying Game (RPG/TTRPG)

A roleplaying game has some of the elements of a wargame in that players spend resources to build something with a tactical advantage but in this case they only create a single figure, called their character. It also has elements of a shared writing exercise or improvised theatre. One player will act as a storyteller and rules administrator, presenting the world that the characters encounter and the adjudicating how they interact with that world. The other players embody their characters, acting perhaps as their characters might choose to. Some games have more complex rules and focus more on tactical decisions to defeat opponents in the world, and others focus more on the shared writing or improvised dramatics. In some cases, the players dress in costumes and use simple sets and props to blend the hobby with historical recreation: this is known as Live Action Roleplay or LARP. Roleplaying games are not played to “win” although the storytelling player ostensibly sets obstacles in front of the players. Examples include Dungeons & Dragons, Good Society, Blades in the Dark, Unknown Armies, Wanderhome and Star Wars: Edge of Empire.

In particular in this book we will look at the worlds that appear in Dungeons & Dragons. Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and the various RPGs that use the Warhammer 40,000 setting. D&D was first designed by Gray Gygax and Dave Arneson and was published in 1974; various settings have been published for the game, including Greyhawk, Blackmoor, Forgotten Realms and Krynn. The settings of Warhammer Fantasy and Warhammer 40,000, (a science-fiction setting) appear in the various Warhammer games from Games Workshop. The fantasy world first appeared in Warhammer Fantasy Battle by Ansell, Priestley and Halliwell, released in 1983. The first appearance of the Warhammer 40,000 setting was in Rogue Trader (Rick Priestley, 1987).

Digital/Computer Game

A digital or computer game may share many mechanics with a tabletop game but a computer terminal or electronic device is required to play them. This a large genre, including arcade games such as Pacman, phone games like Farmville, console games like Breath of the Wild and PC games like Star Wars Eclipse. A popular computer game genre includes the roleplaying game, but these games are not identical to tabletop roleplaying games, despite being designed to emulate the latter. They also evolved into the MMORPG – the massive multiplayer online roleplaying game, which again shares a great deal of concepts and mechanics with tabletop roleplaying but is also its own genre. The most famous of these is World of Warcraft.

Digital games of almost every genre are now expected to have both deep, immersive and complex worldbuilding as well as complex, interweaving branching narratives where player choice matters and often ethical dilemmas are presented. These kinds of games are often built around adventure games or puzzle games where puzzle solving is the primary mechanic, shooter gamers where combat is the primary mechanic, driving simulations, exploration to find and collect resources, base-building or force-building simulations that are about resource allocation and efficient tactical advancement or, increasingly, all of these, concurrent or consecutive. All of these typically involve both an open world that is free to be explored with every area and every character accessible at almost all times, as well as the aforementioned threaded narratives. Thus when it comes to modern popular digital gaming, there is no genre that does not demand worldbuilding and storytelling.

For the most part, this book will concentrate on tabletop games, with the definition that this includes board games, roleplaying games and wargames. That said, game design is a field that transcends the technology and media used in the games and all kinds of game designers will hopefully find this book useful.

Other Media

Throughout this book I will refer to a few of the “worlds” currently dominating popular media. In particular:

– Star Wars, first appearing in the film of the same name in 1977, written and directed by George Lucas

– Star Trek, first appearing in the TV show of the same name, in 1966, primarily created by Gene Roddenberry

– Dune, first appearing in the book of the same name in 1965 by Frank Herbert

– The Marvel and DC superhero universes, first appearing in comic books beginning in the 1940s and 1930s, respectively

Expansive knowledge of these worlds will not be assumed in the reader but passing familiarity with their tropes and forms will be beneficial.

How to Use This Book

This book is made up of thirty-seven chapters broken into three sections. The first section describes the core foundations and techniques of good worldbuilding. The second section provides the practical steps needed to start building a world and laying down its foundations. The third section looks at how to build on those foundations, adding in elements once you have begun, and then collate and collect this information for the player or reader.

Each chapter is designed to be short and easily digested. In this way, the reader can work through a chapter in a short sitting, doing a little learning once a day or once a week as they prefer. Alternatively, you can open this book to any random chapter to provide a standalone piece of worldbuilding advice that can act as an inspiration, prompt or challenge for a world you are currently building. This hopefully may break through a creative block, solve a design problem or provide a new angle of approach or new font of ideas, whether you are constructing a brand-new world or expanding or enlivening a familiar one.

Each chapter also comes with two exercises: one for those who are working through each chapter one by one (titled On a Quest) and one for those browsing through (titled Stopping By).

Note

In August 2020 a comedic post by “zootycoon” on the platform tumblr presented a scenario where his off-brand boots had replaced the imitated brand logo with some random words that suggested a film called Goncharov, “presented by Martin Scorsese”. Further posters suggested the movie was real and speculated on its nature – that it was a gangster film, set in Russia, released in1971. In November 2022 this post went viral on tumblr leading to a mass posting of information about the movie, all delivered “in-character” by folks who claimed to have seen it. Posters and images were produced and the community began to organise systems to keep track of what was being established about the film. The trend spread to Twitter and Facebook and then to celebrity posters; eventually Scorsese himself appeared on TikTok saying he made the film. Eventually the meme was so popular and engaged with so earnestly (and so accurate in simulating how film buffs act and talk about films they love) that many believed the film was real. Goncharov could be considered an impromptu and improvised alternative-reality game, acted out in real time.

I General Principles

CHAPTER 1 Worlds Must Be Built to Purpose

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-2

WE LIVE IN AN age filled with popular culture and that culture is increasingly dominated by what we call genre fiction or speculative fiction, an umbrella term that includes genres like action, horror, romance, fantasy, superheroes and science fiction. The last three have – to the amazement of their once isolated fans – come to be cultural touchstones of the 21st century. Creators like Stan Lee, George Lucas, Gene Roddenberry and Isaac Asimov have as much effect on our modern world as any superstars of music or film, and perhaps none more so than J. R. R. Tolkien and Gary Gygax.

Before Tolkien, worldbuilding didn’t exist in media as we know it, and afterwards it was forever defined by his work. Contemporaneous fantasy works had worlds – places like Narnia, Wonderland and Never-Never Land – but they didn’t see a need to follow any particular sense of rules. Science fiction at the same time was also diverging into “soft” and “hard” styles, with the latter also requiring rigid scientific discipline in both its themes and its material. There was no such standard in fantasy however until Tolkien came along. As a professor of the English language, he took to building first a believable elven language and then developed a half- parody ancient history of a world that would create such a language. Having had some success with his children’s tale of The Hobbit, he decided to build a story around that history and call it The Lord of the Rings. He meant it to be six books; his editors insisted it be bundled into the three hefty tomes we now recognise. That was also relatively new to the book trade, where paperbacks were still thin pulp things not far removed from the “penny dreadfuls” that preceded them in the Victorian age. Everything about this was entirely sui generis – a whole new way of creating fiction.

Fantasy was swift to adapt. Tolkien inspired likely thousands of imitators to reach for typewriters; hundreds of works would see print in the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s. Pulp heroes like Conan enjoyed a new resurgence, too, and comics joined prose in the area with Prince Valiant being a particular hit. At the same time, led by the success of historical epics like The Vikings and Ben Hur, Hollywood was having a love affair with medieval times, and Camelot was dominating stage and screen. The second part of the puzzle came when Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson released their game Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. The game had evolved in the late sixties from Gygax’s medieval warfare system called Chainmail. The wargaming scene had been equally transformed by the arrival of The Lord of the Rings, with many players keen to add fantasy elements to medieval rules. With little in Tolkien’s books on the nature of the actual composition or tactics of the armies of middle earth, Chainmail’s focus on individual heroes was the perfect fit to recreate the adventures of small band of heroes. The final piece of the puzzle was another new wargaming trend where an independent player or referee would have information about the map neither player had, and could act as a simulation for the fog of war, releasing information only when it became known to that player’s troops.

At first, roleplaying games were really just combat oriented, focussing on a small group of characters going into a dungeon and matching their tactical skills with whatever lay inside. However an emergent need occurred when players wanted to ask what lay beyond the dungeon. This shifted play away from pure tactical exploration to one of simulation and exploration. This was inspired again by wargames that modelled troop movement and logistics, where how far someone might move across terrain and what they might find in certain areas were modelled. Dungeons & Dragons, being fantasy, needed terrain guides. Lacking the licence for The Lord of the Rings, Gygax developed the world of Greyhawk while Arnseon developed Blackmoor. It was here that modern worldbuilding was truly born, because now the fictional world existed separately from the art or narrative it was built for. Much like the theological idea of God as a watchmaker, the world could be wound up and run without the need of a protagonist or an author.

Robert Jordan would later describe this approach to fantasy as writing historical fiction, only for places that didn’t exist. Like historical fiction, what mattered as much as the quality of the language, the complexities of the plot and the depth of the characters was the sophistication of the world and the acumen visible in the crafting of its history. This suggested that the world was existing outside or beyond the fiction itself and mattering outside that story. Tolkien had written several appendices to his books that were a kind of joke, a gentle mockery of the form of historiography by mimicking its application to an entirely fictional concept. With Dungeons & Dragons came the idea of reading these histories and geographies without any fiction whatsoever. The world existed on its own, for its own sake, for its own purposes.¹

This is the world we now live in. Worldbuilding is considered a separate task and a separate occupation. We might imagine the worldbuilder like a model maker: slowly, painstakingly, constructing a kind of imaginary terrarium. Later it will be possible for games, stories, media products, imaginary plays and so forth to be drawn from this source, but the world sits perfectly under glass, in a vacuum, fully constructed ex nihilo and in toto. From this ur-text, the world may be interpreted, devised, developed and represented, but it is at birth complete, and everything stems from this.

This fact stands to prove my title wrong. So does the fact that the popular worlds of our time are easily remodelled to suit prose, comics, films, radio plays, TV shows, board games, roleplaying games, wargames, computer games, puzzles and even musicals like Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark. The world clearly does not care about the media it is attached to. And yet, Star Wars the world would never have existed if Star Wars the film hadn’t been captivating. We know much of the original script of the film was laden down with too much exposition, scene-setting and backstory and saved in the edit by editor Marcia Lucas. Audiences tend to over-estimate how much they love a world and how much they loved reading about Sam defeating Shelob and Strider fighting Ringwraiths.² A world doesn’t actually exist under glass, except inside the creator’s head: it must be presented to an audience, and if that doesn’t work, the world won’t work. The means of communication is in fact the most important part, and the world needs to work to support that, not exist despite it, which means the world needs to be built for that purpose.

At the same time that Gygax and Arneson were developing their worlds for Dungeons & Dragons, Greg Stafford was developing the world of Glorantha. This bronze-age world was built in part to be the setting of the board game White Bear and Red Moon but was already an ongoing obsession of Stafford. It eventually became the setting for the Runequest roleplaying game, seeing in D&D that roleplaying games could be a place to put the idea of a world built just for itself. Much like Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, Glorantha was a world that felt rich, detailed and “self-standing”, beyond the narratives and game instances that appear within it. Although it has supported some successful games, its “overdevelopment” past that need has, I would argue, led it to be less successful. Players sometimes report that they do not feel important or significant compared to the vast history of the world of Glorantha and find it intimidating to learn and become immersed in. As a player remarked to a friend of mine: “Glorantha exists; my players are just passing through”.

A similar case lies in the world of Tekumel. M. A. R. Barker developed this world whole cloth when he was studying and immersing himself in Middle Eastern and central Asian cultures. Tekumel filled vast notebooks with its geography, history and, again, language, long before Barker thought it could be “for” anything. Then by sheer chance he stumbled onto a very early version of D&D and it seemed like these world-simulation games were the perfect fit. But Tekumel as a game was barely played when it came out and is remembered primarily for its nigh-unplayability. It was said only Barker could really run the game, because only Barker really understood the world and how to present it. It couldn’t be put into anything else successfully, and his attempts at novels also failed. Barker may be the one person who really did build a world in a bottle and because it had no purpose, it never became anything else but a world for itself.

An even earlier example (and also arguably the first roleplaying game) is the paracosm³ known as Glass Town. This was a world developed by the Brontë siblings as children, as a world to play pretend in, supported by important characters, maps, histories and later fiction and in-world texts. Although the children made extensive written records, the purpose of Glass Town was play and nothing was really made of it for an outside audience. It succeeded immensely at this goal of being a place to play and provides little help for anyone trying to use it for something else. Had it been designed for an audience to read about, it may have looked very different as a world, not just as a series of documents.

It is perfectly fine for a world to exist just for itself, to be nothing but notebooks and ideas, for no other purpose but to amuse ourselves or a co-designer, offering no other interest beyond marvelling at its elements or techniques. But if you are reading this book, I assume you want to do more than that. You want your game to reveal your world and your world to illuminate your game. The simple rule then is to make sure your game is designed to work with, through and for your game. If you are working with a world that exists already, then the way you use, depict and develop the world should also be based around that purpose. A large part of that development is adjusting to fit the new medium – and that is more worldbuilding. Identifying the parts of the world that need to be modified, highlighted or expressed differently or given more or less focus: that is also part of worldbuilding. Worldbuilding is not the same as “world-communicating” but at the same time the two cannot be separated and are done in concert. If your world has no purpose, it will never be seen.

It may seem that putting this purpose first will make your world at risk of being less realistic, deep, rich or developed. In fact, it will likely be more of those things than otherwise, because designing for purpose will put those things on display. What’s more, more people will experience, enjoy and appreciate the world because it will be designed for them to have a pathway to do it. You will also have a better pathway to build your world and your game. Purpose doesn’t just underlie the initial blueprints or concept of your world, but every single part of its inspiration and development. Every part of your game design will be connected to worldbuilding and your world to your game, each illuminating and fuelling the other, each strengthening and reinforcing each other.

That’s the lesson hiding inside this: worldbuilding, if done right, never really ends. Worlds don’t exist under glass, inviolate and unchanging. Nor should your world be finished and perfectly established before you design your game. Some things might be set in stone but that doesn’t mean the world isn’t constantly being developed, added to and pruned back where needed. Worldbuilding is a lot like discovery in our own world: rarely do our understandings completely change or invert; rather our understanding and scholarship are additive. A consequence of our modern idea of worlds as brands means we have been conditioned to total familiarity: the audience tends to think that their worlds must never change. A designer cannot make the same mistake. Consistency matters, unity of theme matters, a sense of setting identity matters, but change is inevitable – and should be welcomed. Canon is for schoolchildren; we are gods, and our worlds are alive, and living things and great art are always changing.

So what is the purpose of your game? And what role does the world play in achieving that purpose? Note that this also raises another question, hiding inside it: how does a setting achieve the goals of a game? What indeed is the point of having a world in a game at all? Should you just keep your game abstract and avoid all the trouble?

We will talk about that in the next chapter.

On a Quest

If you’re reading this book, I assume you have a game in mind that you want to add a world to. If you don’t, or you haven’t worked out the details of the game, try to figure out what kind of game it is. Start with the type: is it digital or tabletop? Is it a roleplaying or story-driven game or something with strategy? Is it collaborative or competitive? Is it solo or multiplayer? Does it use cards, dice or a board? Is it a platformer or an adventure game or a shooter? Can you list the game “stats” or “descriptors” it might have if it was categorised in a library? Finally, what kind of experience do you hope it delivers? Is it immersive? A difficult grind? A mental puzzle? Fiercely cutthroat? Try to turn all of this into a series of dot points or short sentences, in fifty words or less. This is your “game design blueprint” and it will give you a path to building your game. Once you have that, you can then think about how a setting might express each of those elements. Put your game design blueprint down on paper and put it up somewhere you can see it all the time. It will help you make your setting choices and your game design choices. If you can see ways the world will connect to these elements, add them to the document.

Stopping By

Whatever your original intent, you might have become disconnected from it. You may be trying to solve a problem with the world or answer a question about what to include or remove. Step away from the world and go back to your purpose. What is the game trying to do? Look at the above description of the game design blueprint and if you don’t have one, make one, and see how the setting questions relate to those goals. If this is about a specific element of a game, forget everything else and focus on what that mechanic does or needs to do. Don’t think about anything else except how the setting can communicate or express that mechanic. Or how might a mechanic express that part of the setting. Putting things into the context of purpose can help you see exactly what is needed.

Notes

Tolkien coined a word for the maps and histories and logic of underlying worlds for a creative work as the artform of subcreation. What happened with his work though and with D&D was the subcreation that became the creation itself.

The game designer John Wick once put it this way: “You don’t love (the fantasy setting) Dragonlance, you cried when (major character) Sturm died”.

The term paracosm was coined by Ben Vincent who was part of a study conducted by Robert Silvey in 1976 on childhood make-believe. These created cosmoses are often deep and rigidly defined by children and exist for the purpose of playing out roles and ideas in a safe environment. Although they are often shared across children, they are just as often inexplicable to those who are outside of them because they do not exist to be communicated to others.

CHAPTER 2 Setting Exists to Communicate Mechanics

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-3

IN THE JARGON OF wargames they call setting information “fluff”. The opposite is “crunch”. The sense is that crunch contains the “actual” rules. It is crunch that tells you what the unit does: how many points it costs to add to your army, how far it can move, how it attacks and how it defends. The rulebook also comes with the fluff, also known as the “flavour text”: the fiction, the art and the expository text explaining the unit, and the faction and world to which it might belong. Crunch can be “too crunchy” or “too heavy” for some, meaning the game is complicated, complex or difficult to process. Less crunchy rules are “lighter”: easier to understand, less complicated, less complex. Fluff, by allusion, is something that is also light; something that doesn’t really matter.

Sometimes players will get a sense that fluff and crunch don’t quite match. There are jokes in the Warhammer 40,000 player subculture that much of the fluff is actually in-world propaganda, explaining why the two don’t match. There’s even unofficial rules modifications designed to make the two correspond better. That on its own proves that fluff is important! In this case the cognitive dissonance that occurs between the two is so frustrating players have rewritten the rules to match. And note that they did not rewrite the fluff. It is somehow far more sacred. We seem to have concluded that the world written in the text is true, absolutely so, and the rules only exist to simulate it, without ever thinking that it could just as easily be the other way around.

Sometimes, of course, we do change the fluff: we explain that in chess, the castles used to be chariots. We tell stories about the lenient jails and even more lenient beauty pageants in the world of Monopoly. But setting tends to be more inviolate and in either case we expect the two things to match up. Every child who has learned chess has wondered why the holy men move diagonally. We draw a clear line on the board and label one side “JUST VISITING” because we need to explain that a player piece on that space isn’t in jail. Providing an in-world explanation for it makes it not just clearer but somehow more fun. Fluff is a demonstrably core part of all but the most abstract games. A key part, a central pillar, a load-bearing concept. Most importantly, fluff controls how we see, learn, comprehend and internalise mechanics. Robin Laws, the great RPG designer, put it this way: “fluff ain’t so fluffy”.

Fluff really drives every part of our gaming experience. It would be easy to recreate the rules of Warhammer 40,000 with simple chits showing only numbers, calling the units simply functional names like “heavy ranged attack”. But if we did that, it would have none of the sense of the unfolding narrative. By making it about elves with laser guns fighting a last stand for the ashes of their fathers and the temples of their gods, the dice rolls feel different. If it didn’t, we wouldn’t keep wanting these things in our games.

Now, that’s not to say that even abstract concepts don’t gain meaning on their own, through game mechanics. Studies have shown that grouping people into two arbitrary groups instantly makes people align with the name of the group or any perceived values they are told the group has. Once you add game mechanics to this, the group membership and its achievements gain even more emotional importance. Just needing to put a ball in a goal guarded by a Blue player is enough for a Red player to be filled with narrative meaning – the Blue player must be stopped, and the Red player must succeed in destroying them. And the fans, if anything, are even more invested in this narrative. To a Red fan, the Red’s struggle is all-consuming, their success and failure suddenly life and death, though they may share nothing else in common with Red whatsoever.

This is why games and setting go together so perfectly. Games naturally create emotions and narratives within us, making things matter more than they should. You can tell someone they need a six to win – to win no prize at all – and their emotions suddenly explode around the outcome of a simple random die roll. We love stories for a similar reason: fictional things have incredible emotional weight. It’s different to how we care about rolling a six but has an equally powerful grip on us. Games naturally tell stories on top of their emotional power because as humans we add story to everything. Adding actual narrative to games at the design level brings games to an even more heightened experience. In turn, being able to add the thrill of games to stories makes them more intense. In a movie or a novel, we generally know, thanks to experience with genre tropes and story formats, how a scene will play out: even when suspense is crafted it can feel synthetic. But in a game, the suspense is real because we really do not know what the dice will roll.

Setting gives heightened meaning to mechanics, and mechanics provide great power to themes. There is a viral internet image of a post on the platform X (nee Twitter) from user @MissBtheThird that provides a perfect succinct example. It reads:

Giving my classroom gluesticks human names has been revolutionary. Does a student care if a gluestick goes missing? No! Do they care if DEREK the gluestick has not been returned? ABSOLUTELY. It’s like a manhunt until Derek has been returned to his rightful spot.

If you would like a more developed example, Brenda Romero’s game Train puts a simple abstract concept of moving blocks efficiently on train lines into a vastly different context by suggesting the puzzle is about moving German citizens into concentration camps.

But setting doesn’t just provide a general meaning to outcomes. It also explains what mechanics and pieces do and teaches us how to use them. The Marvel Snap (Second Dinner, 2022) mobile game has an Uncle Ben card. If an effect destroys it, you instantly get to put Spider-Man into your hand. If you know anything about the Marvel comic character Spider-Man you will know that his origin story involves the death of his Uncle Ben. This provides instantaneous powerful context to that rule. It even makes the rule seem “natural” – of course that’s what an Uncle Ben card would do. Without even thinking about it consciously, you have internalised and remembered the mechanic, and the card has shown its value, making you want to add this card to a Spider-Man deck. I do literally mean that this happens at a level below our conscious thought, because that’s how stories get to us. They create what seems natural, and they determine how we see the world, before thought kicks in.

This connection would persist even if there wasn’t a perfect marriage between the mechanic and the meaning of it. Uncle Ben could give Spider-Man the ability to deal more damage and we would still have a strong connection with the card. But if there is a large enough discordance between the two elements it stops working and pulls us out of the game. A card representing Uncle Ben that made Spider-Man weaker would not work. Players would look at it and want an explanation and be less likely to use it, even if the card was tactically strong. If the card did find a lot of use, it is likely the players would rename it in the jargon. A fig-leaf term would be invented in the subculture to make it make sense. And someone might make a fan card that had a more “correct” mechanic for it or different setting explanation.

Another great example of this intuitive understanding through story is the Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993) card Akroan Horse. Based on the Trojan Horse of Greek legend, when you play this card your opponent gets control of it automatically, but each turn it pours warriors back into the play area of the person who initially played the horse, ready to attack said opponent. During the development cycle of this product, the Akroan setting was developed to be more lion-focussed, so the card was changed to be an Akroan Lion. Designers found that all of a sudden none of the playtesters understood what the card was for. They found it confusing and dismissed it as useless. People both instinctively and thoughtfully left it out of their decks. The designers returned the card to being a horse – despite having already commissioned art for the leonine version – to restore understanding. This is not an outlier; Magic: The Gathering in general has always been a game that has worked hard to ensure its cards use their name and art and occasionally flavour text to reveal intent. Collectible Card Games have the luxury (and expense) of producing individual art for every single card, and this means they can tailor that art precisely to intentions, down to tiny Easter eggs in the background and subtle uses of colour palettes.

In short, setting exists to not just give meaning to mechanics in play but to make those mechanics as intuitive as possible. It lets us understand them on an instinctual level, and an emotional one, which makes them stick in our memory longer and appear more meaningful. This is a symbiotic relationship: it is the mechanics that confirm that emotional meaning with something that feels “correct”. The two things work hand in glove. Sometimes a perfect marriage between meaning and mechanic can be sublime, but even if there is just a general parallel, the effect is potent.

And so far we’ve only talked about when the two are right next to each other, working in concert on a specific rule, action or piece. Fluff, unlike crunch, is everywhere. It’s in every part of the game, from the box cover art and title to the shape and feel of the pieces, to the presentation of the board, card and text, even the fonts and the symbols. All of this is preparing us for the experience of the game and shaping how we understand it. We also know that human concentration and cognition improve when we look at pleasing or exciting images. Fluff is literally preparing our brain to learn well and play better.

You can almost think of the mechanics as the blade and the fluff as the handle: it is the tool by which we apply them. In this sense, fluff is a “mechanic”, in that it is part of what makes a game work.¹ The two disciplines are so connected that even if you only want to make abstract games, it is worthwhile, as a game designer to learn to build worlds as well. And to build them well.

On a Quest

Previously we looked at describing your game as a whole. Now let’s zoom right in on a specific mechanic or game piece: a card, a character, an action, a rule. How is that element represented? It might already exist to represent something, such as a movement rating representing how far an item can move on the imaginary battlefield that is being represented. If the ludeme (the rule governing how the concept works or interacts) represents a thing, how strong is the connection? How vividly is it represented? Are there instances where the connection is weak or could be shown better in a name or in art? If there isn’t an existing parallel, the mechanic just exists for gaming reasons, is there a way to explain it? Even if it feels tacked on? You might not use the explanation in the final game, but getting used to thinking of how to connect meaning to mechanics (and spot places where they don’t connect) is a vital skill.

Stopping By

Find something in your game (or any game you have handy) where a mechanic is a clear representation of something that exists in the real world or the fictional one. Keep the mechanic the same but change what it means. Then keep the meaning the same but find a completely different mechanic to simulate that. Compare how each one feels. Does one choice feel more emotionally resonant, or more meaningful, or more representative than the other or just more familiar to other games? What games use different mechanics to model those ideas, or the same mechanics for different ideas?

Note

Mechanic is not a well-defined term. Ludeme is not used often but is well-defined: it describes the operating elements that describe or dictate how we play, as opposed to the physical elements that we play with. The Rook is a chess piece represented by a castle; its ludeme is that it moves in a rectilinear fashion until it captures or meets another piece. Similarly games are often said to have theme rather than setting; neither term is well-defined as yet.

CHAPTER 3 Worlds and Games Are Built on Narratives

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-4

TO PARAPHRASE MARK TWAIN: “Let’s say you are a game designer, and let’s say you are a storyteller – but I repeat myself”. Games create stories through play. Not always very good stories, but there is always a narrative, even in the most random of paths. Humans will make one – it’s a thing we’re very good at. We can make a story out of anything. And because emotions get involved, games are great fuel for story-making. And more: worlds not only create stories but are also built out of them.

Before we go any further, however, we need to be careful about defining what we mean by a story. Story can be a hotly debated term if you’re in the literature crowd. Perhaps instead we should use the word narrative. We will define a narrative as an account or telling of a series of related events or experiences. A narrative can be either fiction or non-fiction, and this is where we can get into the weeds, because “story” can also be used to describe a work of fiction, and that story might not have a narrative (or be said to be non-narrative in style); it certainly might have more than one narrative and definitely is composed of more than just narrative. Billions of words have been written on the nature of story and how to tell them, going back to Aristotle, and that’s certainly something worth reading for any worldbuilder, as you’ll see.

Aristotle saw drama (which in his day only occurred on stage or from the mouths of storytellers) as consisting of six elements, which he ranked (in order of importance) as plot, character, thought (the ideas of the work), dialogue, music and spectacle. He ranks plot as key, while also saying that plot contains many narratives. For Aristotle, the plot is the sequence of events or incidents that make up the action of the story, but he separates that from the story that is told by those incidents. Aristotle called them mythos and praxis. Today we often call these the diegesis and the exegesis.¹ If we look at perhaps the most famous Greek play of Oedipus the King, the plot being shown (the mythos) is Oedipus discovering the truth about his past and the story being revealed (the praxis) is the connected narratives of his past, his mother/wife’s past and his father’s past. (Today, of course, we often use mythos as another word for setting, such as the Cthulhu Mythos. Just to be extra confusing.)

For our purposes we will go with Aristotle and take narrative as our word. A narrative is a sequence of related events that a story might tell or reveal. Narratives can then exist not only in a story but also in a world. The movie Return of the Jedi (Richard Marquand, 1983) tells the story of Luke confronting his father and explains the narratives of father and son; it is set within the world of Star Wars. When I refer to the narrative or narratives that are part of the Star Wars universe, I am not talking about the plot of any film or book, however.

Narrative is a good word because it is not bound to fiction or prose: there is narrative poetry, narrative history, narrative songs and so forth. Games produce narrative because they cannot do otherwise: they are a series of connected events leading, typically, to a conclusion. To please Aristotle and his definitions, games contain discovery: a game cannot be known until it is played.² Also to please Aristotle, they require change: at the start of the game there is a state that becomes changed through action into a resolution; typically the characters are equally placed and then encounter good or bad fortune depending on random fate and the choices they make. Games contain moments of suspense about the unknown (what will I roll on the dice?) and release of that suspense when things become known (Arrgh! I rolled a one!). They contain conflict between parties or goals, and that conflict creates tension which, like suspension, rises and falls, builds and resolves. This tension, just as Aristotle would wish, produces pity or fear. In a non-interactive art form like prose, this tension would be created by the authors and felt by the audience but in the case of games – and only in games – the audience and the authors can be the same people. Games, like narratives, present stakes, both small and intermediary and large and conclusive.

Games, like classic narratives, are driven by conflicts. There has to be a goal that the players want to achieve, either collectively or cooperatively, and there has to be a barrier stopping them from doing so instantly and easily. Conflict doesn’t have to mean direct confrontation or antagonism, of course. The conflict in chess is between two equally matched armies trying to destroy each other but the conflict in Monopoly is a tug of war to get the best properties for the least cost, until everyone else is broke. The conflict arises because everyone else wants to do that too (conflict from the players), and you can’t just take any property you want (conflict from the rules) until you land on them or others land on yours (conflict from the randomness of fate). I call these the “Three Voices” of a game.

Worlds don’t have to have narratives. Like some stories, some fiction, some art, they can just be purely representative. An example might be the strange landscapes drawn by M. C. Escher or William Blake. But given how we want our worlds to be used in games, and how games are full of narrative, it makes sense to build worlds that do. Worlds with stories are always better suited to host games and engage players.

Worlds can, of course, be a collection of many narratives; sometimes they are built just like that, with each new story adding more and more to the world. Each new Star Wars film added another plot with more narratives. But whether built via anthology or not, worlds that last any amount of time typically have a big, overarching narrative, what we might call a prime narrative. Again, they may have more than one of these too. Some of these are expressed through plot and plot structure; others through metaphor or theme. A prime narrative of the Cthulhu Mythos is that knowledge and discovery inevitably lead us not to enlightenment and empowerment but madness and despair: that would be a prime narrative around theme. A prime narrative of plot in the Cthulhu Mythos might be more along the lines of “never visit a small town in New England” or “don’t let your relatives leave you anything in their will”.

Since most worlds of the day come from popular fiction, we really can’t separate them from their prime narratives. It’s hard to think of the Star Wars setting without thinking of the narrative of Luke and Vader, of Vader falling and being redeemed by his son. That narrative isn’t just part of the world but the very heart of it. That is not the only narrative, of course, but it is so much a part of the world that it affects all the others. In the same way that being “science fiction/set in space”³ drives so much of all the other choices in the world, the story of falling to evil and being redeemed drives many other story choices. These tend to fall into two categories, and those two you could call the prime narratives of the setting. The first is the external narrative: the Empire and/or the Dark Side (or its antecedents or successors) will always rise and engage in cruelty and oppression and good people must cling to goodness, the Light Side, and rebel against the Empire. The second narrative is the internal one: they are tales about identity and moral choice, of the characters choosing their allegiance and their moral paths. That’s seen not only in Luke choosing his own destiny rather than the one he is told is fated for him, but also in Lando and Han realising they can be more than just scoundrels and believe in more than just greed.

You may think that “the good guys fight the bad guys” is so fundamental that it doesn’t really count as a narrative, but not all worlds use it, and they certainly don’t use it the same way. American narratives in particular tend to have the good embodying values like freedom, independence and rebellion. Western media in general draws its prime narratives from the prime narratives of its cultural, philosophical and psychological touchstones: a sense of an inner struggle between what is quick, easy and seductive, like the Dark Side of the Force, or what involves discipline, sacrifice and surrender is a retread of the Christian narrative of the Bible. Choosing from popular themes like this to build your world makes sense because both the culture and so much other media use them. Your audience will recognise them instantly and relate to them easily. But you’ll also notice that the duality of the Star Wars narratives, internal and external, also makes for good game mechanics by providing easily understood sides. It also means the vast majority of Star Wars games have been either for two players or broken into two teams. The Star Wars universe hasn’t featured a game like, for example, Dune (Eberle, Kittredge and Olotka, 1979), because Star Wars doesn’t have a narrative of many sides engaged in negotiation and betrayal. Star Wars has solved this with the story of the bounty hunters and scoundrels: there is a race to make the most money, but there are only a few of these. The point stands: the narratives you choose will affect the games you make. The games you want to make will affect the narratives you can tell.

The Warhammer Fantasy setting was in part designed so that every faction would have plenty of reasons to attack each other. At certain times, events have called for a different sort of game and narrative, where the sides are grouped into roughly good vs evil sides, and this has not always worked very well because the former narrative is too strong. The Warcraft setting stole many things from Warhammer but when it came to developing the MMORPG, World of Warcraft they drew a clear line between the Alliance and the Horde, so they could have both internecine squabbles and two clearly defined polarities. That let them tell two different types of stories and design two different types of experiences. On the other hand, because they wanted it both ways, the narrative of the two sides set against each other has nothing like the power and resonance it does in the world of Star Wars. Trying to have too many narratives can weaken them all.

Likewise, having a theme too specific or too general can also be a tough balance to make, especially over time. Much of the setting of the Harry Potter books and movies centres around Voldemort and the prequel movies never flourished without his presence. Similarly, when Star Wars insisted on the First Order being a brand-new version of the Empire, some audiences found it frustrating to suggest that the war never ended and something would always take the place of the perpetual bad guy – it felt too general. So they brought back Palpatine to try to make it specific again, but that also ended up feeling repetitive. Finding a way for a narrative to go on forever but continue to feel fresh is extremely difficult in fiction. Batman consistently facing the same criminals over and over again has caused many to wonder (and joke about) why Gotham city has so much recidivism, while the Marvel films increasingly raise the stakes into a multiverse of meaninglessness.

Luckily, games can refight battles over and over again. Games have that advantage. But if you imply (as they sometimes do in Warhammer, for example) that these battles are not refighting the same fight but that each game is a fight which you can write into the history of the world, you better build a long history with a lot of reasons to fight.⁴ If you want characters to make up their own heroes, you don’t want your setting to depend too much on heroes in the established history, lore or narratives. Almost all Star Wars games feature Luke or Vader; Warhammer 40,000 games very rarely feature the actual Emperor of humanity. The prime narrative of the Warhammer 40,000 setting is about space marines fighting back aliens, heretics and chaos, not the Emperor fighting Horus, and that’s deliberately done so the game doesn’t have to be about having those figures at the table. Other miniature games, of course, are all about specific canon characters being available for the players, and their worlds reflect that. The various Marvel wargames are all about picking whomever you want to team up with whomever else, which is of course a prominent theme in Marvel comics. However, that wouldn’t work as well in a cooperative game so those games tend to focus on popular groups from the comics: the Avengers, the X-Men, the Fantastic Four and so on, uniting against a singular threat. That not only keeps the villains in the right place, working against the whole table, but also adds the team building from the world to the shared bonding that comes from cooperative play. Want a free-for-all-brawl? Then it’s fine for Doom to join the Avengers for the day: we don’t need team building in that game.

Therein lies the real lesson here: in most cases, worlds are big enough to have many narratives, and the key is simply finding the one that fits the narrative of your game. Or adapting and tweaking the world and how it is presented to find a new narrative to suit the new game. A great example of that is the setting for the roleplaying game Feng Shui (Robin Laws, 1996) and the card game Shadowfist (Laws and Garcia, 1995). The prime narrative of that setting is that the world is full of key locations and junctions in time that, when controlled, allow you to rule the universe. That is a strong simple narrative: a clear goal that everyone wants, and a clear conflict. In the card game, you play the six major factions of the world vying to control the junctions, perfect for multiplayer fights with unlikely alliances. The roleplaying game has the players take the roles of cops and action heroes (effectively one single faction in the card game) trying to stop all the assorted bad guy factions from ruling the world. With a strong prime narrative, you can make most any kind of sub-narratives that will suit your game design.

As a result of all of this, worldbuilders can benefit greatly from studying literature and the arts of creative writing and building story. This will also help them learn how to build great characters, which in a way every world is. That’s what we’ll look at in the next lesson.

On a Quest

A very simple exercise here: what kind of narrative does your game need? In previous exercises you’ve identified the kind of game you are building: how many players, what kind of mechanics it has and what kind of pieces it uses. Does that suggest a mighty battle between two opposite forces or ideologies? Or a race to control power? Or something else? If you already have a world in mind, can you sum up its narrative? Or one of its narratives?

Stopping By

Let’s assume your world has a narrative in it already. Now try to find a new one. A story you haven’t told yet in that setting; it might be a brand-new prime narrative or it might fold in under the ones you have already. If you can’t think of such a story, not, can you broaden your world somehow to find another point of view? What would the same world look like in another time, place or dimension? Or another genre?

Notes

I’m sure literary theorists and classicists will be angry that I’ve implied that mythos is exactly the same as plot or exactly the same as diegesis. This is what I mean by defining what a story is tricky. If you are angry, please remember I’m trying to sum up an entire discipline of millennia of thought.

There are some wonderful experimental games that don’t fit all the descriptions I’m talking about here. Again, I am generalising for a wide audience. If you want to talk to me about the marvellous edge cases of what a game might be, buy me a drink some time.

Now the Star Wars fans and genre experts are likely angry with me. See the first end note. We will talk about genre expectations more in Chapter 5.

However we also know that any real war is full of a myriad of smaller battles. The wars of our own history are replete enough that wargames are able to imagine any number of small encounters that could have occurred; we just cannot add a new Japanese attack on the US before Pearl Harbour.

CHAPTER 4 Worldbuilding Is Character Building

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-5

IN THE LAST CHAPTER, we talked about how worlds are built on stories. We also talked about how learning to write good stories is a way to learn how to build better worlds. A key skill as a writer is in creating good characters. Likewise a key part in building better worlds is also in building good characters, because worlds are like characters.

I don’t mean that worlds are full of individual characters that need careful creation, although that is true. Nor do I mean making the world as a character for a player to play or embody; I’m not describing a situation where a game master or opponent takes on the role of “the universe” and uses its nature as ways to countermand the actions of other players. I mean they are characters themselves, whether embodied by a person or rules or just as descriptions. The worlds we build don’t walk or talk or fall in love, but they are like a character in many ways. The players and their character avatars within the world will interact with it just like they do with the characters and concepts in that world, and we want those interactions to be consistent, interesting, deep and, well, full of character. Like characters, our worlds are alive too. They are full of variety. They live, they grow, they change, they steal our hearts – and hopefully the hearts of the players too.

There isn’t room in this book to provide a full course on good character design in prose fiction or scriptwriting. The following then is an introduction, neither comprehensive nor exhaustive. This is also just one theory of character design, and it is one drawing on popular modes in Western narratives.

Stephen King remarked that a character is someone who wants something. A character is not just a person, however detailed or “realistic” they may be described or defined. A character is a thing that drives a narrative by the things they want, things which they must act on and reach for and things that force them to take action and change the world around them or change themselves.

Can a world want something? Yes indeed. This want represents how the world is driven by desires and forces that push factions into action and events into motion. What drives the world forwards, towards change or into conflict? What do the factions and characters within it hunger for and dream of and want to turn the world towards? A great crushing evil is a great way to provide a want: that force wants to crush everything; everyone else wants it to stop. You can also reverse this! Many worlds want things to quietly go along as they have been, and there are figures who definitely don’t want this to happen at all. The world of James Bond wants order and British supremacy, and it needs to stop any threats to that. Another classic want is an obsession with a particular product or idea or outcome. Not everyone in the world may want it but enough people with enough power or influence want it bad enough that it is a consuming factor of the world and colours every part of it. The world of Dune is driven by the demand for spice. That want is itself driven by the sheer size of the empire depicted – people want to get places, or the Emperor could not rule. This is also nicely cyclical: the universe is vast so everyone wants spice to travel across it, which requires the Empire to need to control the universe, which means they need to travel. This makes the want impossible to remove, so the stories keep going.

Characters also typically have one or more needs as well as wants. Needs are different from wants and exist in contrast and conflict with them. Wants are visceral, obvious and instigating desires, whereas needs are more subtle, more long term and more reflective; they are often difficult to identify and even harder to act upon. In some narratives, acting on the need is what brings the story to an end or resolves a key conflict. In Dune, everyone wants spice so they can be in control of the universe; what the universe needs is to rid itself of those who wish to remain in power and maintain control. In the world of Star Wars, everyone wants to be able to stand alone: Luke wants to stop being a farmer and be a war hero, Han wants to make money and get out of debt and Lando wants the Empire to leave his station alone. But what they need is to work together against the Empire. The want is about security, of not being beholden to someone, and the key mistake the characters in both Star Wars and Dune keep making is trading one controlling force for another. The need requires letting go of the want, which creates a great prime narrative, because we can all understand how hard it is to let go of the want.

The mistake the characters in Star Wars and Dune keep making is something that in characters is called the “great folly”. Other times it is the thing driving those mistakes that is focussed on, called a fatal flaw or a great wound. These aren’t quite the same: the fatal flaw typically cannot be healed (making the story tragic), but the wound can (making the story fantastic). Often, the wound is a reversal of the need or the need is that the wound must be healed; chasing after the want can be the folly. You could call then the folly of Star Wars and Dune being the lust for power; the wound being the way that their past in a cruel world made them feel weak or choose immorality. The wound doesn’t need to be so entwined with the need or want, though. In the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) (at least for the first ten years), the heroes want to be heroes in the sense of being feted and championed or to have some sense of control over their lives and typically what they need is to grow up and swallow their pride and be humble enough to surrender some control and work together. But their great wound that most of the heroes carried was the guilt and shame over their past actions and the damage they caused – the “red in the ledger” as Black Widow called it.

When every character has these themes, then the follies, flaws and wounds belong to the whole narrative and the whole world. It is represented not only in each individual character but also in the ongoing themes, structures and background. The world in the MCU needs heroes to believe in and wants the villains punched in the face but carries a wound of past secrets and covered-up crimes, and it wants things to carry on as normal. Belief in a better world comes at the cost of confronting and healing that wound. Everyone in Star Wars is fighting the same battle between individual safety and greater sacrifice, and so are the institutions and even the motifs. Moisture farming in a desert is an echo of survival against oppression. Making two bumbling droids the focus of the first story echoes the importance of the small rebellions of the everyday people. The prejudice against droids echoes insular thinking against the face of the old enemy while ignoring the fact that the war was driven by unseen overlords.

Stories often end when the characters discover that their wants are wrong, realise what they truly need instead and heal the great wound or overcome their great folly. That can be dangerous for a world, if we want to keep on telling stories! Luckily humans are slow learners and we like characters who are the same. We love telling the same stories over and over too. We also don’t want our game worlds to have easy ends that shut down the narrative. Or worlds that never learn anything: a character that just cannot seem to grow up past a problem becomes frustrating and boring to the audience. We talked about the problem of the recurring Empire in Star Wars in the last chapter; after a while the audience simply cannot believe that Jessica Fletcher of Murder, She Wrote runs into so many suspicious murders. The trick is to find a story with a wound that is never quite going to heal but one that is large and wide-ranging so we can look at it in different ways, moving it around to different times, places and points of view. “Humans too often trade away freedom or justice for short-term security” is a pretty large theme, so it works as a good flaw that can tell lots of stories.

In the world of Warhammer Fantasy, the world needs to come together against a primal enemy of capital-C Chaos, but the nature of Chaos is causing division and decay, pulling people apart from each other and making them want only power. In the Cthulhu Mythos, human curiosity is ever-present and always punished, but because we live in an age that celebrates knowledge and inquiry, we don’t feel cheated when the characters once again try to uncover the truth. Human greed ensures that someone will always cut corners on attractions in the world of Jurassic Park. We know that in real life we are not able to constantly watch over our friends so we understand that the characters in a horror film will inevitably split up – as long as the author makes sure the characters don’t know they are in danger.

Tragedies are heart-wrenching but because they lead to endless conflict they are perfect for games. Horror is also the friend of the gamer: as inevitable as tragedy but faster and more visceral. Both rely on human failings we cannot help but recognise in ourselves. The eternal struggle doesn’t have to evoke fear and pity however. The Autobots in Transformers will always face the threat of Decepticons because they refuse to destroy their enemy utterly; they also continue to fight that battle without feeling overwhelmed by that fact. It doesn’t feel foolish that they don’t simply murder everyone on the other side. The world of Star Trek has an eternal struggle as represented in the Prime Directive: there is a constant and impossible battle between doing what is right and respecting individual freedom. These aren’t tragedies but deep questions to ponder, noble truths to find calling to us and inspiring challenges to rise up to meet.

Both wants and needs require more impediments than philosophical debate. Getting what they want can’t simply be super easy, barely an inconvenience, or the story or game would simply stop. Worlds need to be driven to movement, but never too quickly or too simply, and the want or need should always be slipping from one’s grasp or revealing another goal behind. If the great wound, great struggle or inability to find/hold onto the need doesn’t make the quest difficult, some other things should do so. Batman can’t just punch the Joker the moment he escapes from Gotham; he has to solve the mystery of the Joker’s plan first. The puzzle there is the barrier. Discovery, as Aristotle called it, makes a great impediment. So too is marshalling resources: as Joseph Campbell observed, the hero needs advice or magical aid or allies before they can reach their goals. So worlds, in their prime narratives, tend to have recurring barriers to conquer or paths to walk.

Most fantasy worlds ache for justice or for revenge, and these are hard to get – these are the philosophical barriers. Those worlds are filled too with darkness and danger, mystery and hidden lore, ancient pasts and impossibly distant exotic climes: these are the discovery elements that bar the way. There are also just boatloads of orcs, skeletons, wraiths, trolls, giant spiders and so on that want to murder you and make it hard for you to fight evil – and these typically have little or nothing to do with the main quest. Sometimes staying alive or stopping other kinds of evil going on at the same time is an impediment! These are the oppositional barriers. Then there’s some more abstract barriers: the world of Tolkien’s Middle-Earth, much like the vast universe of Dune, is hard going because the world is large and exhausting. There are no good roads, few open plains and horses are rare. A simple issue of geography provides a constant antagonist. High technology and high magic worlds often struggle here; if you can teleport anywhere you want instantly and have infinite money, your ability to achieve things is greatly increased. Likewise philosophical utopias can often run down: Star Wars has to break its technology often to deal with the first problem and invents many conspiracies and shadow governments to help solve the second.

This can feel like a cheat, especially, again, if it keeps happening. Star Wars has just as many technology breakdowns as Star Trek but it feels less repetitive because the story establishes so often that the technology of that setting tends to always be breaking down, at least for characters on the rim. Han and Chewy spend almost the entire first act of Empire Strikes Back trying to fix their ship, which justifies all the problems in the rest of the film. One can think of this as an addendum to the rule of Chekov’s Gun: the Russian playwright observed that if there is a gun hanging on the wall in Act One, it should be fired in Act Two. Here the rule might be: if your world has a way to reach its goals in Act One, you can’t simply take that away unjustified in Act Two.¹ In the case of ongoing media, there are often hundreds or thousands of Act Twos, so some leniency is permitted, but it is reasonable for your audience to remember things!

On that point at a larger scale, worlds, like characters, need to be consistent. They can’t have an opinion on something one day and then change their mind the next; they cannot cry out for justice and then decide the unjust overlord is kind of okay. But they can, like characters, be capricious and complicated. They can be large and contain multitudes, and even contradictions, not least because of the struggles between wants and needs. Your world might never have a clear answer or decision on some things; it might leave dilemmas undecided and the right path ambiguous; but if it does, it should not change its mind and decide there is one clear answer. If it does, it is reasonable for it to feel as if it is a different world.²

Consistency also matters in tone, imagery and structure. If your world features lots of action scenes, it will feel strange if there is a part that does not, and vice versa. There can be wiggle room here, of course: worlds can allow for different kinds of stories, and very slowly characters and worlds can change fundamentally. Sometimes those very slow changes can be incredibly satisfying to be a part of. Change too fast, however, and you’ll lose at least some of your audience because it won’t feel consistent with their expectations. When Star Wars recently made Andor (Gilroy, 2024), a show about military intrigue and political philosophy, with not a laser sword in sight, many felt it was not their world anymore. Others saw no significant difference and welcomed the risk in trusting a new artistic turn. Like changing the point of view, this can keep the world from becoming boring. As with characters, sometimes change is the best thing about them and the thing we treasure the most. But big changes are a risk. We like characters and worlds because we find them familiar. We want to return to the things we remember.

Consistency of course doesn’t mean constancy. Characters are not uniform robots, unable to break habits. But it should mean something when they do go off script. If a character is bombastic or fancily dressed, it means something when they are dour or wearing rags. You want the same for your world: establish a baseline and it will be more interesting when and where it changes. Too much change and there is no baseline to refer to. And it is that baseline that keeps worlds, like characters, feeling distinct. Andor’s depiction of fighting fascism works because although it feels different, stepping away from the well-established baseline of picaresque adventure fantasy, it was still also very true to the prime narrative.

Worlds, like characters, are also never perfect. They are not utopian paradises where nothing can ever go wrong and no person ever suffers. They are rarely places where the right path is instantly obvious and evil is instantly defeated. They are unpleasant, sometimes unvirtuous. They can be ugly. Few of them are nice places to live. Even Star Trek, in its enlightened future, sets its narratives boldly going into danger and the unknown, far outside the comfort of the fully automated space communism back on Earth. Despite this, we want to go to our fantasy worlds. Just like characters, we like worlds for their beauty and their virtues; but we love them for their ugliness and their flaws. And just like characters, worlds can be unappealing only if they are also not boring. Ugliness cannot give way to drabness; unpleasantness cannot turn into a grind. There has to be a reason to be drawn to these places, even if it is only a perverse desire to see the horrors within it.

Another way that characters feel familiar and distinct is language. Worlds, like characters, have distinctive words and names: place names, character names, the names for magic, but also just the language style, tone and rhythm used to discuss all those things. Ideally, a world should reveal itself in a single piece of artwork, or a few sentences, a lone character. You should know which world you are looking at as soon as you see the way a character stands to meet a threat and the way an artist draws that picture or the timbre and cadence of the words that describe it. Good writing is being sure that a line of dialogue could only have come from that particular character as soon as you hear it; a good world should be so clearly expressed that you can know it by one single piece of illustration, one character design, one piece of fiction or even one section of rules.

Obviously, there are some differences between worlds and characters. Worlds are larger and typically more multifaceted. They are collections: one enormous, complicated character with lots of smaller characters inside them, and smaller ones inside those. Characters are more temporary and less influential on their environment than worlds, so they are easier to edit or reverse in your drafts. Characters move forwards in time faster and are easier to change in-world or over installments as a result. Characters can change their minds in a moment; worlds may take centuries. Characters can get away with acting weird for a scene or two, whereas fans are much less forgiving about worlds acting “out of character”.

So as you build your world, ask yourself what kind of character is it? Could you draw it or describe it as a person? Is it antagonistic, putting pressure on the main characters of the story, the way the brutal streets of Gotham City are never free of crime? Or, is it more like a supporting character, setting them up for greatness and pushing them to be more than they are, as we see in Marvel? The world of Dungeons & Dragons is more like a challenging rival, urging the protagonists to test their ever-increasing skills. The world of Vampire: The Masquerade (Rein-Hagen et al, 1991) is a tempter, promising you that you can flirt with darkness without consequences. Finding your world’s voice like this will mean you can write about them with ease. You will know them like a friend.

Finally, when you know your world is a character you can understand that like any character there is always a risk that they can hog the spotlight or steal the victory. The world is important but it is not the only character in your game. The players should feel equally important. Make sure you leave room for them too.

Exercise: On a Journey

A quick internet search or trip to the library will find you a guide to writing and almost everyone of those will include the idea of a character questionnaire. Grab one and see if you can fill it out for your world, or for as much as you have worked out about it. Not every question will make sense. Some might seem silly or useless. But when you are drafting your world and trying to brainstorm ideas, you’ll be surprised how useful a character questionnaire can be. Trying to figure out what your world eats for breakfast can be much more enlightening than trying to make sure your economic modelling corresponds to the latest academic theories.

Exercise: Stopping By

Imagine your world as if it were a character in a story, or represented by a character, such as how Captain America embodies his nation, or as some kind of mystical embodiment. What would that character look like? How would it talk? What would it say about the places and people within it? How would it react to the embodiment of other worlds you know well? Would it be friends with Star Wars or Star Trek? Which one would it prefer?

Notes

Another well-known example of this is the Time Turner in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Rowling, 1999), a device that allows a major character to go back in time several hours. Many fans wondered why the device was never used in subsequent books. The much-later play The Cursed Child (Thorne, 2016) added some retroactive continuity around this. See Chapter 27 for more on retroactive continuity.

Worlds can and do evolve, however, and that’s okay. Although Doctor Who likes to act as if it is all the same setting, it really isn’t, and that’s why the actor playing the Doctor is so often important: it also defines the tone and narratives of the world around them. Ditto James Bond. Making your actors replaceable is always a good idea if you want your world to last, too.

CHAPTER 5 Astrology Not Astronomy

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-6

THE FIRST TIME I went to a class on worldbuilding I was surprised that the lesson began by talking about astronomy. Don’t get me wrong; astronomy can matter in some settings. Sometimes it matters a great deal. Sometimes it doesn’t matter at all. In the movie Prometheus (Ridley Scott, 2012) scriptwriter Damon Lindelof made his space captain Vickers sound like an idiot when she declared they were a half a billion miles from the earth – a distance that would not even take them past Jupiter.

That also doesn’t really matter. Nitpicking on this level is rarely a fair appraisal or a reasonable approach to any media. There are some plausible reasons why Vickers might use those words. Science fiction (SF) fans noticed it because of how they view media: it was not so much an error in worldbuilding as a lack of understanding the audience and what makes them connect with or dismiss a world or a work. In creating art, it is important to find your own voice and your own position towards your work but at the same time, you are also developing a sense of the identity of your audience. The core audience for a film in the Aliens franchise is listening for these kinds of details. Sometimes they are listening with a cane in their hand, ready to slap the knuckles of a writer who steps out of line.

After the release of Star Wars/A New Hope in 1977, the venerable and respected SF short story magazine Amazing Stories ran a piece that retold the entirety of Star Wars but as a western. They closed by explaining that any story where they could replace the names of the characters and turn into a western, or a fantasy, was demonstrably not SF and would not be published by them. (They were, we assume, getting a lot of submissions imitating Star Wars!) Around this divide there became a growing distinction between “hard” SF, which is a genre (supposedly) keenly focussed on science and the philosophy of how it interacts with human nature, and “soft” SF, which is more about zooming through space and fighting aliens. Much debate has gone on about where the barrier lies and which works are on which side of the fence, with a lot of SF having feet in both camps. Some accuse Frank Herbert’s Dune of failing to be hard SF because it doesn’t explain its faster than light travel properly; others consider it a foundational text of what hard SF should be. The distinctions have, in a sense, only made things less clear. But what Amazing Stories was trying to do was to clearly decide and announce who their audience was and what kind of material they were delivering to that audience. You should do likewise. You need to be as hard in SF as your target audience expects – and you will always fail some of them.

The other issue with Vicker’s words is that the line was an example of what is called “technical discourse”. Technical discourse is any piece of writing that moves from language that is generally how the average person speaks and the standard reading level of your audience into language that uses argot, cant, jargon and specialised terms that are less understandable unless you are an expert in the field in question – or a passionate amateur. Technical discourse exists primarily to establish mood and character, particularly a sense of the world being realistic and having a texture of realism. A character uses technical discourse to demonstrate to the audience (and perhaps other characters) that they are an expert or extremely experienced. It is also telling the audience that something professional and technical is happening. That these things are just slightly outside the audiences’ general understanding makes it exciting and exotic. The audience feel excited to be peering into what feels like a real world, rich with meaning they do not yet understand, and are curious to learn more, like children at a museum. Indeed, for much of the history of the novel, many styles of works were designed to do what we would later think of encyclopaedias or museums doing. Moby Dick spends so much of its content on whales and whaling for this reason.

That some of the knowledge is just outside our experience makes it feel exotic and exciting. That some or all of the knowledge is just inside the understanding of some of the audience or educational to them is also important because that makes those people feel intelligent, and intelligent in a shared way with the author. For a lot of readers, they get to feel like they are once again the smart children at the museum that the tour guide singles out when they get a question right. As well as asserting the audience the mood and texture of the world and characters, technical discourse is also a way for the author to establish that they are knowledgeable and there is some reality or at least authenticity to their work. When Tom Clancy talks about military vehicle statistics or global politics, he is saying to his audience that he is privy to some level of inside information and that he believes his audience are smart students keen to learn, and some of them are the star pupils who already know some but are keen to know more. When Vickers said they were a billion miles from the earth, it made the audience of special students who went to space camp feel as if the teacher was an idiot and the class was beneath them.

It is worth noting though that technical discourse does not have to be accurate to any standard! It just has to sound “good enough” to the target audience. Writing is a kind of cartoon, where we suggest a thing to the audience with a series of squiggles, and the human brain interprets them as narrative. Worldbuilding works the same way.

Worldbuilding, or rather the presentation of the world we have built, likely always includes some form of technical discourse, whether in fiction, in “in-setting” artefacts or in the technical writing about the world (the encyclopaedia-style direct voice explaining the world).¹ However all of these can also be present in general, common language too. Indeed, we need to mostly use common language. Anthony Burgess in A Clockwork Orange writes the whole novel in the voice and slang of his lead character but it is a rare exception. Hints of futuristic terms and a newly emerged argot need to be peppered in lightly or your audience will simply not be able to understand you.

The upside of using technical discourse or slang in your world is you can usually not be wrong, because you are the creator of the reality of that thing. However, the voice must still appear to have authority and expertise and feel like an expert to the reader. The audience still wants to feel smart. This is in fact a principal joy of the alternate world: instead of learning what might be considered dreary schoolboy facts about whales from Moby Dick, or be forced to memorise the dates of famous battles, it feels exotic to learn the biology of Vulcans or to memorise the date when Han Solo met Chewbacca the Wookie. We must again return to how Tolkien invented this whole idea, and he was writing as a schoolteacher to schoolboys. Of particular note here is The Hobbit, which includes in the frontispiece an image of the map that Thorin will later read from. This map is not referenced in the text at all, but the clever student can return to the front of the book and find landmarks and solve the puzzle. They can see what Thorin is reading and teach themselves to write in dwarven script. This little exercise for the smart children again exists for the reader to feel clever. And it is exactly the same delight when an adult can look up the history of Deadwood to learn more about their pulp cowboy novel or which car models were on the Titanic so they feel more connected to their romance film.

Again, you have some advantage if you are making it up – until you’ve made up so much and the fans know it better than you do, which they always will. It’s also a lot easier to “know” something about a fictional universe because the source material is much smaller than trying to get scientific or historical truth out of an infinite universe that we can never possibly know perfectly. But your audience still wants to feel smart and still needs the teacher to “get it right”. They might not know anything about your world yet they very often think they are experts in worldbuilding. When you speak of your world with authority, you are speaking to that audience and their needs, and that audience can be demanding. You certainly cannot please everyone! I have written things into worlds that are historically accurate and been told they are unbelievable and would never happen “in reality”. I have written behaviour of godlike beings and been told “obviously” the God of Death wouldn’t be that way.

Some of this you can ignore, but you can also get ahead of things by managing those expectations and managing your audience. It doesn’t matter that Star Wars never explains how hyperdrive works in any technical way, which meant the audience generally felt no instinct to complain about why shooting the exhaust port would make the Death Star explode. On the other hand, the Alien movies went to great lengths in the first film particularly to depict space travel in a realistic way. The hypersleep chambers, the entire design of the ship Nostromo and the spacesuits worn were all clear elements of technical discourse, grounding the setting in reality. So when Holloway takes off his helmet in Prometheus, it feels outside of that expectation. There is no right or wrong to a choice about your worldbuilding or the explanation you give, there is just expectations in the audience, and how you set those up. Dungeons & Dragons doesn’t really give a damn about how gelatinous cubes make no damn sense because it has a light tone and typically a shallow setting. The historical tone of the Legend of Five Rings (Zinser, Wick et al, 1997) games means that though the world is fantasy, if an elephant shows up they have to make sure there’s also a place on the planet that would have a climate and vegetation to support them (the Ivory Lands, in this case).

The rule I have coined here is astrology over astronomy. When newspaper astrologists write their columns about how everyone born under Pisces will meet a dark stranger, they are thinking far more about the lives of their readers than they are about the relative positions of the planets and constellations. It matters more that they match the expectations of what their audience needs to hear. It matters more that you think about the story you are telling and the characters in it than precise scientific mapping of the sky.

The audience you attract and the expectations they have are driven by lots of things. Some you can control, as the creator and producer. Others might be out of your control, such as the culture and artistic scene in which the work appears. If your work is published by someone not you, they will also control things like art, presentation, product design and marketing. Like any other media, there are the usual ideas of genre – game settings broadly engage with film and fiction settings like fantasy, horror, SF and so on – and the baggage those genre assumptions bring. Games also have their own increasingly well-defined genres, and that also affects the expectations when it comes to setting and worlds. Platformers aren’t expected to have nearly as complex a backstory as digital RPGs or first-person adventure games. A game that models a financial engine is going to need a developed sense of the financial system of its world. Some of this is arbitrary: there’s no reason why a complex detailed wargame couldn’t be set in the My Little Pony universe, but you might find that the world as written doesn’t have some of the information you’d need and that your audience would be confused by finding things not matching their expectations. We don’t need to link certain visual or textual ideas to levels of complexity or kinds of mechanics, but we need to acknowledge our audience cannot help but do so because that’s the culture we’ve been exposed to. So again, the kind of worldbuilding you will need to do depends on the game you have designed, just as the world you make will drive the kind of games you can design.

I have taken a potshot at the class in question in the opening of this chapter but it was an excellent class not least because it too ended up bringing things back to astrology not astronomy itself. The class ended with the incredibly important lesson that culture drives geography just as much as geography drives culture. The way a culture or society thinks and the way it conceives of knowledge, of value and of thought itself will determine how they comprehend and interact with their world and the reality of that world to them. In truth, astrology doesn’t follow astronomy, but the other way around. Western thought and Google Maps have given us this idea that there is one single version of reality that we can simply open the windows and look at to see it in its true form. But that is a philosophical stance that is unique to our culture and this time, and we should never assume it is going to occur in other cultures. Not unless those cultures are also explicitly designed to think like us in many other ways, too. And if they do, they might not be very interesting.²

What this means is that most of your audience can have a very modern 21st-century idea of what makes a real world or a believable world, and that’s because of our current relationship with epistemology – our ideas about how things become known and become understood as true. That’s making a lot of our worldbuilding become very homogenous, cleaving only to things we think are “possible”. Before Tolkien, that never happened. We have to acknowledge that but we don’t always have to follow that model. Our world has to be coherent, but it doesn’t have to be scientific. It certainly doesn’t have to be quote-unquote realistic, because even the best scientists know what that means, and only for their discipline, and outside their fields they too run on assumption, conjecture and mythology just as much as the rest of us. Their idea of what’s true is very much like our idea of what things pull us into a fictional world and makes it feel real and which ones pull us out and make it feel false: it’s all about whether it meets our expectations.

We’ll talk a little bit more about realism and what it means in the next chapter.

On a Quest

Consider your game idea and where it sits in the current product space and art scene of game design, both in your local community and worldwide. What kinds of games are also in that space? What assumptions do people bring to games in that area and how are those assumptions formed? Are there games that don’t conform to those assumptions? How so? How much does the setting influence all these questions? How do these things influence the settings that appear?

Stopping By

Think of one single thing from your world or a game piece that represents something from it. Try as much as possible to remove it from all other context. It could be a single character description, a kind of action or an animal or object in the world; it could be expressed as illustration or fiction or as some rules text or description. Try to present just that element and show it to others and ask them about what assumptions they might have from that element about the rest of the world and the rest of the game. If they don’t have any idea, your element might not be evoking assumptions enough. If they have very wrong ideas, you might be in trouble, but remember that the audience can always be corrected with other material.

Notes

We will talk more about how our sense of information presentation of the real world affects the way we write about settings often in this book and particularly in Chapters 18 and 31.

Again, see Chapters 18 and 31.

CHAPTER 6 Realism and Believability

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-7

THE GREAT STEPHEN KING said, in his book On Writing: “reality can take a flying f*ck at a rolling donut”.

What I take from this is that even the greatest of us are bothered by the bugbear of realism. Or rather, the bugbear of people who care about quote-unquote realism. It’s not something any creator can ever escape. It’s something all of us want to do well at, but it’s also something, ultimately, that we need to let go of. We cannot bind ourselves too much to the goal of realism or it will drive us crazy. There will always be someone, somewhere who thinks something in your story is unrealistic. They might even be right. It doesn’t matter.

In researching this book I spent some time asking people about things in settings that drove them crazy because they were unrealistic, unbelievable or inconsistent or which settings drove them crazy by having too many of those “pinch points”. The last part mattered because most people can excuse something small, but little problems can slowly build up. What was most telling about the responses I got was the variety. There were definitely some recurring stars on the list. The use of “unobtanium” in James Cameron’s Avatar films was a regular suspect. A lot of angry men who are old enough to have better things to do have a lot of strong opinions about the rules of hyperspeed in the Star Wars movie The Last Jedi. Fans of classical history are in an ongoing war with Hollywood where safety principles require the actors on horseback to use stirrups while the ancient Romans were having none of that. A similar historical problem comes with “firing” arrows, since that word only exists because of gunpowder, which we definitely also won’t tolerate in a fictional setting that doesn’t have regular use of cannons, which requires a high level of precision blacksmithing to make them reliable. But I also found people complaining about nearly every single part of Star Trek. Some were cross at a minor point in Independence Day, others at the entire concept of Interstellar, two films miles apart in terms of their science fiction “hardness” credentials. The appearance of potatoes in The Lord of the Rings causes some to fret (coffee, tea and sugar also being contenders) while others were concerned about how the same setting managed to keep records for centuries on written paper. One person brought up an obscure displeasure with a brief aside in a lesser-known Patrick Rothfus book. Another said they thought the amazing spectacle of Kenneth Branagh’s four and half hour-long Hamlet was pretty good but the quality of the wigs ruined it. That one wasn’t really about worldbuilding so much as costuming but it always stuck with me, because it shows that we are all very individual creatures with very weird and very disparate lenses on our eyes, and we can be very negative, able to devalue a work of endless beauty for the smallest possible fly in the ointment. As Anais Nin observed, we do not see things as they are, we see things as we are. And some of us are extremely concerned about wigs. We could see this as character flaw, a terrible need to rob ourselves of joy, but there is something all of us likely will not tolerate, and are convinced there should be something that matters to everyone.

Good worldbuilding matters, but realism? Most of the time, realism is chasing the tail of a demon that only exists in other people’s minds.

Let’s be clear, though: story has it easy here. Story can distract you. Story can be like “yay, the Death Star is blowing up, the rebels are winning” so you forget about whether the gigantic structure might crash into Endor and kill all the Ewoks. It might only catch up to you the next day in the shower, if at all. More than that though, fiction has enormous power of misdirection. Fiction shines a spotlight on things and hides or disguises others.¹ Nobody had ever wondered how wizards in the Harry Potter universe went to the bathroom since they didn’t like to use “muggle technology” like the modern u-bend. It didn’t matter because we weren’t looking in that direction. Then of course, Ms Rowling decided to give us the answer, and it was not only a bad answer, but it kind of ruined the whole trick. It drew attention to a piece of worldbuilding that wasn’t very strong and worse: it was a piece we didn’t even want to think about. We didn’t even want to wonder if it was realistic, because most of our focus on realism is based on what we care about and mostly we don’t really want to think about going to the toilet. Fiction and even fictional worlds are relatively toilet-free. Star Trek recently brought up how the replicators are run on poop, and then everybody pretended they hadn’t. It wasn’t a fun detail because we’d rather not think about it at all.

Realism is like everything in narratives: it’s about attention. It’s about where we want to look and what we want to think about. Attention is not only something a writer can control but also something that is driven by the audience’s desire and sense of expectation (as discussed in the last chapter). And just like we said in the last chapter, expectation is something we can recognise, anticipate and, for the most part, control. In this way, writing is like a magic trick.² The writer and Navy veteran James D. Macdonald had a perfect example of this: his advice to people who were not gun experts was to simply use the word “modified” in their descriptions of guns – as in “she lifted her modified MAC-10 and felt it kick as she rained down fire”. Does a MAC-10 have a kick? I have no idea. But now if things don’t appear realistic, the readers now have a puzzle to solve: there could be some way to modify a MAC-10 to produce the outcome. And so they start to fill in the missing details for the author.

This also works with “custom-made” or “special issue”. In fantasy, you have to be careful adding random magic but “elven-made” or “eldritch” will often produce the same effect.

Note that this isn’t about being vague. It’s about what kind of specifics you use and when. It’s about directing attention away from the things you don’t know in a way that either causes the audience to not notice the gap or to supply their own answers. It’s a trick, but it’s also one that the audience usually does not spot and, deep down, doesn’t want to spot. Like a magic trick, they are semi-willing in their disbelief. They’d rather fill in the blanks themselves, as long as it makes them feel smart and engaged then demand the magician empty his pockets. The opposite effect is when something seems so unbelievable it jolts us out of the story. But the truth is, if the story or world is good enough, we will often work hard to forgive such things or imagine a solution. As I said above typically there is no one thing that is unbelievable, but rather it is a death of a thousand cuts. We often complain about one thing, but it was in fact the last thing, the straw that broke the donkey’s back. We tried as hard as we could to meet the world and believe its truth, but we were pushed too far.

And let’s be clear: it is belief that matters, not reality. Realism isn’t really the goal. Reality is just too unbelievable sometimes. More than once my professional worldbuilding writing has worked directly from real historical events, places, concepts and beliefs, only to be accused of being completely unrealistic. Photos from the Mars rovers clearly show that the surface of Mars is a dirty grey or a dusty brown, seldom getting anywhere near anything red, but when I described it this way, I received angry emails. Once again we come back to the idea of the magic trick: it’s not what is really going on that matters, it is what the audience believes is true. The rabbit must have appeared magically in the hat because we saw before it was empty, and we expect a hat to be empty. Similarly, we have “seen” before that Mars is red. Everyone “knows” it is red. It must be red. We expect it to be red. It almost feels insulting to be told it isn’t.³

Media plays a big part in this, because it is constantly controlling our attention and what we notice and think is “true”. So many TV shows and movies repeat the rule that police can’t investigate missing persons cases for the first forty-eight hours. That’s a great rule for driving a plot, but it’s not just false but also dangerous and police forces around the world now have to run community education programmes to change this view. Most of the time when people think something is realistic, they mean it doesn’t conform to what they see in other fiction and showing the reality can clash with that! I am an expert in animal behaviour but I know how often fantasy fiction likes to have wolves or wolf-like animals hunt humans. When this trope pops up at a roleplaying game I often ask: “Are these real wolves or Fantasy Wolves?” Usually it is the latter and I’m okay with that because I can recognise a trope when I see one.

A more nuanced example appeared in the Netflix movie Bright, a cop film where the discriminated underclass of America is fantasy orcs rather than black people, because orcs have existed alongside humans for millennia. Early on, the main human calls some local orc gangbangers (in gang colours) “shreks”. This stood out clearly: why would a world with orcs make a movie about fantasy creatures when those creatures aren’t fantasy? Other critics pointed out that the Los Angeles gang culture and their outfits being represented were a direct result of black oppression in American history, which was supposed to not exist, having been replaced with the oppression of orcs. This mistake was harder to see because the media has conditioned us to expect black people to be in gangs, wearing those kinds of clothes, as normal. Indeed, the film later used those same visual cues to tell us the orcs were violent criminals and to think of them as black. Shorthand is a vital tool of the worldbuilder, but like everything in worldbuilding, it points to more implications. The visual language we have to communicate certain things just might not have existed in the world if it were “realistic”. But at the same time, we must work with the visual language of our audience. For a filmmaker making an action film who wants to quickly set up a scene to a broad audience, that’s a problem!

Media can also get us used to ideas, so we accept their unreality. We know that they aren’t true but we can, like the wolves above, just accept them for the purposes of those stories. This can become so reflexive over time we forget that they exist. The Marvel Cinematic Universe started with characters grounded in science and plots focussing on arms trafficking, terrorism and World War II, with only tiny hints of genetic experiments or magic superconductors. That allowed it to build up to aliens, magicians, time travel, dimension hopping and more. By the time we got to She-Hulk we were so used to these “unrealistic” ideas we could have characters going out drinking, dating or fighting court battles around the basic assumption of superpowers existing. The “baseline” of what we accepted had shifted.⁴

Again, we’re not really talking about reality. We’re talking about what the audience will believe and what they will “buy into”. In wrestling, they call it the sell. Selling is the art of reacting to a punch, the way wrestlers make it look like they’ve been hit harder than they really have, but it is also used to mean selling the storyline, making the audience hate the heel (the bad guy) or love the face (the good guy) or believe that one has become the other somehow.

The selling and buying here are almost literal. The language comes from advertising because the techniques are much the same. Like selling a product, once someone has bought it, they’ll convince themselves that they got a great deal. They’ll even want to get others in on the deal, to build a stronger sense of alignment, and buy more stuff to go with the first thing – diving deeper and deeper into your world, because each step further back-justifies their buy-in. Points of disbelief operate like what advertisers call “pinch points” or “pain points”: things that catch the buyer and make them wary. As mentioned, your audience can tolerate a few of these but eventually will tap out (to use another wrestling term). If you are a creator, you can deal with these like any smart salesman. First, you manage expectations by putting everything in the front window as it were. You establish right out of the box what kind of world you have and what points of disbelief might be coming. Star Wars films begin with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Alice in Wonderland starts by going down the rabbit hole: transportation devices are a textual way of asking us to set different expectations. The roaring tommy gun out of the back of the getaway jalopy on the cover of Arkham Horror (Richard Launius, 1987) lets you know this isn’t a game of psychological horror, and it may indeed also have some liberties with exactly when women started wearing gunbelts.

One particularly marvellous example of this is the great movie A Knight’s Tale (Brian Helgeland, 2001), where they open with the peasants singing We Will Rock You by Queen to let you know this is a light-hearted sports movie that is having a little fun with history. Actually, it’s a very historically realistic film too: it wants to tell Chaucer’s Knights Tale in a way that makes sense to the audience, which means communicating in shorthand what a knight might be in a medieval world. The musical start works not just to immediately establish that some liberties have been taken with a purely scholarly approach while at the same time helping the audience understand the world. It manages to be surreal enough to suggest it is not truly part of the text – it is a metatexual, non-diegetic element, to suggest tone, so it doesn’t clash as much as the orcs in crips colours of Bright. This is an appeal to the audience, asking them kindly to buy in to the values of the world, to connect with its beliefs and its logic – the astrology, not the astronomy. When they do they get a richer story because it lets the writers tell the important parts of Chaucer’s tale, about what chivalry and nobility actually mean.

The opening scene was a way of asking the audience to come along and providing cues as the way in. In A Knight’s Tale it was metatextual, but there are many other ways to beg the audience’s forbearance. That is the lesson of the modified MAC-10, applied to the entire world: if you can justify it, you can get away with it. If there’s a reason for a change or an element, people will generally be placated. They don’t even need to know the reason, so much as being assured someone has thought about the question and has a reason. The acknowledgement is the key and the lack of acknowledgement feels insulting. Sometimes the smallest line of dialogue will do it, the tiniest nod in art composition or style. Games, for once, have it easy here because there’s an inbuilt assumption when we come to games that reality may be bent to suit better play. We know that games are models and approximations and have to by their nature only approximate reality. We are in the mood to forgive. We understand that bishop moving diagonally is an interesting mechanic; we don’t care for very long that it doesn’t reflect real-world dogma of the medieval catholic church regarding diagonal locomotion.

But worldbuilding does have it rough when it isn’t shown through fiction or mechanics – when it is provided as background, written as technical writing or pure exposition. Here there are far fewer ways to misdirect the reader when you are – supposedly – laying out all the details, bit by bit, in chronological and causal order, demanding to be believed. Here the audience is at its least forgiving. However, you still have some ability to direct attention (or misdirect it), and again if you acknowledge the issue you’re halfway there. Here comes another rule of salesmanship: if there’s something that might be a pinch point in your product, then you turn it from a bug into a feature. Engineers at 3M had a glue that wouldn’t stick well for long and would only hold a small square of paper. They turned it into Post-it and made millions. The benefit of the encyclopaedia entry is that if we are reading such things, we are in the mood for complicated explanations so if something doesn’t seem right, the answer is to add more explanations to justify it. You make the answer so interesting that people forget the question was a problem; they get so invested in the answer that they start making it fit the question even more in their own minds. A famous internet post on tumblr by “homunculus-argument” puts it like this:

Hey btw, another worldbuilding thing: You can, and actually should have weird and impractical cultural things. They’re not inherently unrealistic, for as long as you address the realistic consequences as well.

Let’s say you’ve got a city where there’s tame white doves everywhere. They’re not pests, they’re regarded as sacred, holy protectors of the city, and the whole city cares for them and feeds them like they’re pets. They’re so tame because it’s a social taboo to hurt or scare one. Nice pretty doves :)

Then someone points out that even if they’re not seen as pests, doesn’t having a completely unchecked feral pigeon population – that not only isn’t being culled, but actively fed and cared for – mean that there would be bird shit absolutely all over the place?

A part of you wants to … explain that there’s a reason why they’re not shitting all over the place, maybe they’re super-intelligent and specifically bred and trained to not shit all over the place. The logistics of how, exactly, could anyone breed and train a flock of feral birds go unaddressed.

An even worse solution would be to not have those birds, editing them out of the world. No, they spark joy, you can’t just toss them out!

Now, consider: Yes, yes they would, but the city also has an extensive public sanitation service that’s occupied 90% of the time by cleaning bird shit off of everything. One of the most common last names in the area actually translates to “one who scrapes off dove shit”, and it’s a highly respected occupation. And thanks to the sheer necessity of constantly regularly cleaning everything, the city enjoys a much higher standard of cleanliness, and less public health issues caused by poor public sanitation.

The doves do protect the city. By sh*tting fucking everywhere.

I actually like those first few suggestions too: a city of bird trainers or magic intelligent birds could be great. In any of these cases, the solution also iterates and provides more and more ideas. The problem isn’t just solved, but it drives more amazing ideas: it fixes other things and fires the whole engine.

Maybe the best example of this is the Infinite Improbability Drive, which Douglas Adams invented in Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to save his radio script (and later novel) reaching a point of ridiculous coincidence. The only way he could think to save his characters required something absolutely improbable, and so he made probability drives the key technology of the book. Another great example is how the world of Dune wants to be quite-hard sci-fi but also has faster than light travel. So, it turns this magical hand-waving concept of folding space into the heart of the entire setting and the MacGuffin⁵ that drives the whole plot. You don’t have time to think that spice letting you fold space is a huge cheat because there’s so many more interesting consequences and implications to think about if that’s true. You’re sold on the consequences before the disbelief hits your logical brain.

There will always be someone who will catch on something in your story and complain it is unrealistic. But Dune is regarded as one of the greatest examples of worldbuilding ever made and it gets away with Magic Faster Than Light Travel Because Reasons. If it’s good enough for Dune it’s good enough for you. Just be a good salesperson: put your belief-suspending concepts right up front, make sure there’s an explanation and then turn the explanation into the thing that is cool and the fuel for the fire. That’s how you get past disbelief. And in the next two chapters, we’ll talk more about how to use this explanation loop for more setting ideas.

On a Quest

Your world is going to have some kind of unreality in it somewhere, or it would just be reality. Pick some part of that and examine it as harshly as you can. Try to even separate it out from genre convention: assume the reader has never encountered any part of the genre before and has no expectations. Then, when it is at its most ludicrous, justify it.

Stopping By

Nobody likes having their story or world pulled up on a lack of believability, but we’ve all done it to other stories we’ve encountered. We all have our own pinch points, and we all secretly believe ours are the important, rational ones and everyone else is being silly. It’s good practice in both creativity and audience empathy then, to find something that caught you and try to see how you could be made to believe in it, if only the author had nudged it ever so slightly. What would be the smallest explanation it would require? Or the smallest significant redirection of your attention to not notice it or let it slide?

Notes

Actually, settings can do this too, and we’ll talk about that in Chapter 11. They just can’t do it quite as easily as narratives.

We will return to this metaphor in Chapter 34.

Sometimes beliefs about reality are so strong that they become archetypes, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 23.

That said, we should be increasingly careful of what we consider to be the baseline understanding. Media these days is increasingly “siloed” into its genres, which means the tropes are invisible to anyone outside of them, and constantly evolving in reference to themselves within them. Every day somebody comes into the superhero genre and encounters ridiculous ideas like radioactive spiders and thinks they aren’t justified, while at the same time superhero fans are relieved to have media not having to keep justifying this. Audiences are always shifting and you should never assume they are just okay with things. Be generous and assume they are new – but also assume they are smart.

We’ll be talking about MacGuffins in setting in Chapters 11 and 17.

CHAPTER 7 Keep Asking Questions

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-8

WE’VE ESTABLISHED THAT GOOD worldbuilding is like good character building. So how do you make good characters? One simple exercise used by writers for generations is “keep asking questions”. Sometimes it’s just “ask three questions”, because that’s usually enough. Another variant is “keep asking why”. They all boil down to the same idea: we keep interrogating ideas, over and over, until we find a core truth. Something that speaks to a larger, deeper or more interesting story. And we learn a lot as we go.

The easiest way to explain how this works is by demonstrating. Let’s think of some examples with characters, then with worlds.

Imagine I want my character to have a gun in the next scene, and she doesn’t really have a simple way to get one. I need to explain this because – as discussed in the last chapter – it is the lack of acknowledgement of unreality that makes stories feel hollow. I might solve this by having a character who can give her a gun. If I just write “John handed Jane a gun” it’s not very compelling. I need to know more about John, and I have a great starting point. He has a gun. It’s not much to go on, but then I start asking questions.

>Why does John have a gun?

He got it for self-defence.

>Why does he need it for self-defence?

He lives in a poor neighbourhood.

>Why is it a poor neighbourhood?

Because the villain destroyed it.

Now I might write:

John handed Jane a gun. ‘Go get him,’ he said, with a shadow behind his eyes. Jane knew that Doctor Despair had taken a lot from the young man when the treacle floods had come and turned the western city into a hellhole.

All of a sudden we know a lot about John and the scene has a lot more weight. The gun means something, and so does the passing of it, which is what we want: the art of good writing, of good creation, is to waste nothing: to create the most meaning with the smallest touches.

That example shows you how well the question of why works, but it’s not essential. Let’s try some different kinds of questions:

>What kind of gun does John have?

A service revolver from his time as a soldier.

>What kind of soldier was he?

A regular infantryman, in the trenches.

>What kind of service history did he have?

Brutal. He saw many men die.

John handed Jane a gun: a simple army revolver. Jane knew it was standard issue for trench soldiers. She had heard the stories of those brutal battles and saw John’s hands shook a little as he let go of the side-iron. Jane pretended not to notice.

Or we can try:

>When was John a soldier?

During the recent war against the Elandi.

>When did that war end?

Last year; but it feels like forever since then.

>When did he sign up?

As soon as his father was killed.

John handed Jane a gun: standard military issue but old-fashioned. Jane must have looked puzzled. She had assumed John would have objected to the fighting. “This was my father’s”, he said, with a click in his throat.

And of course we can mix and match, at will. And we can go past three too, if we hit a vein:

>When did John get a gun?

He always keeps one in his desk.

>Where in his desk?

Bottom drawer. Hidden. He’s not supposed to have it.

>Why keep it there?

His wife won’t allow it in the house.

>Why not?

Her father killed her mother with a gun.

>When was that?

After her father came back from the trenches.

>Is this the same gun?

Yes. John took the gun and let her father go into hiding and told the police the murderer was a random intruder.

John handed Jane a gun he had pulled from the bottom drawer of his desk. That was definitely against regulations, which seemed unlike someone as careful as John. “You got to have protection round here”, he added, as if by way of explanation, then acted as if the question was settled.

You might have to go a long way past three questions. If you haven’t hit something that means something, something that paints a vivid, commanding picture, something that excites you and begs to be told, then you need to just keep digging. You have to dig and dig until you hit gold.

>Why does John have a gun?

To keep him safe in a poor neighbourhood.

>Why does he live in a poor neighbourhood?

Because he doesn’t have much money.

>Why doesn’t he have much money?

Because he never got a good job. (Note: we’re going in circles here)

>Why not?

Because he never got an education.

>Why not?

>Because his parents made him go into a trade (now we’re getting somewhere).

>Why?

Because they were poor as well.

>But could he have had an education?

Yes

>So was he smart?

Yes

>So did they take away his chances?

Yes

>So does he resent his parents?

Yes

>And can he forgive them?

Often you’ll know you’ve hit a great question when, like that last one there, you don’t know the answer. A question without an answer isn’t a dead end. It is in fact what you want. A question without an easy answer is one that can be explored. One that can define the whole character.

Note that in that example there was a period where the questions weren’t going anywhere in particular. Rather they were just restating the question in different ways. However if you keep restating the question you will likely find a way to get to a deeper question. Also note that these questions are only about a minor side character, so it may not matter a great deal what secrets John is keeping. If it were a major character, however, learning more about them might change a lot more than a simple scene. You might need to rethink or even rewrite large sections. So for major characters – and for worlds – you want to do as much of this as you can in the planning phase. With worlds, that planning phase is going to take longer than it does with characters and plot. Worlds need long development cycles, with the questions (and the things they connect to) probed over and over again, and the ripples the answers send out checked and rechecked. This is true at every step, from the early brainstorming and in final touches.

You will also note that some of our examples above do a lot of worldbuilding, because characters and worlds interact just like characters do with other characters. And just as character changes have ripples, so do world changes (and worlds change characters, and characters change worlds). Everything about characters impacts your world, and everything about your world impacts your characters.

You can, indeed, make sure your questions are a character and are actually about your world, by directing your focus there.

>Why does John have a gun?

Because everyone does.

>Why does everyone have a gun?

Because this is a dangerous town, and guns are cheap and easy to get.

>What does that mean?

There’s got to be a level of industry to support that. And a level of lawlessness.

Note how key the question of “what does that mean” can be here. That’s the question that digs down into the worldbuilding logic. When it comes to worlds, every idea we can serve up implies a million other things. Everything has an implication. Everything has a consequence. Even the simplest things in our world do, because everything is connected in worlds.¹ Jim has a gun, what does that mean? What assumptions have we made? And what assumptions are part of those assumptions? Steel exists (or some similar metal), probably. Or something like it. Gunpowder exists (or does it?). So mining exists (or does it?). Some sort of precision construction exists (or does it?) and perhaps mass production (or does it)?

Could you make a gun that is made of wood? An elven plant gun? An alien biological gun? Could it fire some magical explosive? Could metals not be mined but collected from the air or extracted from animals or harvested from long dead technology? Could guns be extremely unreliable because they are very poorly made? Could there be only a few in existence? Could they run on intricate clockwork only available to the vastly wealthy? Does Jim have the only gun ever made, and is he being hunted by those who want it back? You see how every single one of these questions can cause incredible consequences and even more questions.

And that’s just material things, we could also do politics…

>Why does John have a gun?

He fought in the war.

>What war?

There was a war between this nation and the Conclave.

>When? How long did it last? Who won? How did they win? Why didn’t they go to war before that, when war is often the general state of nations? What’s stopping the war from starting again?

And that’s the beauty of this: once you turn on this tap it never stops. Every single thing you add to your world has a next step waiting to serve up something else. Every question you answer only leads to another question. We may even have too many questions!²

So far we’re still working with John and Jane. You can do this with every character you might find in your world but of course for the most part we are not starting with characters. But we will have characters very quickly, because we are building a game, and that means players will take on an identity.³ Even if our characters are two gigantic nations or ancient cosmic enemies, those are characters, and we can start questioning. But you can also just start with an idea, or a concept, or an image.

Again, let’s do some examples. Let’s take one of the ideas above – a world with metals but no mining.

>Where do the metals come from?

From animals. Just like we get fur and meat. It is in their bones.

>What does that imply?

That their bones aren’t just made of soft calcium.

>What else could they be made of?

(some research later) Well just up from them in the periodic table are things like titanium and vanadium which are very strong. Also, there’s carbon in bones; maybe there’s a simple process that can turn that carbon into steel. Maybe they discovered that process, or the animals on this world just have huge levels of carbon in their bones for reasons unknown.

And there’s that mystery moment. A question that we want to explore. A reason we want to find out.

Or we might go:

>Where do the metals come from?

From animals. Just like we get fur and meat. It is in their bones.

>What does that imply?

That that process is easier or cheaper than mining.

>What does that imply?

That the planet is very hard. Maybe it’s made of something like gold itself. Something impossibly hard to dig through.

>What does that imply?

If there was something down there…we would have no way of knowing…until it was too late.

Those examples are setting up a whole world or culture or nation; we can do the same thing when we have our setting already partly worked out. Just like our minor character John above, we might suddenly need Jane to go somewhere, or use some technology, or encounter some art. All we have to do is ask questions.

Let’s imagine we’re trying to add flavour to a town.

>What do we know about the town so far?

It’s by the sea.

>What does that mean?

It means that fishing is their primary industry.

>What does that mean?

It means they have a religious relationship with the fish population. Whatever threatens that population threatens them on a spiritual level as well economic.

>How religious is this relationship, exactly?

Let’s find out.

We hit a question without an easy answer, and that’s your plot hook. If we were writing this for a setting book or game we originally might have created an adventure hook like this: “The town depends on the fish population to survive, so will hire the adventurers to find out what’s killing the fish”. But now thanks to our questions, we might have: “The locals are conducting religious ceremonies to try and get the fish population back. Unscrupulous locals may kidnap the adventurers to be sacrificed. Kinder folks will beg the heroes to intervene”. Now we’ve got drama, not just another bland Quest Giver. We’ve got factions. We’ve got different positions on the same issue and moral dilemmas. And so on.

Finally, we can also use these questions to connect elements into other parts of our world and make sure we are spotting all those ripples and interactions.

>Why do they have a fish cult?

Because they need to cast a spell to call the fish, and that means blood sacrifice because that’s how magic works.

>Can they change that?

Maybe they can start farming the fish instead.

>What does that change in turn?

Maybe the wizards want the common folk to use magic so the common folk need wizards. So the wizards likely have systems in place to stop people from not using magic.

>What kind of systems?

Good question. Time to design a new faction in our world.

Or we might try…

>Why do they have a fish cult?

Because they can’t use normal spells to bring the fish in.

>Why not?

Because those spells are locked out to simple peasants.

>By whom?

The big fishing guild wizards.

>What does that imply?

That there’s probably a black market – and maybe a revolt in the works so those spells can be accessible to everyone.

>What’s that market look like?

Good question.

Or

>Why do they have a fish cult?

Because they are running out of fish.

>But there are magic spells that can keep everyone fed, why does this matter?

Probably sometimes those spells can fail, especially far from the capital.

>Would a society know that could happen and take means to guard against it?

Of course, but it doesn’t always work.

>What things stop it from working and why aren’t they fixed? And why is it worse further from the capital? Why does geography matter to magic?

Good questions.

As you can see these questions did not dismantle our predetermined ideas but quickly gave us more depth and development to them. They also suggested opportunities for danger, villainy and choices – all excellent plot hooks – and point towards wants, needs and great follies and narratives, just as a world needs. Questions like these are about finding those narratives, at the micro or macro level, and giving your world the real spark of life. But it does also help to have interesting answers, and we’ll talk about developing that skill in the next chapter.

On a Quest/Stopping By

The exercise is the same here because it’s all about stretching your creative muscles no matter what you’re doing. Leave your current work to one side and run these questions on some other world or other part of your world, something you haven’t thought about much or something not yet developed. Try it over and over again with different things, or to get different outcomes. You want to build this skill so you can do it instinctively, all the time. It is the very core of worldbuilding.

Notes

We’ll come back to this in Chapter 34, too.

We will look at how to find your start point and not get overwhelmed in Chapter 14.

We haven’t explained these concepts properly yet, but we will in Chapter 12.

CHAPTER 8 Question Everything

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-9

TO QUOTE THE LATE great Douglas Adams: assumptions are the things you don’t know you’re making. It takes an enormous amount of work to question the things you don’t even see operating in your brain. That’s how brains work: to help us do everything we need to do, they hide all the things that might get in the way. To see those things, you have to outwit your own brain and your brain is clever. It knows all your tricks.

For worlds to be truly different and interesting and exciting, they need to step outside what we think and beyond what we imagine. They need to have both content and ideas that are alien to our world. That means we have to train our brains to get past assumptions. To see further, and question deeper. It doesn’t help that we’re surrounded by worlds all the time now, all of them trying to be different while at the same time wearing down each new edge they find into cliches.

Luckily there are things we can do to help build this skill. We can travel the world and experience other cultures. We can study and read about history, geography, biology and nature, to see how other people and things have lived and explore their view of the universe. We can explore philosophy and do imagination and creativity exercises. These are all good places to start. And they all lead to the same thing: learning to question our assumptions.

Questioning assumptions is all about saying not just “what if?” but also “what if it were different?”. “What if it wasn’t the way it is?”. “What if” doesn’t go far enough, because it doesn’t give us anything to change. And it’s in that change that we can find the most interesting ideas, but it’s also where we hit walls. Our brain shuts down at the question because the answer instantly comes back that it must be so. Getting past that requires two steps. First, are you really seeing all the assumptions you have made along the way? The more assumptions you can see, the more of them you can question and the more of them you can change. This also helps you see assumptions you might miss later when we change things and forget that everything in our world is connected. Unpacking assumptions gives you the ability to turn them on and off. The second part is not immediately abandoning an attempt to change something because it “doesn’t make sense”. The human brain is very good at funnelling information. It shuts down possibilities so we can make sense of our world, learn and survive. So we instinctively shut down things we know aren’t “true” or “possible”, and we get stuck. (And sometimes we can be completely wrong about what can be possible and what might be true.)

Let’s look at an example and try to keep it simple. Let’s pick something that also appears in lots of games these days: fishing. So many video games use fishing or have a fishing mini game. But what are the assumptions in the idea that a character in a game might go fishing?

First, obviously, we might assume that fish exist. That means there’s oceans, or rivers, or some bodies of water (unless fish aren’t water creatures). Things must live in that water and some of those things fish likely eat so they stay alive; there also can’t be so many predators to kill all the fish. If the character is fishing, it means they see the fish as fit to eat and right to eat: the fish provide nutrition, and it is morally okay to slaughter them for food, or practical concerns are permitted to override the moral ones. The creature(s) doing the fishing are allowed to eat the fish, presumably, under the law, if there is a law. There is something driving the need to catch the fish. Maybe it isn’t for food. Or it is but not food to survive but food as a delicacy. Or are they fishing for ceremonial reasons? To acquire a fish as a trophy to gain social status? To prove themselves, to gain entry to a cultural status or to follow a tradition or habit? Or just for fun? There are so many reasons one might fish.

We might also assume it’s some sort of tool-based fishing, not bears fishing with their claws. So, these fish-eating individuals are tool users of some sort (or they choose to be in the case of fishing) who have access to the raw materials to make fishing tools and the ability to learn how to do so. That in turn implies things about the environment they live in and the culture it supports: they can gather raw materials and pass on knowledge, or they are smart enough to learn on their own. There’s even one deeper assumption we missed: that one person fishing implies many people fish. That this is a habit of the creature’s species, people, culture or settlement, not just this one individual. When we say “there is fishing”, do we mean there is one example of that, or many? Are all the examples the same?¹

Now to find new ideas, all we need to do is question every single one of these assumptions and imagine if they weren’t true.

Starting at the top: maybe fish don’t exist. People are still fishing so maybe they believe fish do exist. Maybe fish once existed; maybe people don’t yet know that the fish are gone. Or they might fish regardless: fishing might be an exercise in hope, or prayer, or historical recreation. It might be a “ritualistic practice”. An old anthropology joke goes that anything anthropologists don’t understand is labelled as having a ritualistic purpose. Maybe people continue the ritual in the hope they’ll come back – or, maybe to hide that they’ve gone. Maybe they are trying to still get paid for the work they do. We don’t have to limit this to a pure yes or no question either. Maybe only a few fish exist, nigh- mythical fish that folks want to catch to become heroes but will likely never do. Maybe fish are vanishingly rare but it’s like playing the lottery or digging for gold nuggets: they are so incredibly valuable that it is worth trying to catch them. Maybe fish numbers are slowly vanishing so it’s less and less profitable every day but what can a fisher do but keep trying? Maybe there’s something else besides fish, but the practice is still called fishing because the idea came from a world with fish. Perhaps the practice has nothing to do with actual fish, because it was invented by Lord Fish. All these possibilities with that very first assumption: if fishing exists, then fish exist.²

We can also follow these new assumptions to make interesting conclusions. The partner in crime of questioning assumptions is asking for the implications of changing those assumptions. If fish don’t exist now but used to, then they died, do the smaller animals, free of natural predators, grow in abundance? Or do some other creatures gobble those up, taking on the role of fish? One would assume that a lack of something higher in the food chain would cause things below to grow without control, but that’s also an assumption. This could be a world where food chains don’t exist – or rather, one where such ideas aren’t important enough to mention or think about. A world of fantasy, say, where animals are metaphors. A world where we can say that the fish are gone without needing to justify a lack of a competitor taking over their role in the ecosystem. This might be a beautiful fantasy world that is dying from a sickness or recovering from one. Perhaps a magical figure came and sang all the fish a song and they followed the figure into the stars. Will they come back? The lonely fishers think so. They cast their nets at night hoping to catch the fish back from the sky.

We’ve gone a long way and we only started with that very first assumption. And now comes the next step: every time there’s an implication, it too is powered by its own assumptions, which means this game of inspiration is self-sustaining and never-ending. Make a change, consider the implications, then question the assumptions therein and loop around and around. If the fish were led away by a magical being, who was that being? Why did they take the fish? Are they coming back to take other things? If fish can vanish and the whole food chain not collapse, why? It might not matter to this setting, but what if it did? What if it matters a little bit? Perhaps there is a new creature in the water now. Perhaps the magic being wished to save the fish from being eaten by those creatures? We could turn the idea of a food chain on and off and see what happens, because it’s also an assumption.

Obviously, a premise like “food chains don’t exist” could be a big deal. The bigger the assumption, the more things it might affect, and typically the more fantastical a world where it doesn’t hold. A big assumption also requires more knowledge about the topics at hand. “There is no food chain” is a big idea to think about. You might need to read some books on biology or ask a biologist. However, you might find that there are few books or biologists that will be useful. One of the consequences of knowledge is you internalise some core principles. It might be quite hard indeed for a biologist to even think of what the question might mean, let alone conceive of an answer. For the most part, it isn’t science’s job to completely ignore what is and conceive of what is not.

It might be better to ask a small child. The great science communicator Julius Sumner Miller loved to ask small children what might exist outside scientific categorisation because they hadn’t had their doors of perception closed with knowledge. Not that small children are exactly easy to come by, certainly no easier than biologists. You might instead ask a cartoonist or a comedian. Indeed, one skill that they teach in writing comedy is the ability to build nonsense and to tolerate nonsense because that’s a great way to write jokes. And that ability to create and enjoy nonsense is a worldbuilding superpower. It starts as nonsense but then as we said in the chapter about realism, all you have to do is sell it.

Note that nonsense isn’t the same as a world not making sense. Everyone knows that in a Road Runner cartoon physics doesn’t work the way we know it, but that world has a truth to it. It has rules and cohesion and causality that make plenty of sense. If every now and then the Road Runner fell off a cliff, then that wouldn’t fit. It wouldn’t make sense. Rules matter. Internal logic matters. But rules and logic can be made of nonsense.

We don’t want every world to be like the Road Runner, of course. Different kinds of worlds and different kinds of audiences have different tolerances for nonsense. But humans are inherently silly creatures and our own world is full of the ridiculous. A world where people fish even though there are no fish in the sea may seem silly at first, but real-world humans have purchased NFTs and other far, far sillier things. We don’t make a lot of sense, and having your world sometimes do the same will make it feel more believable.

There are some ideas so dumb that almost nobody can take them seriously. However this is usually because they don’t seem to add anything cool along with it. People will tolerate the impractical, the illogical or the farcical if it also looks or sounds interesting or attractive. Ultimately, most worldbuilding exists to provide technical discourse and the point of technical discourse is to make the reader feel that the writer cares about what they think and wants the reader to feel smart and special. Adding something wacky just for a weird personal flourish, or with no forethought or no pay-off, or because you didn’t think about it or couldn’t think of anything else makes the reader feel used. But if something is stupid because it’s interesting, or silly because it’s accurate, or crazy because that’s exactly how the real world works, that’s a completely different story. Then we feel included and complimented and want to know more.

We will look more on the real world being stupid (and other things) in the next lesson.

On a Quest

Practise your assumption-busting skills and nonsense tolerance by identifying fundamentally limited concepts, where things are only A or B or only A, B or C, then trying to think of extra categories or the consequences of fewer. What if a world had day, night and a third thing? What if a world had only liquids and gas, no solids? What if battle arenas weren’t just land, sea and air, but two more things, or a completely different list? You get the idea. Note that this is hard! At times it will seem impossible. Keep at it anyway. This is an exercise, building a muscle: it will get easier over time.

Stopping By

Pick something in your world, something small, like fishing. Then run down all the assumptions that are lying behind it that cause it to exist and all the implications following from the thing existing. Chances are there are some you haven’t thought of yet. Try to list at least twenty of each. Then look at both lists. Do they conflict with anything in your world elsewhere? Or do they almost fit but there’s possibly some tension or something that makes them less believable? Could that tension be removed with some extra justification or added elements, or could the tension be increased into something interesting by removing or changing some of the assumptions? What would happen to your world if something it relies on to be true suddenly wasn’t true? What would your world do if the fish all vanished? Would people still go to the old fishing hole? Would they have sports fish trophies on their walls or, indeed, battery-powered singing fish? What might they have instead?

Notes

Dealing with assumptions like this also comes up in game design and is the source of the “Door Problem”. The Door Problem is the idea that if you imagine a game like Pac-Man, for example, there are no doors – everything is always accessible. As soon as a door is added to a map or a graphic, then you have changed the entire scope of the project because now every access point, every traversable space, could possibly be barred by a door or a barrier, and you now need to inform the players if they are barred or not, and if they are barred, how to know if they are open or closed and whether they can be locked or not, and you have to test with players if this information is communicated clearly. In a game like Pac-Man, answering this is relatively easy – areas can be colour-coded as “out of bounds”, and everything else is accessible. As a game becomes complex, the Door Problem becomes incredibly more complex. Simple decisions have enormous consequences in terms of how much “bigger” your game is – how much more space a player is forced to consider and how much more coding and testing is required. Understanding how the Door Problem can shift so much will also help train your brain to see how underlying assumptions are so powerful. It can also help you see how worlds need to communicate information to the audience.

You could even go one step back and go “does fishing exist, or do people only think it does?”.

CHAPTER 9 Reality Is Your Muse

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-10

WHEN IT COMES TO fiction, whether it is fictional characters or stories or worlds, nothing pulls us out of our suspension of disbelief more swiftly than an idea that seems stupid. We can tolerate characters being foolish, rash or lacking foresight, being blindly self-destructive, damning themselves with their hubris or pride or cowardice or any other kind of flaws but outside of the broadest comedy we cannot tolerate our protagonists being straight-out stupid. Being dim-witted, slow or ill-informed we find it endearing, but stupidity enrages us. A villain or an antagonist can make mistakes but they better be defensible or dramatic ones. Defeating a stupid enemy only makes the hero look cheap; joining a stupid ally makes the hero seem weak.

The nice thing about worldbuilding is we are a little more forgiving of stupidity in worlds than we are in characters. This is because we know worlds are often stupid, because we live in a stupid world: reality. We’ve spent our whole lives getting used to a world where people are vainglorious, stubborn idiots, societies are cruel, values are self-serving, habits are nonsensical, customs are hollow and beliefs are hurtful. Our processes often are set up to fail and our systems are frequently ridiculous. The law fails to provide justice, knowledge doesn’t make us smarter and communication often drives us apart instead of bringing us together. Our great and powerful civilisations have a habit of crumbling into dust.

This is all terribly depressing regarding the state of the world, but excellent news for worldbuilders. And reality isn’t just stupid: it can be completely unbelievable or inexplicable at times too. Random coincidences, bathetic tragicomedy, cruel irony and dumb luck run riot through history. So your world too is allowed to not make a whole lot of sense in some places. But we have a stupidity tolerance in worlds too. Worlds can only be stupid in a way that feels believably stupid. Recognisably stupid. Stupid in a way that feels familiar to us from the world around us. As we said in Chapter 6, it’s believability that matters more than accuracy, which means you need to know what people around you believe.

No matter how anarchic or fantastic the world you build, it has to make sense and “feel right” to the reader and that means it has to take some or even most of its points from reality. Realism is a chain, but reality – with all its lack of realism at times – is your best and primary source. Your source and your muse. The more you know about the world around you, how it works and all the things in it, particularly the many strange creatures, cultures and world views, the better your world design will be.

That means you need to do research, but there are two kinds of research. The first is the one we all know: we want to know more about a particular topic so we go to the internet (or the books in our local library) and find sources about that topic, and then read them (or watch them if they are educational films – YouTube is fantastic for this). The other kind of research is passive research, the kind of research you don’t really know you’re doing and if you did it wouldn’t be for something in particular. You’re just moving through the world with a curious spirit and a passion to know more so that one day the knowledge you’re soaking up might be useful. If learning things is a habit you pursue all the time, you will also be storing away an endless supply of worldbuilding ideas. Whenever we create, we can only build on what we know. The more we know, the more we can build; and the richer and deeper we can build.

For example, a few years ago I was developing elements of the Norscan culture for the Warhammer Fantasy setting. For this particular work we were looking at how societies where reputation is king can develop into a world built entirely around braggadocio and projecting a false identity. Weeks before I had been reading about the Fyre Festival scandal, where hundreds of tourists were caught in a web of manufactured deceit by braggadocio and false promises. Much of what I worked into that Norscan worldbuilding was, believe or not, based on the Fyre Festival con. I also went and studied other sources as well as more about the Festival, but if I hadn’t been reading about it in the first place I would never have found that inspiration.

Another example: just this morning I read a story about how new scientific evidence seems to indicate that the Australian dingo has not interbred with European domestic dogs as much as previously thought; in fact, barely at all. This research is crucial because Australian environmental policies currently produce a very stark split: wild dogs are not just permitted to be shot to protect local fauna, it is encouraged. If the dingo is a dog, it is something that will be shot; if it is an ancient indigenous species, it cannot be shot. Do I know where I will use this in a game? No. Does it give me amazing ideas for worldbuilding? Absolutely. I might use it in a medieval world where the feudal lords need to know if something is of the natural world or of the devil before they decide how to deal with it. I could build an entire science-fiction world about agents whose job it is to rescue local lifeforms from alien invasions, while also understanding that the decision to call something an attacking alien or a vital species to preserve is at least somewhat arbitrary. This could get even more interesting if the alien “invasion” is a rapid process of interbreeding, infecting or mutating, something like we saw in the film Annihilation (Garland, 2018). You could also imagine that the species themselves might have opinions on all this. Then there’s a modern day or horror campaign ideas: what if it turned out a canid species that was like nothing else on earth and contained some heritage of a werewolf? What if the Deep Ones from Cthulhu had political agents lobbying the government to alter fishing regulations or were shifting the Overton Window about what is considered a genetic illness and what is considered a terrible monstrous inheritance. Maybe the Thing on the Doorstep is doing a push poll.

With a curious spirit, learning is everywhere and your life can be research. It doesn’t have to be reading big dense academic books. I’m actually a terrible reader: I read extremely slowly and lose focus easily. But I learn really well from watching videos or documentaries or going to places like museums, zoos and galleries. That’s my way of doing research. I also enjoy some podcasts, of which there are countless that tackle history and science. Some come with comedy or commentary to make it more fun. Similarly, a lot of people do their research by reading or watching historical fiction; even when it’s wrong, it can get you curious enough to go and find out the truth. Other people might just take classes, online or in person, or travel the world. Every new experience can be a chance to learn something new.

Participating in your favourite pastimes also easily leads you to learn more about them. Enjoying your favourite forms of entertainment does the same. You don’t have to study the history of wrestling to enjoy a match or know how tea is made to enjoy a good cuppa, but if you encourage your curiosity, these things will likely seep in around the edges over time with very little effort. You might not think knowing more about those things would be useful in worldbuilding, but everything is useful to building art, and everything that’s in our world teaches you how worlds work. And this is true no matter how alien the worlds we are depicting because even alien worlds have to have some sort of sense and connectivity. You’re not just learning the ideas themselves, see – you’re learning to understand how things connect.

A great worldbuilder once told me that “nothing in a world seems real unless it is connected to (at least) three other things”. It’s how things sit in relation to and having effect on other things that make them feel believable. As a simple example, consider Smaug in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. He is a greatly fantastical creature, but he is grounded by the fact that he is not just the antagonist, sitting on the stolen treasure of Thorin’s ancestors. Bilbo knows that to talk to dragons you must talk in riddles. The folk of Rivertown know of Smaug as a perennial menace. Smaug says he has eaten the people of Girion, Lord of Dale. We actually don’t know much more than that about Smaug, but three things are enough.

The alien creature in Alien is an equally vague and mysterious antagonist. Before the events of Prometheus we knew almost nothing about where they came from or what they wanted. But we are again given key points beyond just how it lives and kills. The “space jockey” scene, showing something else had fallen afoul of the creature, was key to showing that they existed in an ecosystem. That same ship sends out a distress beacon that causes the Nostromo to alter course and bring the crew out of hypersleep to investigate. We also find out that Ash and the company know what’s there and want it recovered. That’s much more grounded than having the alien simply just appear as wild fauna. Note that we don’t need to know why or how Ash or the company knew about the creature or even why they might want it. It’s the connective tissue that matters more than what it connects to.

This connectivity isn’t the same thing as everything in your world having a sound ecological or historical context, however. Tea exists in the Narnia books of C. S. Lewis without Narnia having an analogue of China or a trans-oceanic trade system or even the right climate to grow it (the entirety of Narnia is roughly the size of Puerto Rico and the climate seems to be mostly temperate). But after Mr Tumnus offers it to Lucy, we see that later the guards who take him away have smashed his tea set to pieces. The beaver family offers tea to the children as well, repeating the sense that tea is part of a regular meal and a source of comfort. Mr Tumnus considers it polite to offer guests tea (and impolite not to), so it has a sense of ritual and hospitality. Narnia’s ideas are often random and exist more for whimsy, plot reasons or metonymy, but Lewis still remembers to connect his elements.

Surrealism is probably the only place you can get away from connecting things to each other or the real world, and as such there are no surrealist games. As soon as one requires that players step into a world and act as if it is real, the unreality of surrealism collapses: the causality of embodiment is a requirement surrealism cannot satisfy. However, even in the bizarre disconnected worlds of Lewis Carroll, where a candy shop can turn into a pond at a moment’s notice and for no reason, the shop owner appears in a boat having the same autocratic nature as she did as shopkeeper, a manner well known to young children in the real world.

And again, these kinds of things come from looking at the world around you with intent, and with curiosity, and really seeing them. You don’t have to learn about the East India Company or the biology of Camella sinensis; you can simply see how tea (or whatever you fancy) operates in the world. What kinds are there? Who drinks it and when? Where does it come from? It does help though to have the extra curiosity to start looking things up, though. Wikipedia is your friend and so is Britannica.com.¹ If you have a house, own some reference books and pick them up from time to time. Or go to libraries and browse amongst the shelves. You want to get interested in being interested in things, especially things you don’t know much about, and bringing those ideas into your current understanding. You want to know the things you don’t know you don’t know, which you can only find out through whimsy and serendipity. Wander down a random bookstore aisle and grab the first thing you see. Read a newspaper cover to cover. Open books to random pages.

Some folks like to use random generators as well, to mix ideas together. You can do this yourself by simply grabbing two random ideas from the methods above (Wikipedia has a random button built in). You can also find many “idea generators” online for free, or you can spend lots of money on all sorts of inspirational card decks and so forth. AI is now also offering ways to do this (but so far not in any way differently than a random wiki page). Many amazing RPG products, both old and new, are full of random tables to spark creative connections. But if enough knowledge of the real world is coming into your head and you have a wide variety of interests and general curiosity, you are the randomiser, especially when you combine it with the kind of questioning of assumptions we talked about in the previous chapter.

To be clear: deep or exhaustive knowledge of something is good too. That teaches you not just about your one subject of interest but also how the depths of knowledge work on any topic. It also helps improve your curiosity and your skills in looking further and digging harder. It is all inherently about the same muscle: the need to know more and to see more, and letting go of the idea that one single fact is all there is.

Curiosity, really, is your silver bullet. Curiosity builds empathy, and empathy builds good world design and good game design. Curiosity also saves you from thinking you know everything, which is the best way to end up making mistakes or being stupid. Curiosity prevents this because it is an inherently humble position: it assumes that most people and most experiences can teach us something new. People love to encounter someone curious and they are often then very keen to teach you something they know. And that’s a thing we’ll talk more about in the next chapter.

On a Quest

If you’ve already done a lot of research for your setting, choose something you haven’t researched (even something random you’re not sure if or how you’ll even use) and look it up. Or choose a different way to do your research from your normal methods. It’s always good to have another quiver in your bow.

Stopping By

Go to Wikipedia and generate a random page and learn something you never knew before. Then think of how it could be something in your setting or any setting. It might inspire a creature, a faction, a country, a character, a practice, a moment in history, a trend, a style – whatever you like.

Note

The internet is becoming increasingly destroyed by AI slop, but those two websites remain excellent.

CHAPTER 10 Keep Asking People

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-11

RESEARCH MATTERS. YOU CAN’T be any sort of artist unless you want to understand the world you are representing and expressing ideas about. It’s less about passing a test, though, and more about getting the raw material to power your creation. Artists are constantly asked where they get their ideas from and most of the time, research is the answer. It’s also where ideas develop, come into full bloom and gain more meaning and depth. In the last chapter, we talked about lots of different ways to do that research but there was one very special one we left out: just ask other people.

Harlan Ellison once said that knowing something is the same as knowing where to find it – there’s no reason to memorise an encyclopaedia when you have a set sitting on your shelves. And the best kinds of encyclopaedias are people. Of course, not all our friends may be the experts we desire (you might need to check either their qualifications or some of their statements) and they might not all be the best teachers, but everyone has something they are passionate about and are just bursting to explain to someone else. And with the Internet, we can reach so many people! Which means you can ask weirder and weirder questions.

You can also do something else, too. You can ask them if they believe your ideas once you have them. In this way you are road-testing your worldbuilding to see if it holds up to the test of “realism”. It might not matter if your topic is really niche, of course! If only people who know a lot about a very narrow suspect find something unreasonable, then most of your audience will likely not. But if it passes muster (or nearly does) with those people, then you know it’s solid as a rock.

As an example of this, let’s say I’ve decided to write a setting about vampires fighting nazis. I do some research online about the history of Transylvania and see that the Ottomans effectively extinguished the Hungarian empire in 1526. I decide that perhaps in this event the Ottomans were seeking revenge on Vlad the Impaler and – seeing the way the winds were blowing – he and his servants went into a magical sleep for 400 years, waking up in the 1930s just in time to form a tentative ally with Russia and stop the nazi warmachine from advancing eastwards. Does that sound roughly believable? I have no idea. But I go and find a nerd who knows a lot about World War II. I can ask them general research questions but I can also simply just explain the idea and see what they think. Does it suddenly snap their suspension of disbelief? If so, what would I need to change or establish to make it more believable?

Then there are other questions we can ask too: is it not just believable but also interesting? Can they think of exciting consequences this might bring or great story potential it might suggest? Can they see further implications to world history? Does it immediately make them want to start theorising what would happen next? Can they jot down those ideas for you as well? Would they mind if you came back and asked them some more questions about those later? I might even ask about what kind of game they might like to see in such a setting, and what kind of characters they might like to play or what kind of moments they might like to play through or zoom right in on.

In games, it is particularly important that your setting inspires people very swiftly because games don’t have a lot of time to make a good impression. After the art and a brief summary, the next thing that comes is playing a game is usually a ton of rules. It is the setting and the excitement of stepping into that world and embodying those characters that are the gateway into engaging with your game. You need to know, as early as possible, if your world works. If it inspires or falls flat. And the only way to be sure is to test it. That means explaining it as often as you can to as many people as you can. Over and over and over again and noting every time the things they like best, the things they ignore and the things they think are stupid. Keep asking questions about the things you’re not sure about and asking them for ideas to fill in any gaps or fix any problems.

What you’re storing in other people’s heads isn’t just research: it’s inspiration. It’s creativity. And it’s enthusiasm. And all of this is also a kind of playtesting. Or “worldtesting” perhaps would be a better term. The point of a world is not just to house your game and give it meaning and narrative but to excite people, from the very first concept onwards. You always want to know if your world is doing that, so you always need to be testing that. Even when you no longer need to do research, you’ll want to keep putting your world in front of people and seeing what they think. This goes for every aspect of your world, too, not just the broad concept and at every step of the process.

Luckily you can usually do this in conversation; you don’t have to get people to the table to test as you do with game mechanics. When you do get them to the table though, you’ll be wanting to pitch your world there as well. Not at great length, of course, but again, that’s the skill you’re trying to hone: synthesis of ideas down to the core parts the audience needs to know. You’ll also be testing how people learn the world from the theme elements included in the rules, art and flavour and from the mechanics themselves. If you want people to learn that knights usually charged at the enemy in straight lines, chess will let you down.

All of this is also making the game and the world clearer to you as well, both as a product that has to attract an audience and as a tool for you to use, an idea to explore and an expression of what you care about. It sounds contradictory, but the person you also need to ask about everything is also yourself. It’s very easy in worldbuilding to put things in as placeholders and temporary solutions. Worlds have millions of assumptions and are built by aggregation and agglomeration; along the way we often grab ideas and stick them in to keep the process rolling forwards without actually checking that they really work or really excite us. And nobody needs to be more passionate about a project than you. That doesn’t mean blindly obsessed about every detail and failing to “kill your darlings” – cutting the ideas that you love but don’t quite work – nor does it mean you have to create the kind of vast and deep references that Tolkien did. But building a game and a world are both Herculean tasks, and it’s going to matter that you are invested.

It should also be something you have a personal stake in, at some level. There are increasingly more and more worlds being published, and they are increasingly harder and harder to tell apart. Love and passion behind the design and a strong artistic vision can be a crucial factor in standing out and catching attention. You need good marketing too, of course, but people are hungry for things that feel authentic and have meaning to them, even when the settings are lightly drawn. Much like the iterating questions we did in Chapter 7, you should ask yourself why you want to make this world. Of course it needs to exist to host and give meaning to the mechanics (and we’ll talk more about that soon) but why does it need to exist in this form? Why does it need to exist here, now, in this way? Why do you need to build this world? Why are you the best person to create it? What do you want to say, or what questions do you want to ask as you build it?

You want to keep asking yourselves these questions and also get good at giving yourself the answers. Once you find answers that stick, you can find ways to summarise and concentrate those answers to provide a singular design focus. The summaries we talked about above became pitches, designed to sell your world to an audience. These summaries instead become ideas to sell the world to yourself and to use as guideposts for all your designs. I like to call these the keynotes.

The term comes from music. A piece written in the key of C will use the notes from the C scale, because those notes all resonate with each other. If you know the keynote of a scale, you know the rest of the scale because all scales follow the same patterns, stemming from that note. Composers, conductors and bandleaders would often strike the keynote on the pianoforte or other instrument to give their performers the sense of all that will follow. Metaphorically then the keynote is the summary of a thing and an emblem from which all the rest stems. In his book Hard Times Charles Dickens has a chapter entitled “The Keynote”, where he describes the core nature of the book’s setting, the industrially ravaged town of Coketown. Here is where all the action takes place and from which all the titular suffering also stems. Coketown’s haze of chimney smoke and befouled chemical air hangs over everything below it and over the miserable lives of the working poor within it. The keynote sets that tone for the reader and sets the cast of the life of those poor.

Later on we’ll talk more about writing your keynotes when developing your world bible. For now the point is to keep asking yourself about your world as well as much and as often as you ask other people. Talk through it, out loud preferably. Write it down. Draw sketches. You’re trying to bring your world into the light through the process of interrogating it, exploring it and testing it, and then finally, once you know how it works, summarising it so you and your audience can see it clearly.

Of course, there are some parts you might not want them to see, and we’ll talk about that in the next chapter.

On a Quest

Try to summarise your world (and/or your game). Try to do so in just a hundred words. Then fifty. Then twenty. Then ten. Then seven. Then five. How low can you go? What do you have to leave out? What can’t you leave out? What do people need to know the most? What turns out to be the most important part?

Stopping By

Choose an element in your world. Does it really belong in your world or is it just there because you haven’t thought about it yet and have just defaulted to the standard? For example, do your spaceships have engines that use fuel? Do your zombies eat brains? Do other things rely on that? If it breaks the “rules” of history or science, is it believable? Does it need to be magical when it could be mundane, or vice versa?¹ Could it be more interesting or something you are more interested in? Find someone else and ask them the same questions.

Note

The legendary fantasy author Raymond E. Feist argues that you should never make something magical unless it absolutely has to be. This helps your worlds feel more believable, makes magic seem more important and actually makes your job as a worldbuilder much easier!

CHAPTER 11 Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-12

THE TITLE OF THIS chapter comes from the science fiction/comedy author Douglas Adams. His great book The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy describes an advanced race of superbeings who build the greatest artificial mind ever, in order to determine the meaning of life. The launch of this computer is attacked by philosophers. They are protesting the machine because if it solves the meaning of life, philosophers won’t need to exist any more and they will be out of a job. They demand, in their protest: “Rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty”. Years later, the roleplaying game In Nomine from Steve Jackson Games would rely heavily on this same phrase when detailing its world. The setting involved angels and demons and was full of secrets, lies and mysteries. As the books in the line grew in number, it was important for game masters to consult a wiki and determine which things were definitely true, which things were lies, which things were just not revealed in book X but were (or might be) revealed in a later book, or hadn’t been decided yet, and which things were marked to remain ever mysterious (or left to the reader to decide). Things unlikely to be answered in published works were labelled “rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty”.

We often think of worldbuilding as “wikibuilding”. Everything that is said in the text is true, and the point of saying anything at all in the text is to make things true. Canon then becomes something that is studied, recorded, scrubbed for facts and analysed for errors, with the aim of creating a wiki that stores all the necessary facts. That’s a fine approach from the fan end but it’s not really how creators should work. The wiki is the after-effect of a world, not the beginning. And as fun as it is to play detective, it’s really the not knowing that really excites us as audiences. Good worldbuilding benefits from areas of doubt and uncertainty the same way that horror movies benefit from darkness. At the edge of the map there should always be signs that say, “Here Be Dragons”. That makes the map more exciting because it creates contrast: the known becomes more intense when set against the unknown, and vice versa.

You can also think of this as light and shadow. Your world should have big brightly lit areas that are eager to show off everything within them, illuminating the visitor with everything they could possibly want to know. And it should be made all the more dazzling by how the light fades quickly at the edges. How things can be half-glimpsed in the shadows. And then…nothing can be seen at all. The edges are the key: the things we can only see hints of. These things don’t have to be scary of course! They’re just mysterious because they’re not in the spotlight. A few chapters ago I said that everything should be connected to three other things; those connections can and typically do extend out of the “frame” of where we set out story.¹

Consider the first time we saw the Star Trek Enterprise on television. It was on a mission. There was some sense of being sent by someone that would soon become the vaguely defined Federation. We could clearly see these people were out doing important things. We imagined everything else that was offstage. Even today, when we engage with Star Trek, we don’t keep the entire universe in our heads. We are looking here, but we are knowing there must be something else over there. That’s what makes fictional worlds exciting. In media set in our own worlds we might have suspense if things are not being shown but we know the world around everyone is just like our world. When we visit fictional worlds we don’t have that certainty.

What we choose to put in the spotlight is what drives our audience’s imagination and is kept in their minds as they look into the shadows at the edges. In a detective story, it is the grisly murders that the heroes stumble across that paint the picture of the violent individual behind them. Just so, the epic struggle of the rebels against the Empire in Star Wars paints a picture of the evil things the Empire have done without us needing a great deal of examples. The way the characters in the original trilogy talk about the force and the Jedi lets us imagine the epic history that has slowly been painted in to fill that curiosity. The long close-ups of the mask of Darth Vader hint at the shadows beneath it; the tired, strained way Obi-Wan speaks about the past suggests a brutal, savage conflict.

A few have noticed, meanwhile, that Star Wars has little commerce of any scale; its finances seem to be medieval, with an emphasis on guilds and trading houses. There is no real galactic stock exchange, no mass media (in fact no media at all except live entertainment) and thus no advertising. None of this really feels absent though. Nor is there much religion to speak of besides the Jedi, which is part of why its introduction in The Mandalorian felt so fresh and interesting. These gaps were perhaps initially unintentional, but they gained an intentionality to them and a sense of the world’s flavour and style. We don’t think about these things being outside of the spotlight: the things that are shown are what we focus on. The focus controls our attention and our imagination.

There are plenty of things we don’t really want explained or are perfectly happy to “just work”. No matter how much we might pretend we like realism, we don’t need to see fictional characters trip over, stammer on their words or go to the toilet; similarly there are plenty of things we are happy to ignore in the fictional worlds we visit. Consider, for example, how vampires drink blood, given that they are dead. They have no peristalsis muscular contraction to make things move down their throats. Nor do we care how they turn this blood into energy to go on living. Is it like blood-drinking insects, where there are enzymes present in the lumen of the intestine that break down the proteins, or is it like ticks, where the blood is broken down via an intracellular process? Few creators have said because few audiences care, and the only reason to point attention at this would be if it led to an interesting fictional addition, such as if a scientist discovered a way to interfere with the intestinal enzymes.

Until then, nobody has said because nobody cares. We’re totally okay with something being made clearly true, right out in the open – that vampires must drink the blood of humans to live – but with the interior logic or process being kept deep in shadow. This is the “black box” idea which exists throughout all worldbuilding, even the most prestigious. At some point it is okay for something to “just work”.

In some cases, these hidden explanations can be nested, like Russian dolls. Originally, the faster than light speed travel in Star Trek was not explained at all but when the next generation of shows began in the 1980s the writers had heard audience comments (or thought to themselves) that such movement would be impossible due to the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle and that the speeding up to such speeds would crush the crew with inertia. So the script began to speak of the Heisenberg Compensators and the Inertial Dampers. When asked how they work, the writers famously said, “they work very well, thank you”. In effect all they did was shifting the black box one level down, but in doing so it broadened the world.

Once again this is the use of light and shadow, where what we mention implies something else. Star Trek is the expert at this, which is one reason why it set the tone for so much worldbuilding. Once we specify some things, we gain the benefits of that detail. Now if something goes wrong with the ship, we have more to ponder. It’s not just that the magic thing that makes the ship go is broken; rather something might be wrong with the magic Heisenberg Compensators. Our speculation is directed to think technically by the way the technical language is used.

Many – perhaps most – genre settings come down to things that have this kind of black box idea, to one or more things that “just work” or “just exist”. Sometimes this idea is used so often in certain genres or media, and the device has its own name. Specific tropes get nicknames among writers or players, and sometimes these end up creeping into the world itself, or the trope itself of “just working” gets a name. In comics it has been referred to as “handwavium”, a portmanteau of “handwaving” some problem aside combined with an allusion to the Marvel comics fetish for exotic chemical elements that end in -ium. Handwavium is a shorthand for the general disbelief that is required to get everything in superhero comics to hang together and is only loosely explained through brief technical discourse or vague dialogue. Handwavium has a bigger cousin in worldbuilding, too. David Greenwalt, a writer on the TV shows Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel, is credited with popularising the term “phlebotinum”. Phlebotinum is a key element of functionality that exists to keep the conceits of the universe operating, at once not only justifying the fantastic but also giving it some inherent logic, even if that logic is really just another black box.

Fury specifically warned his writers not to “mess” with the phlebotinum too much, or the whole premise might collapse. One might imply that the Heisenberg Compensators were doing something mysterious, but it would be unwise to start laying out with any kind of precision or completeness how they work or definitely don’t work. Pulling something too much into the light has incredible risks. It can make all the things that depended on that thing being in shadow fall apart. If the vampire-fighting scientists mentioned above went into too much detail about intestinal enzymes people might start to wonder how vampires manage without peristalsis or gut bacteria; if your setting also involved the vampires not showing up on camera you might start to question how the scientists can even see the enzymes. Opening the phlebotinum up to scrutiny risks making everything untenable, because it is usually tied to everything else. But it is those very connections that make the phlebotinum seem interesting and “believable”. Likewise the few details provided about it do the same. Dancing along the edge of light and shadow, revealed and hidden, is how worlds stay compelling. They hint that everything has an explanation but carefully keep the actual explanation tucked away.

This is true of all setting elements, but as Greenwalt warned the most care is needed for the elements that form the spine or core of your world’s concepts. When you worldbuild, you need to know which ideas matter the most whether they are in light or shadow – where your phlebotinum lies. In Star Wars, there is only one magical power in the Force so it is extremely sensitive to its rules being changed.² Contrarily, high-weirdness settings like Marvel comics have a thousand ways to explain any given setting conceit: science experiments, chemicals, radiation, gods, magic, spirits, aliens, mysticism, all existing and overlapping, concurrent and consecutive. So those things can be detailed, examined, exposed or changed without much care. However, a big core belief that makes most superhero comics work is that nobody questions why the heroes run around in their underwear, or that general vigilantism as a good idea, or how it makes no sense to pretend to have a strict moral objection to killing while punching regular humans in the head with fists the size of rump roasts. That’s where Marvel phlebotinum lies. You absolutely can question these things, and a lot of amazing worlds and stories have come from doing just that, but you can only do it with the understanding that if you mess with those pillars, it changes everything. You take them away and you don’t really have superheroes any more: instead you end up with Alan Moore’s Watchmen or Garth Ennis’ The Boys or Mark Millar’s Kick-Ass – or end up entirely in self-mockery (like Bob Burden’s Mystery Men).

Suspense of disbelief is easily won with a willing audience but it is also very fragile. Years of high engagement and buy-in can be shattered in a single moment if a core pillar or key trope is disturbed. And writers are so often tempted to mess with phlebotinum because it’s a great way to shake up a world: the mysteries at the very core of the settings are the ones that naturally have the most shocking effects when shaken. They are also the ones that sound the most mysterious and important. But the electricity that sparks the imagination can also kill you. Rigidly defined boundaries exist to keep you and your setting safe.

Another way that a phlebotinum can be a critical element is when it is also a MacGuffin. The term MacGuffin was made famous by the film director Alfred Hitchcock in a discussion about The Maltese Falcon (Huston, 1941). The point of that film is that everyone wants the falcon but the nature of the falcon itself is meaningless – it could be literally anything as long as it drives the actions of the characters. Again, we can return to Dune: the spice melange is the one thing that allows space travel to happen, so it is a vital building block of every part of the logic of the setting. It is also a MacGuffin, because it doesn’t matter what it actually is but only that everyone wants it. It is the want that drives the setting. You can imagine, therefore, how exciting a story might be if there were suddenly rumours of a way to make spice without needing the planet of Dune or to travel through space without it. That possibility would rock the universe of Dune to the core and drive incredible events and actions but if this happened, then great plot arcs and plot drivers might resolve or vanish. Things that characters and organisations used to care about would suddenly stop existing. Any books from that point on would feel vastly different from those before and possibly might lose key elements of feel and as a result lose fans as well. It might even make all the previous events feel hollow, if there was always this way around it.

The longer a property goes on, the more the temptation comes to meddle too much with the phlebotinum, break into black boxes or yank rigidly defined areas of doubt into absolute certainty. A savvy worldbuilder should know at least where these things are before they start monkeying about.

On a Quest

There will definitely be some elements in the setting you are pondering that will need to “just work”. Make a list of them! Then consider if they can have some elements defined about them, brought out of shadow into the light. See what happens when you start really defining them, exposing them, changing them or breaking them. Do they have some interesting things that might be worth breaking or changing? Could they be amazing secrets to seed for the future? Or do they wreck the whole thing? You want to do this now before you start building everything else.

Stopping By

Think of something that isn’t part of your world and that isn’t the focus at all, and see what happens when you pull it into the spotlight. This might be something that was probably there all the time. What are the servants doing during the Regency balls? Or the horses? Or add something completely out of left field or from a different genre. What would happen if aliens landed at the Regency ball? Or a communist uprising started? The point isn’t necessarily to write these things into the setting (although it could be interesting, if it doesn’t shatter the tone) but to understand your setting better by putting it through its paces. What are the key points that should only be changed with great care? What are the things you can easily alter?

Notes

The use of frame here is of course from movie and television making – the frame of the camera holds a slice of reality, but our eyes and brains know there is more. The same thinking applies to theatre and prose: we know characters offstage or not being mentioned do not cease to exist. Since video is the primary media of our age, much of our language uses terminology from that artform, and it will suffice here even when we speak about games.

This is often referred to as a “point source” setting – everything that is supernatural (or that is antagonistic or that is mysterious) comes from a single origin. Point sources can make worldbuilding easier in some ways (you only need one key event, and only one supernatural element) but it can be restrictive if later you need some other kind of power or force. See Chapter 26 on the danger of closing doors.

CHAPTER 12 Embodiment and Anthropology

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-13

GAMES AND PLAY INVOLVE, even at an abstract level, a sense of simulation or, as a better word, embodiment.¹ Embodiment means the act of players taking on the meaning of the gaming world, not in the sense that we actually think we are real estate moguls in Monopoly but that we internalise the idea that if someone lands on our property, they damn well better give us money. It can be even more simple than that: in tic-tac-toe we embody our side of Xs and Os. It doesn’t just refer to sides though: in Bridge there is the declarer, and Monopoly appoints a player as Banker.

Embodiment is the core of all gaming, even when it has no setting or world to inform it. Every time we play a game we take on some kind of identity, and that identity is a lot like a character in a narrative. Games typically have a way to win, just as characters have goals they seek, and just as narratives do not work if characters simply get what they want, games have a force stopping us from simply declaring ourselves the winner. Narratives are built out of characters wanting to achieve goals and forces acting against them; games are built out of us embodying a role that comes with a win condition and rules that prevent that condition. Journalist and game designer Tim Clare called these three elements Identity, Motivation and Law.

Every game will have these three concepts by default; the goal of worldbuilding then is to design a world that reinforces, explains and gives more meaning to these three elements. Your world must provide identity, and motivation and laws. It must answer who you are, what you want and why can’t you get it. The embodiment we take on should be more than just who we are; it must inform the other two elements as well. In a game of Twilight Imperium we are not just “a planet” or “a species”; we are one of the major species that is battling to take control of the Imperial throne. There is no point putting something in that world that doesn’t have an opinion about the throne or the empire or has an opinion but has no power to act on it or has both an opinion and the power to act but no reason to follow the rules of the game. The world must then be designed so that no faction can exist without having this kind of interaction with the world around it. In order to create identities that have motivations and are bound by laws, you don’t want all of that motivation to be internal to the identity. You want to be an environment where identities must have developed motivations to that environment and must have strong reasons to follow the laws.

The theory that our environment (be it biological, ecological or cultural) determines how we see the world is known as umwelt theory. The name comes from the German word for environment, and the theory was first put forth by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant. The accuracy and usefulness of umwelt theory in anthropology and semiotics are not important to us here; what is important is that games can only really model external forces, so this theory is the best way to think about creating identities in games.

It is true that very often we do (or must) assume these external forces exist. We assume that the two armies in chess have strong reasons to want the other side destroyed; we do not wait around, failing to move any pieces until we discover the backstory. (We certainly don’t assume that it is all in their heads, that white seeks to destroy black solely for ideological reasons, but that could be just as easily true.) But if you want your players to be more emotionally involved, then worldbuilding should be ready to step in and support all of this. And it needs to connect properly, so that the embodying we do in the game matches the embodiment we are doing in the world.

Since games require us to take on an alternative persona, they involve embodiment far more than any passive art form. Watching Star Wars films makes us want to be Luke Skywalker but we have to internalise his point of view to control his figure in a game. This is why worldbuilding matters so much in games – and why games are so much about worldbuilding. We must understand these concepts of identity, motivation and law to play a game – that is literally what the rules teach – and we must understand them to enter a world. Arguably, more than anything else, this is why we are drawn to games and roleplaying games particularly. As some anthropologists have observed, the donning of synthetic identities in a game has a similar social and societal purpose of wearing masks and costumes and engaging in ritual music or dance. They allow us to become something else, trying on different identities, different desires, different constraints, entirely different concepts and beliefs, in a safe environment.² A game of poker might not look like the mask dance of Bhutanese culture or the masques of medieval Venice but they are all different paths to embodiment. Embodiment is at work whenever we begin to play and is mostly why we play in the first place.

As discussed back in Chapter 1, worldbuilding is not really about creating a miniature under glass: worlds exist to be lived in and explored, by their creators, by fictional characters and by players. Outside of works of pure philosophy or satire, worlds don’t exist in the abstract or as a thought experiment. Everything in them exists to be encountered and experienced. The very act of conceiving or encountering another world asks us to step into that world, to imagine what it would be like to actually be there, to see and hear and smell and touch those things, to be amongst the peoples and places and to believe and conceive of the thoughts arising from there. It could be argued then that the way we engage with fictional worlds, the act of embodying other worldviews, is also a form of play. To even read about another world with different rules is to imagine ourselves there. When we play in these worlds with games, we take this one step further than just reading or writing about it: we act out being in these places, take on the role of some creature, entity, faction or concept and take on a little or a lot of what we imagine are the thoughts and motivations of that role. This is true regardless of whether the game is Monopoly or Dungeons & Dragons or Pacman.

In Chapter 2 we looked at why theme matters in games at all; this chapter answers the same question in a more practical way. The purpose of everything that goes into your world is to communicate this embodiment. The best worlds, and the best games, are often the ones that really make us feel as if we are in an alien place and acting outside of ourselves, and they do this by really bringing home this idea that a different identity gives us different eyes to see the world. The better you climb into the minds of your identities and the more your world and mechanics change how they think and operate, the stronger your worlds will be and the richer your mechanics will be that instil those worlds.

This question of how to communicate a different mindset, a different way of seeing, thinking, acting and communicating, means that when we build settings we are really building cultures: the way that a society sees, thinks, acts and communicates.³ Someone once said that culture is hard to see because culture is what we see with. Admitting that we have a culture of our own means admitting we might not be right about everything we think or believe. To understand other cultures we need to understand our own culture and also how our culture thinks about culture itself, which means understanding some of the basics of anthropology.

The original forms of anthropology in the 19th century were very theoretical, with the idea that one could view all cultures and civilisations as operating much as biological evolution: the latter was a machine that turned until monkeys turned to men, and then the former turned to take men from hunter-gatherers into industrial giants. Much of the work of anthropology in the late 19th and early 20th centuries by luminaries like Franz Boas and Margaret Mead were repudiating these theories and the racism within them. They emphasised instead that civilisation was not one idea or one progression towards enlightenment and that alternative cultures could only be understood through participant observation and recoding, creating what was known as an ethnographic work. This led to the theory of cultural relativism, which is the idea that values and ideas and thought processes were unique to a culture and could not easily be transferred. Moreover, these differences often led to outsiders judging a culture as backwards or barbaric, permitting the performing of atrocities.⁴ Also developed at this time was the theory of structuralism, which moved away from a study of atomic elements of a culture or system, suggesting that nothing could be understood without understanding the context it operated within and the things it is connected to. Recently, some anthropology has returned to being more centred in biology, with the idea that when we see large trends across human societies, they are likely evidence of evolutionary forces selecting unifying human aspects through natural selection. This area is often dubbed evolutionary psychology and remains contentious because many cultural anthropologists are suspicious of the way it can elide differences between cultures.

Through the middle of the 20th century, the ideas of cultural relativism became increasingly important. The events of the holocaust and the exposure of the crimes of colonisation caused a great investigation into how cultures could be turned to the demonisation of differences. Similarly, the encounters with Japanese soldiers in World War II were often perplexing to American values: the suicidal loyalty of the kamikaze pilot seemed inexplicable, as did the idea that Japanese soldiers taken prisoners would often prefer death to release. Societies trying to understand vastly different cultural systems and repudiate the sins of colonisation and genocide meant that ethnography moved from just an academic discipline to a popular entertainment. Ethnographical works like The Chrysanthemum and the Sword were considered vital to understanding the different psychology of the Japanese. Books like To Kill a Mockingbird and Black Like Me were vastly popular because of how they focussed on seeing other points of view.

This trend continued into genre fiction. Roddenberry’s original idea for Spock on Star Trek had him red-skinned so he would literally look like a devil; with his Asiatic haircut he was the demon of communism, the “Red Menace” made flesh. But, Star Trek suggested that was just How Vulcans Were and in the future we might have a communist standing next to an American at the helm of a ship.⁵ Similarly the Planet of the Apes films (ham-fistedly) imagined how apes and humans might be inverted, and in such a world that benighted religious extremism would teach that God created Monkey in His image (or, in later films, worship atomic power).

However, a new approach to anthropology was now on the rise. Beginning with Edward Said’s seminal work Orientalism,⁶ post-structuralism, post-colonialism and post-modern anthropology critiqued Western approaches to anthropology. Structuralism was argued to have ignored wider structures such as sexism and classism, and how Western colonialist pressures had driven cultures to appear more “alien” to create distance from conquerors or to appeal to expected stereotypes. The well-intentioned need to value cultural differences is argued by this school of thought to have created too much of a sense of the “exotic” difference. Moreover, the popular ethnographic texts of cultural relativism had reduced culture to materialism. The 1964 World’s Fair in New York had the theme “Peace Through Understanding” and premiered Disney’s famous It’s a Small World ride. It is a classic example of late 20th-century ethnographic depiction, with again the focus being materialistic concerns: each place has different kinds of houses, costumes, games and food, but nothing else.

Popular thought and popular entertainment are, of course, running behind and have only just caught up to post-modern anthropology and it is causing a reckoning through all of genre fiction and games, where so much of what has come before has been driven by a broad cultural relativist approach. The most widespread and profitable worlds around us – Star Wars, Star Trek, Dune, the worlds of comic superheroes and of Dungeons & Dragons – were all developed by American writers, all males, all born in the early- or mid-20th century, and almost all of them were college educated and middle class. They were all raised by a cavalcade of ethnographic texts and documentaries that taught children how the people of other lands were different but also Just Like Us.

Tolkien is the exception here: being some fifty years younger than most of the above creators, he was raised in a system that still taught 19th-century anthropology, which is why he chose the word race to describe his fantasy peoples. European mythology is big on typology: the Norse have not just elves and giants and dwarves but also divide elves into day elves and night elves and the gods into the Aesir and Vanir; Greek mythology breaks the supernatural figures into titans, giants, gods and monsters. Fantasy uses this kind of rigid divide as metonymy for talking about different kinds of ideas. It is not wrong to imagine individual peoples being vastly different creatures, as a literal metaphor.⁷ But Tolkien could also only represent these things through the way he saw the world, so he chose to use the word race. The vast popularity of his works and their influence on Dungeons & Dragons made this the word used until only very recently, where options such as heritage, species or origin are now (at last) being preferred.

Also part of Dungeons & Dragons has been the idea of “ability score increases”. This was a mechanic where to simulate the differences between the fantasy peoples, their physical natures were represented in bonuses or penalties to the mechanics that measured those things. This makes sense: we want mechanics to give meaning to the setting. However, this approach has echoes of the ideas of race science and biological determinism: since fantasy worlds use these different peoples as stand-ins for cultures and peoples in our world, it implies a carry-over into meanings about our world. Western society is doing its best to root out the causes of casual and deliberate racism and much of these lie in the subtexts and representations that surround us – that are part of our cultural depictions of difference. In 2024, Dungeons & Dragons abandoned ability score increases, and a general move has been made to have mechanics as tools to display cultural differences rather than biological. Science fiction gaming has not changed, perhaps because there is enough clarity in difference between species than there is between fantasy races. However, this does lead us back to the questions and controversies of evolutionary psychology.

Having inched somewhat out of the shadow of 19th-century anthropology cast by Tolkien, genre fiction is just beginning to grapple with post-modern anthropological concerns. We will come back and talk more about this in Chapter 35. For now it is important to understand that all games involve embodiment, and our ideas of embodiment depend on our ideas of anthropology, cultural relativism and cultural difference. Sometimes in our desire to represent that we value difference we can go too far. The instinct to add rules to express different embodiments is well-intentioned, as it highlights that value but can be fraught and be caught in assumptions. But if we know this going in, we can be ready to examine our ideas for mistakes and welcome correction where we inevitably fall short. There are, as yet, few, if any, post-colonial games, but we can hope a bright new future will bring some.

On a Quest

Your game likely already has some idea of what the players are doing in your game. Summarise that in the modes described: identity, motivation, law. Who are they, what do they want and why can’t they get it? That text can be useful in explaining your game; it might even end up at the start of the rulebook. And now that you know what they want, despite the opposition, consider how your game communicates the worldview that makes them want it. Why does it matter so much? What in the culture or environment makes it matter?

Stopping By

To really observe if you’ve made your culture rich with clear communicators of motivation and law, consider a single person in your world who is not directly connected to that struggle. Describe them doing something mundane or simple, such as waking up and getting breakfast. Then describe a character doing that in the same world but with a very different view of things. Then try the first character, with the same basic wants and needs, but have them wake up in a very different world, perhaps one you know well from your favourite games and media, or bring a character from that world into yours. What would Frodo or Bruce Wayne do in your world? What would your character do in the universe of Star Trek or Star Wars? Is the world different enough in feel and tone and worldview to change how they eat breakfast?

Notes

Some people talk about what games simulate, but the word simulation suggests that the goal is to correctly depict or reflect a reality. So I’m avoiding that term here.

Johan Huizinga’s concept of the Magic Circle is relevant here. First coined in his 1938 work Homo Ludens, the Magic Circle is a name for the idea that when we are inside a shared gaming space, the game acquires a meaning it does not have outside of that space, such as points mattering and rules being unbreakable despite no force acting to police them. Simultaneously we also leave behind the rules and meanings attached to the “real” world – friends can become enemies, attack is not anti-social, betrayal is expected and forgiven and defeat and destruction are tolerable. In any game, we are letting ourselves experience not just anti-social rivalries or the lust for power but letting go of fears of failure and death and experience competition and struggle in a place where for once it does not matter and cannot hurt us.

Another discipline that looks at how both societies and organisms view the world and express into the world is semiotics, or the study of signs and signals. This not only overlaps a great deal with anthropology but also extends it into animal psychology and behaviourism.

It might be argued that we have reversed cart and horse here, in that colonisation, empire building, enslavement and genocide were all economic decisions later justified by convincing the oppressor population of the moral righteousness of these actions rather than being the moral force leading the charge. In that case, however, cultural relativism is key to calling those powers to account.

The Prime Directive of Star Trek was a political expression against American imperialism as well as echoing the anthropological imperative against the colonial drive to judge and then interfere, justifying that interference by the need to “improve” the quality of life of the people involved (as was so often the argument used to justify colonial devastation.)

And also in his other works such as Culture and Imperialism.

We will talk more about literal metaphors in Chapter 30.

II Breaking Ground

CHAPTER 13 Intrinsic and Extrinsic Expression

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-15

IN THIS SECTION OF the book we’re going to move from general theory into putting pen to paper, which leads us to the question: where does setting actually go when it goes into a game? Where is the setting found? How do games express and communicate their settings? It turns out this is a complicated question.

In the world of video games, there is a concept known as “game writing”. All games tell a story in that they contain identities seeking goals against opposition, but more and more in video games (and now in tabletop as well) there are games that tell stories in a way much closer to traditional media. In some cases there is a great deal of overlap between the two things, with games including a vast amount of prose storytelling. Indeed the first examples of these games, where we choose which parts of a story to read, were marketed more as books than games.¹

Not every game has this kind of writing, but it is a place where a lot of setting is communicated and we can use this as a starting point to answer our questions. James Portnow, writing for the YouTube series Extra Credit, argues that writing in games is not really one thing but three: plot, character and lore. Plot describes the sequence of related events through which the player moves through or encounters. Character is not just who you play but the characters you encounter and the discovery of their own narratives. Lore is everything else that creates a sense of the world and enhances the experience of feeling part of that world.²

Portnow also argues that few, if any, games do all three and it is a fool’s errand to try. Generally the games remembered for “good writing” do not do all three but do one type extremely well. In fact, the elements can fight against each other: games like the Final Fantasy and Mass Effect series develop a deep roster of characters that players feel connected to, something which is achieved because the simple linear plot is frequently halted to allow for character interaction. In comparison, stories where plot is key want to lay out the choices and branches of that plot very carefully for a relatively faceless hero or tell the story of the particular hero you are playing, putting that character centre stage and nobody else. Branching narrative stories tend to not have space to let complex characters evolve or let you explore rich environments at your own pace because those things would interact to produce too many fine divisions. Games sometimes try to solve this by breaking the games up into walled-off sections where each section does one element and then the next element comes in, such as Mass Effect (Hudson, 2017) allowing different ending choices in the later instalments or allowing you free time to wander and explore the main Station.

Some of these divisions could be considered arbitrary. Gone Home (Gaynor, 2013) is definitely a plot-focussed video game: you play a character returning after a long departure to your family home in Oregon, exploring your house and finding clues to everything that has happened in your absence, and the trail of those clues leads you through an emerging plot of those events. But that story is enhanced by how well developed the characters in the family are. Equally, the worldbuilding/lore of the family is extremely well done. The very first action in the game involves you finding the “Christmas Duck”, a much-loved family object, and the tiny details of the Duck could be considered lore, since it tells you nothing of the plot or the central characters. Portnow’s divisions are more about processes: in how the game is designed, the mechanics that it uses and how those mechanics are then played and interpreted.

These distinctions also exist in tabletop games but character interaction is decidedly rare. A plotted story of any depth (as opposed to the lived-in emergent narrative the player or players build through play) is also fairly rare, although plot-like events are common. But what I’d like to do is use Portnow’s divisions as a way to build an overarching classification. To wit: plot as defined here typically has to be interacted with by the player directly. There are some exceptions but even the loosest of plots is typically tasked to the flow of the game. Mario’s Princess is in another castle, so we have to do another level to save her. Shephard in Mass Effect cannot help but find out about Reavers and the plan to bring them back, and we have to do another level to stop it. Between each mission, the player can make Shepard talk to each character but you don’t have to do this. It isn’t the “main story” of the game. Despite this, most players do this and this is where they gain the principle enjoyment and engagement with the game, and the game designers certainly expect them to do it. It also has a few mechanics (choosing who to talk to, branching dialogue trees) to it, so it is not simply a totally passive experience.

Let us for the sake of argument define intrinsic setting, then, as the world that we must interact with in order to play the game and extrinsic setting to be all the setting that we can encounter optionally. This is not intended to be a black and white separation! As mentioned, the character interactions in Mass Effect have some small mechanics to them. If we look at the Japanese-style games that inspired Mass Effect, the mechanics of play depend on which characters you take with you into each mission, and that determines which character narratives you learn about. We can see, however, that lore typically is very optional. We don’t have to read every detail about an item or every description box of a location. We don’t have to examine much about the beautiful environment of the level, so much as know where the spawn points are and the sniper nests.

This comes into a sharper contrast in tabletop, where visuals play less of a role. Let’s look at checkers. When you reach your opponent’s back row, your piece becomes “kinged” and can then move backwards. The fact that these pieces are called kings is an intrinsic element of setting. It’s very low level, but it has some sense of how to apply value to the piece based on our real-world ideas of what kings are. But if there were symbols on the checker pieces that showed, say, heraldic devices or a crown (or a crown on one side) we could still play the game of checkers and ignore all of that. And yet that is also part of the setting of the game – an extrinsic setting element. A similar example might be the use of setting text on the cards in Magic: The Gathering (Garfield, 1993). As we said in Chapter 2, it does matter a great deal what a card is called and how it is depicted as that makes us understand the mechanics better. But the flavour text in italics at the bottom of the card, often a quote from within the universe, is the least important part of that communication. So much so that while every card in Magic has a name, art and rules text, not all of them have flavour text. Art is less important than names, with names becoming a key element indicating a specific piece as well as a signpost for the player on how to interact with that piece.³ Art can change; names cannot. Art rarely becomes part of jargon or metonymy. To this day, searching for a card in your deck in all CCG play is called “tutoring” and making an opponent discard cards is called milling, both named for the name of those cards (“Demonic Tutor” and “Millstone”, respectively); little memory is given to the volcano behind said Demonic Tutor.

In the video game example then, typically plot writing is intrinsic to most games, and lore is typically extrinsic, with character writing being somewhere in the middle or moving depending on the game design. Again, this isn’t a clear-cut black and white separation, and that’s doubly true in video games where visuals are more important and also because video games cater to such a wide variety of play styles. It doesn’t matter how much you design a game so that the progress involves killing the last enemy or completing the final jump; some players are still going to want to not do that so they can look around a bit more. Those players are getting a lot more out of lore than others, and over time, game design has become accommodating those players inside games or with entire games around that concept. Similarly the game designers of Mass Effect expect you to want to talk to the characters and that is where all the design and setting focus and where players find the most value, which is important: since players do a lot more with a game than just interact with its mechanics, there is no value judgement or ranking difference between these two elements.

Much work has gone into determining the reasons people play computer games and using those things to create player profiles. One of the simplest and most popular was developed by Richard Bartle in 1996 and it is that same simplicity that has led it to be so useful for so long. Bartle identified four types of players: Killers who primarily want to defeat other players in the game, Socialisers who play to form bonds with other players, Achievers who seek to get the highest scores or the fastest times and Explorers who want to look around and find perhaps strange combinations of rules or glitches. More and more games are designed for Explorers, and thus finding and engaging with extrinsic elements are given more focus, and then eventually given mechanics and thus the setting then become more intrinsic to the game design.

But from this we can now see that when we put pen on paper we have two canvases to paint our setting. If we are playing a game about a car driving along a track then there is our setting in a nutshell, but it can be expressed in different ways. Some things naturally leap to become intrinsic to mechanics: the player piece will likely be a car, moving along a board that likely depicts and represents a track (which we must stay on). Cars might be of different colours to indicate who controls which car or have different appearances in other ways to indicate different capabilities; likewise the track that is slippery might show ice or oil; the track that is rough might show bumps or ditches. But we might also be thinking about what the car or the track should look like to indicate that this race is fast and exciting, or set in a post-apocalyptic world, or any other factors that aren’t mechanically coded at all but are all still shaping the player’s experience. Again, this isn’t a black and white categorisation. We talk about games being “reskinned” as if settings are merely cloaks lightly placed over mechanics, easily switch in and out. But the truth is there is no hard line where the aesthetic ends and the mechanics begin and where the fluff encounters the crunch.⁴ The only reason we use this distinction is to think about how we express things as designers.⁵

As you build your worlds, you need to be thinking not just about what the world is but how the world communicates the game and the game communicates the world, and part of this choice is choosing which elements will be imbedded intrinsically into the gameplay itself and which will be extrinsic. It can be a lot to consider, which is why our next lesson is about checking on scope.

On a Quest

Pay attention to the things you’ve already decided to model mechanically and the things you have decided not to. A lot of the time we make these decisions subconsciously, based on the habits or styles of other games. Sometimes the most interesting games come from tying things to mechanics that haven’t been tied to them before or from taking things out of the mechanics and made extrinsic. One of the most common examples of something extrinsic is what is shown on the cover of your game’s box or book. Imagine or create a mock cover. Circle things that are likely to be intrinsic to the gameplay. Circle things that aren’t at all likely to be in a different colour. Ask someone else who has played the game to do the same and see if you agree.

Stopping By

Choose something in your world you have modelled with mechanics and something you have left to the aesthetics of written prose, illustration or lore material. Swap those two things around and see what happens. The cover image exercise is also good to do here!

Notes

The idea of a book where you could make choices about what the character began long before the “Choose Your Own Adventure” craze of the 1980s. The first example was Consider the Consequences, written in 1930 by Doris Webster and Mary Alden Hopkins.

Often the term worldbuilding is used as a synonym for this definition of Lore. We will talk more about this in later chapters.

We will also return to this point in Chapter 34.

In a roleplaying game, arguably, there is no barrier at all and everything could be considered crunch. At the same time, since almost all roleplaying games involve exactly the same game loop, you could argue that everything is fluff!

For players, a division also exists between structured/formal play and unstructured/informal play. Structured play might be rolling dice and controlling your character in a game session, whereas unstructured play might be drawing a picture of them or writing a story about them, while still connecting to the game.

CHAPTER 14 Start Small – And Finish Small

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-16

IT’S TIME TO GET started and make some worlds. Yes, worlds plural.

Sometimes I’ll meet someone in game design who has been working on the same game for five, ten, maybe even twenty years. And you know straight away: that game is unlikely to be published because it is unlikely to be finished. It can’t even be set aside. After a certain point, habit has set in and you have become accustomed to not finishing. Our human brains love to form habits and that’s the habit they’ve learned: to keep on working. To never feel it’s enough because there’s always something that needs tweaking. The longer you work on a game the more at risk you are of it never coming out.

This is true of any art form, because no work of art is ever really finished, and we can all fall victim to feeling safe inside the process. Finishing something exposes it to critique. An unfinished work can never fail.

This issue is much worse, though, when it comes to worldbuilding, because worlds really can never be finished. Our worlds stretch back into the infinite past and unimaginable future and can be enormous in size and detail. Worlds are fractal too¹: you can zoom in or out as much as you want and it’s always just as vast, just as complex. You can write about the rise and fall of galaxies over billions of years or the split-second moments of domestic tension at the breakfast table and it’s all the same world. It’s all “lore”. Your brain loves to keep on going, and you also love thinking about your world and adding more and more to it. It’s like building a model railroad. There’s always more models to add. More ways to play. And for the most part, that’s fine! Worlds aren’t art, so they don’t need to be finished and complete. However they do need exposure to an audience. They do need to be tested. And they do need to interact with whatever form you want to use them in, and those things do need to be finished. Sometimes, we can get so caught up in building the world that we never actually take it and put it to use.

Another danger is you put out the game with the world over-developed. You end up designing or including far more background material than you need. You risk drowning the audience in lore that has no application and turning them off the whole experience. World communication is a separate skill from worldbuilding but too much of the latter can easily set you up for mistakes with the former. You might also end up neglecting the actual game design. So we need to aim to have something we can use as an end point. It makes sense to start small. It also makes sense, when starting out, to finish small.

This also gives your goal an approachable scale. I don’t recommend you start out in your first world to build something as complex as Dune universe. Or indeed, a masterpiece. There is a saying that every writer has five bad books in them, and you have to write them first to get them out of the way. The same thing about artists – you have to draw hundred bad pictures. You’re probably going to make some terrible worlds. Might as well get started on them and move on to the good ones. But if worlds are never finished, how do we know when to stop? If we aim to only design as much of the world as the game needs, how much is that? What amount of world does a game require?

To quote game designer Matt Colville, all you need to run Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is a village with a cave filled with orcs nearby. The village gives the players somewhere to come from, the cave somewhere to go to, and then there’s are orcs to fight when they get there. If the orcs raid the village then all you need is the village and the orcs! This is even true of great fantasy literature: all Tolkien really had to start with was a hole in the ground with a hobbit in it. Le Guin had some ideas about what Earthsea looked like but the first chapter, like so many in the genre, is just about Ged and his village. This isn’t just because writers want to start their audience off with a small, familiar place: it’s because it’s very often how they started building their worlds as well.

What’s also good about Colville’s list is that it is based on need, on purpose. In the case of session one of a typical fantasy roleplaying game (RPG) it’s important to get the players emotionally involved in going down a hole and killing things. That needs just those three things: a village, a cave, some orcs.² It doesn’t matter exactly what we choose, so much as actually identifying what the bare minimum requirements actually are. As we said in Chapter 12, the three key pillars are identity, motivation and law. Who do the players embody? What do they want? Why can’t they get it?

Games can help with this because for the most part games have a tight focus. There are exceptions; tabletop RPGs being the most obvious and games covering great detail or epic scope. But even there, there are tight concentrations to be found. D&D doesn’t actually care about anything besides going down holes and killing things, or occasionally across forests or into towers. It might come up in conversation at the table but it doesn’t care about the summer fashions or the process of brickmaking or what the characters eat for breakfast. They might care about the last one in the sense that they have enough of it to get through the winter pass. You can therefore just call that “rations”. Indeed, the “redbook” edition of D&D did just that³ – there were no costs for food or drink, just regular rations or iron rations, and a waterskin. Food, water, we’re done here. Advanced Squad Leader (Greenwood, 1985) models ninety-nine different kinds of German military vehicles but does not care in the slightest about how the uniforms were manufactured or the star signs of the commanding generals. The universe of Twilight Imperium is as baroque and Byzantine as the Dune setting but the games set there are about war and diplomacy. What matters about a planet is what kind of political and military resources it has. How does interstellar transport work? How do the alien species talk to each other? Why is there a complete technological collapse but the economy works fine? None of this matters and so is just never explained. Does it still feel “real”? Yes.

Your game is probably less complicated than Advanced Squad Leader but even so, try to pick a very simple game to start this exercise. Or find a way to focus on a simpler part of your game or simpler mode of play. Set it to the smallest player count, for example, and the shortest play mode. Remove all the extra modules. Strip out things you’ve added even if they provide important balance. You can add them back in later of course! When it comes to getting the world and the game to work together, you want to start as simply as possible. You want to boil the game down to its minimal form so that you can do just a minimum of worldbuilding.

This isn’t just so you can practise finishing and practise only doing as much as needed: it is also important to design your world around the critical core of the game first. It does not matter if you have a great idea for what the D&D characters eat for breakfast if you neglect to work on why they’re going to the dungeon (and where it is and what’s in there). It’s surprisingly easy to make this mistake. I’ve seen so many settings, especially in RPGs, fall down here. The creators get so excited about some part of the setting they are building that they lose perspective and forget the practicalities. Players and game masters alike will read the books and respond that they don’t get what they’re supposed to do with the material. All the character options and combat statistics in the world can’t help if it’s not clear who you’re supposed to be and what you’re supposed to do and who is trying to stop you and needs to have those combat statistics driven into their sternums (if they have sternums). Just as you can add more to the game later, you can add great volumes to your world later but you need to get these bits the most right and build out from that point.

One of the reasons D&D has stayed so popular for so long is it has never suffered from this problem. Even though its setting is nominally fantasy, its world is not really like any fantasy that came before it. By borrowing from dozens of nearly random sources disconnected from context – magic from Vance’s Dying Earth, moral philosophy from the Elric novels by Moorcock, some elements of travelling thieves from the pulp fantasy material of Conan, Fahfrd and Thieves’ World even though that stuff conflicts a lot with the epic stories of Tolkien, sword-fighting from Errol Flynn films, undead from cheesy Hammer horror movies and a bunch of random ideas from a set of rubber monsters and Ray Harryhausen movies about ancient Greek myths and Sinbad the Sailor – the game ended up creating its own setting only vaguely reminiscent of the fantasy of its day and one that continues to make very little sense even though it became de rigueur. But none of this matters because the game has always put front and centre, above everything else, that players take the role of hole-going-downers, and you exist in a world where going down holes is the most important thing to do. Players are given a “class” which describes how you go down holes and a “race” that tells you what you think about going down holes. Then the GM typically purchases a big book of maps of holes and a whole book of things in the holes that you’re supposed to kill. That is the primary lore of the game: what lives down holes and how to kill them.

It never mattered that the world was incoherent outside of the dungeons because the game has very little rules for doing anything else but going into dungeons. Or protecting the villagers against the orcs coming out of the hole. The identity people took on in D&D was obvious; it was based on whomever the player had just read about (or later, seen in a sword and sorcery movie) that week. The motivation was wealth: most fantasy and fairytales had that trope embedded as something everyone just wants. The law, the force opposing, was that strange grab bag of monsters. It didn’t matter that they made no sense; they were probably made by wizards. Or they were orcs: just there to raid villages and be slain in return. They didn’t need a reason so much as they just had to be there. They served the purpose. That’s reason enough for most players.⁴

The point is not to replicate D&D in not caring about everything else. The point is understanding that you have to cover the three pillars, or nothing else matters. I guarantee you that any successful gaming setting you can name has taken big steps to spotlight to the players (and GMs) those three key elements: who you are, what you want and why you can’t get it. The worlds might also be masterpieces of subtlety and deft interconnection but they also hit those marks. Starting small and finishing small will help you hone your skills in doing the same.

This doesn’t mean to skimp on how good your worldbuilding is. You’ll still want to connect each of these simple ideas to three other things. You also don’t have to use this idea in your final product! And that’s another skill you’re honing: pretty much any game mechanics can have any setting, so make up a whole new one for your current game design. Being able to fit something else on to your game besides your first idea teaches your brain to be flexible and to be able to at least rehearse killing your darlings. And if you really do later have to abandon your big idea (or parts of it) you’ve now got one or more worlds in the chamber ready to go.

Having trouble pulling new ideas out of nothing? We will talk about that in the next chapter.

On a Quest

What is the simplest form your game can take? Or does it have a single core activity that is the particular focus of the mechanics? If you had to boil it down to one activity or element, what would that be? Can you imagine the game like that, even if it wouldn’t be much of a game? Can you give that another setting? What would the game look like with the same mechanics but different extrinsic setting material?

Stopping By

As a creative exercise pick a very simple game like a children’s game (tic-tac-toe, hangman, hopscotch, etc.) and give it a setting. Make sure to add strong embodiment of identity, clear motivations and a striking explanation for the laws. You are just adding extrinsic elements here and not changing any mechanics although you can change the name and representation of those mechanics if you like. For example, if tic-tac-toe is representing a battle between two armies, the grid could be called the field or the battleground, and moves could be called Sorties; if the game is about political machinations, you might instead call a move “Gaining Leverage” over one of the nine “Arguments”.

Notes

For more on this, see Chapter 35.

You might be wary to establish these things so firmly, because what if later we decide that people don’t live in villages or that orcs don’t live in caves? That’s fine. We can always erase things. This is a practice world. Or maybe these orcs or these people are exceptions to the rule!

These books were a series released between the first and second edition of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, beginning in 1981, designed to provide a simpler experience. The books were named Basic, Expert, Companion, Master and Immortal and are often referred to as BECMI. They are also known as the Rules Cyclopedia.

It is worth pointing out, however, that many players took the setting details as critical elements that they could not possibly determine themselves, because as a GM they would be biased, and unless something was said officially, might choose an answer that was unfair to the players. They also had grown up with simulation wargames where, for example, all ninety-nine different vehicles of a nation’s army were listed, so were used to rules providing this kind of material. Much of the settings created for D&D was added just to answer questions that the players put to their GMs. The psychologist Gary Alan Fine tells a story where Gary Gygax was awoken by a phonecall at 3 am from a desperate GM across the country who needed to know, because his players had asked, how many eggs a hippogryph might lay. Gygax said “Seventeen!” and hung up.

CHAPTER 15 Go Big and Go Home

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-17

“GO BIG OR GO home”, goes the adage. As they say on the internet, however, “? Porque no los dos?” Why not both?

Worldbuilding and world communication are not the same thing, but the two do work hand in hand. A world that lives in the heads of our audience only does so when it is communicated. How it lives on in their heads depends on how we communicate it, so its existence is its presentation. Understanding how it is presented is the key to understanding how it works. Therefore at the heart of a strong world is a strong pitch. A hook. A way to sum up everything it is, or as much of it as possible, into a pithy line, one that greatly informs but still hints at more to come and one that sets the ground rules even as it excites the imagination.

This is a lot to ask of fifteen words or fewer. It will not come to you easily! But it is key.

Your hook is also a way to present the world to yourself. A good hook becomes the basis of a good keynote (or keynotes), which forms the basis of a strong bible.¹ All of which is to say: good worldbuilding requires good hook-building. I’ll go so far as to say that you should find a good hook before you do anything else. Worlds can be complex, detailed, rich, but they must be communicated, especially to yourself. And I’ve seen too many worlds fail – fail to be finished, fail to be published, fail to find an audience, fail to inspire that audience – because they could not be communicated well enough. It is possible to build an amazing world and find it an audience without a good hook, but the odds are against you. Of course, nobody wants to reduce their incredibly complex and subtle work of art into a soundbite, but think of it another way: the audience have to get in the front door to see the art. The journey of a thousand miles must begin with a single step, and buying a single ticket.

This lesson is about not only designing that hook but also getting to the ideas behind it: these things also go hand in hand. And they come down to the same rule: go big and go home.

The fantasy author Stephen Donaldson said his approach to writing was to have one idea you know everything about and one idea you know nothing about.² The former gives you the fuel, giving you unique knowledge, experience and insight that you can bring to your audience. The latter gives you the spark to write to discover more things for yourself. You need knowledge to give you a foundation but ignorance to make you look into the shadows. You need a passionate belief to put forwards and a curiosity to suggest what you’re unsure of. Another way to think of this is to have one big answer to something and one big question about something else.³ These are fuel and fire. Go big and go home is much the same, although either of those things can be the fuel or the fire. Either can be the question or the answer, the knowledge or the ignorance.

Go big means that you want to build your setting on big ideas, earth-shattering ideas. Maybe literally earth-shattering! Ideas that break the world in two or mend it again or bind it up in chains so it can break those chains or tear itself apart trying. The best worlds are worlds that have really big things that make them stand out. That doesn’t mean they have to be radically different,⁴ but they need to have bold, identifying features. Sometimes a big idea stands alone; more often it is in contrast to something else. What if the world or the genre was not as we normally see it. Star Wars was the big idea that wizards and swords could fit into science fiction (SF). Star Trek was “Wagon Train – but in space!”⁵ The idea of Buffy the Vampire Slayer was invented just by inverting the genre trope of the blonde cheerleader running away from the monster.

Another way to get a big hook is to combine two things. Star Trek is a combination of (and conflict between) two other big ideas – the thrilling naval adventures of Horatio Hornblower and showcasing the cerebral SF of Asimov, Heinlein and Clarke. The combination doesn’t always sit easily, but that conflict, like the sand in the oyster that becomes the pearl, is a big part of the strength of the material. The world of the Alien franchise transplants classic haunted house horror into hard SF. Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) is neither wholly the rough rogue’s tale of Burroughs nor the world-saving epic of Tolkien (and is neither a tactical game nor a storytelling game) and that conflict is actually a big reason why it works.

The big ideas don’t have to be genres or tropes. They can also be the big questions you want to ask or the big ideas you want to learn about. In Stephen Donaldson’s case, his first fantasy trilogy wants to ask about unbelief, or refusing to be part of an idea, so his books are about what we now call an isekai hero refusing the call to action because he knows the world is fictional. The central horror of the Cthulhu Mythos is that our lofty ideals of the pursuit of knowledge are in fact the very seeds of our own destruction and downfall; most games in the setting tend to be about shooting tentacles with tommyguns but the idea that the horrors in the shadows could not be fought and would overwhelm our minds as surely as our souls made the original Call of Cthulhu tabletop roleplaying game (Petersen, 1981) like nothing that had ever come before it. The big idea was that you probably are going to die screaming – but you might have fun anyway.

Big ideas might not invert genre tropes but ideas of geography or history. The universe of Dune set itself apart because amongst its big ideas about an SF future it also had so much about desert life and desert ecology. Alternative history is of course a familiar setting, and it also wants big, bold changes. Few alternative histories are based on Thomas Dewey winning the 1948 US Presidential Election. Far more choose JKF not being shot in Dallas or George Washington being shot crossing the Delaware. The nazis win World War II or Rome never falls – better still. Custer surviving Little Bighorn? Not great. The Civil War never ending because the dead returned to walk the earth? Better.

Go big is powerful. Having a huge tilting point allows you to sum that up in just a few words. You get both the fire – in that it demands a million questions and sparks a million unknowns – and the fuel – in that you can think of so many answers to those questions. If Rome never falls, what happens to all other history? If robots can look exactly like humans, what happens to society? If Lex Luthor did kill Superman, what would he do next? However you can get lost in this and over-develop your world if you don’t also go home. You must ask: why does this matter to you, personally? Why do you have a stake in it? Why does it hit home?

This can be another way of phrasing Donaldson’s idea of something you know everything about: our passions and our personal experiences are fantastic places to start building our worlds. For Donaldson, it was his experience as a child when his parents worked in communities housing sufferers of leprosy. Frank Herbert stated that the original inspiration and source material for Dune came from him being hired by a magazine to write an article about the ecology of the dunes in nearby Florence, Oregon. He did so much research that he wanted a place to put it. Tolkien was interested in fictional linguistics and fictional historiography; fiction became a place to put those interests.

It doesn’t have to be academic. The genre inversions of Star Wars and Buffy the Vampire Slayer came about because George Lucas and Joss Whedon consumed a lot of their favourite media in those genres. It doesn’t have to be a special interest, either. It could be just something that happened to you or resonates with you or that you care deeply about. Star Trek embodied Roddenberry’s hope for a future beyond the divisions of the Cold War. Glass Town, the paracosm created by the Bronte siblings, obviously takes much from the Napoleonic War happening around them but was equally driven by the toy soldiers given to Branwell Bronte, not to mention dealing with the grief of losing the two eldest sisters to tuberculosis in the same year, aged ten and eleven.

Making sure your idea is more than just one big one is what keeps you invested. You have a personal stake in the material you put in and the questions you ask. That can be vital to making sure you don’t get lost in the project and not finish it. If it is something very close to home, it stops existing just in the abstract; it becomes something you cannot forget or let go of and must finish and express.

A big idea is something that you know needs to run through the entire game, affecting every choice (intrinsic or extrinsic). If the idea is big enough and bold enough, it will do this naturally, and as it does so, it will become infectious. The players can hang onto the largeness of the idea as a key entry point into the setting. It not only inspires them to look further but also provides their first foothold to understanding – and how to play. If everything is about boldly going into the unknown, it will make players want to do that, even on a subconscious level.

The danger in big ideas, however, is they can often not mean anything. If Sauron wins the War of the Ring but players still create characters that are men and hobbits and they still go on quests and fight orcs then in practice the game will not feel very different. The joke has been made over and over that the difference between an SF RPG and a fantasy RPG is solely whether you use medpacks or cleric spells for healing or lasers or fireballs for ranged combat. Since games are already an inherently abstracted experience where we have to interact with the world through real-world elements like dice and cardboard and our fellow humans, the need to make things feel strikingly different is much higher. It’s perfectly fine for the cinema and television to remake all the old World War II and Western stories but set them in space; the audience will probably not even notice.⁶ Games do not have this luxury. Changing the name of the big bad enemy from Cthulhu to worldwide disease outbreaks likely will not be enough, especially in RPGs since the activities there are so often exactly the same: go into something like a dungeon, kill something like an orc, get better tools or skills for doing more of that.

A key part of making an idea feel really different, and a setting feel really potent in play, is again to make sure you go home, in a different sense.

By this I mean, what is the minutiae of the setting? What are the things you do in every game, every session, every round? What do the people (or the heroes) do every morning and every night? And how is that different? If your big idea isn’t changing these, then it may not be big enough. Or not big in the right way. In those cases the idea isn’t really big: it’s high. It’s a change that doesn’t trickle down because it isn’t connected to very much. A big enough idea should connect to everything, automatically. And you can check this by looking at what is going on when you go home. When you go into the day to day, the routine and the regular. That’s having breakfast but also swinging a sword. If I could be fighting zombies with a baseball bat just as easily as orcs with a sword or robots with a lightsaber, then your setting might not be hitting home enough.

In Star Wars, the fact that it was set “A long time ago” changed everything because it led to the set design being old and weathered and dusty, completely different from the shiny worlds of all the other SF of the time. It is Star Trek’s dedication to a more enlightened future and morality plays that make it feel unlike every other space setting. In games, again, it’s harder: games tend to keep using the same mechanics and visuals matter much less. Again, we come back to Call of Cthulhu: by changing its key resource from hit points to sanity points, the big idea hit home.⁷ If you can’t see how the core mechanics would change that is another sign that your idea might not be hitting home enough. If you want to see if an idea hits home, try changing the mechanics and see if it still feels like they suit the setting.

There’s an old creative writing exercise where you need to describe a barn from the perspective of say a parent who has just lost a child without referring to the child in any way. In a similar way, a good setting should let you describe a barn in a way that shows you what world that barn exists in, without mentioning the world’s backstory. A good game setting should do the same with making the barn a game artefact or writing rules for the barn. A barn in D&D should have a very different ruleset and description than the one in Call of Cthulhu or in Good Society (Gordon and Hendro, 2018), the Jane Austen RPG.

Go big, yes. But always, always make sure you also go home. That’s what makes your setting meaningful to the players – and to you.

On a Quest

What are the big ideas of your world? Can you make them bigger? Can you make them more personal? Can you describe how they affect every person or every action?

Stopping By

Do the barn exercise, although for a game it is probably better with a power, a monster or a fight. Pick something small from your setting and write a description of it as well as rules for it, without referring to anything specific in your world. Could it exist in another game without significant modification? What would the same element look like in a game or setting you also know well? How much would you have to change to put a creature, location, event, scenario or character type into that world or game?

Notes

We will explain what a world bible is in Chapter 19.

Donaldson also once said, when asked about where authors get their ideas from, that the climax to his first fantasy trilogy came from an image on the bottle of disinfectant on the windowsill of a gas station toilet. I like this story because you can go to the gas station yourself if you like and find the same bottle perhaps, but you probably won’t have the same idea. Ideas come from us.

Refer back to Chapter 7 for how finding a question you can’t answer is important for creation.

In fact, going too far out of the zeitgeist can make your work difficult for a lot of people to understand. You need to keep at least one foot grounded in the familiar.

Most TV westerns centred around a central location such as a town or ranch (e.g. Gunsmoke, Bonanza, The Virginian) or the wanderings of one or two hired guns (The Lone Ranger, Maverick, Have Gun – Will Travel). The innovation of Wagon Train that made it so popular (and later the same approach in Rawhide) was to make the series more of an anthology, spending big money for big single-episode guest stars (members of the train (or the cattle drive in Rawhide) or those they encountered on their journey) who would tell a single story, and then the wagon train would move on. Although Wagon Train is little remembered now, this semi-anthology format developed into the now very familiar Monster of the Week/Mystery of the Week style of television, which became the heart of so much genre fiction and thus also many games inspired by it. Before Star Trek, what little television SF there was likewise focussed around a very small cast, typically always in the same location. Choosing to have the ship “boldly going” was a pivotal moment in worldbuilding, which we will talk about more in the next chapter.

Indeed, once Monster of the Week shows became the standard model, TV scriptwriters would famously just keep reusing their same scripts in different TV shows, over and over again. Nowadays the internet has given us a more encyclopaedic knowledge of TV plots (hence games like “Simpsons Did It”), but until the 21st century this was far less noticeable.

You can also work the other way, having big ideas in your mechanics that then hit every part of your setting. The computer game Hades cleverly took a popular mechanical idea of the “rogue-like” and gave it a setting interpretation that made it sing. Similarly the Assassins Creed games used the idea of a setting explanation for save games.

CHAPTER 16 The Richard Scarry Interrogative

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-18

I SAID BACK IN CHAPTER 4 that characters are people who want things. In non-interactive media – prose, poetry, theatre, film – it is fine for characters to stop there. To only want things. Literature is full of charters who do little more than look out the window and sigh a lot or fail to get up the courage to ever truly live. Games can’t get away with this. Games don’t just involve embodying an identity who is motivated to get something. Those identities must encounter a barrier and push against it. They must figure out if they win or not. They must act.

Characters in game settings are people who DO things.

In the last chapter I talked about how easy it is for settings to get lost in their own lore and forget about being useful for their intended purpose, or clearly communicated towards that purpose. Another way worlds can fail like this is forgetting to focus on things to do. The things might be there but they’re not enough in the spotlight. Or there are obvious goals but no clear paths towards them. In roleplaying games (RPGs) and open-world video games characters can in theory do almost anything they want, and worldbuilders can make characters want to do anything since they have total control. But what should they be doing? What does the setting demand they do? What does it drive them to do and how does it celebrate that, even as it makes it difficult? What might they do if they weren’t doing that – and why don’t they choose to that instead?

I also like to call these the verbs of the setting. Worldbuilders often get very excited about nouns over verbs. Here are the biospheres, the races, the factions, the powers they will say. Here is a complex interweaving of a myriad of the fates of epic heroes played out across the rain-slick rooftops above a city of shadows and intrigues, at the edge of time in a world gone mad. It all sounds exciting but notice how it’s all nouns? Heroes, fates, shadows, schemes, rooftops, time. How do players get onto those roofs or join those intrigues? When our callow youth leave the village in scene one, where are they going and what are they going to do when they get there? Do they even want to leave the village, or did you forget to give them a reason to do so? Many internet memes have pointed out that sane people with full lives are unlikely to want to be the kinds of heroes Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) calls for – but at the same time, people also mock the propensity of rootless, bitter orphans and “murder hobos”. But murder hobos exist so often in D&D because that’s what the game encourages – in its rules and its settings. And murder hobos at least have a clear agenda, even if it is limited.

My references are getting as old as I am but growing up I had the works of Richard Scarry in our house and I loved them. Scarry wrote and illustrated over 300 books beginning in 1949, with his big break coming with The Best Word Book Ever in 1961. Many of us were particularly fond of his depictions of real life in books like Busy Busy Town and Busy Busy World. The appeal was lots of action-packed pictures that were fun to look at for a long time and also explained to children how the world worked. My favourite and by far the one with the best title asked the burning question: What Do People Do All Day?

This is the Richard Scarry Interrogative, and as you have likely guessed, it is a key question to apply to all worldbuilding. In Chapter 2 I talked about how worlds have their own narratives, and parts of those narratives are the stories that the leading characters, identities or forces get caught up in. Those things give us the identity and motivation that need to be expressed in the game. Determining what those identities do in order to reach their goals is the next step. What are they actually doing?

This may sound obvious but it can be subtle. The setting of Star Wars is about fighting wars, as we can tell from the title, but how exactly do they do that? The goal of the characters in the Star Wars setting is generally to join the rebellion, destroy the Empire and confront their own demons or pasts as they do so. In some cases, their motivations are to make a quick buck and watch their back. For the most part, how they do both of these things is with a gun on their hip, a sword in their hand or riding high in their spaceship. Occasionally they fight in vast battles but it isn’t very common and then almost always dogfights or bombing raids in space, not on the ground. When the robot-vs-clones land battle breaks out in Attack of the Clones the camera finds no heroes to follow and the story moves to the one-on-one fight with Count Dooku. This is one reason why we might conclude that there has never been a large-scale Star Wars infantry miniatures game. There’s plenty of justification for such things to exist in the world! But it’s not really what is in the spotlight. It is not what they do all day.

And despite being obvious, it can be very easy to miss this element or give it short shrift. The World of Darkness games have historically depended on having a great gamemaster or the right group because the rules are often very clear on who you are – for example, vampires fighting against your own worst selves – and what you want – to not be used as the puppets and pawns of those above you – but not always what you will be doing in a standard session of play. This became obvious when published scenarios came out for Vampire: The Masquerade and they were often vastly different, not to mention incoherent, in their tone and expectations.

D&D works because everyone knows how a single round goes (swing a sword, shoot an arrow, fire a spell), how a combat goes, how a session goes and how a scenario goes. What it can lack is a clear reason of why you are doing all of this besides getting more money and experience to do the other stuff better (again, unless again the gamemaster is good at building campaigns). D&D also doesn’t have a good idea of what you’re doing besides all this though, which is why the cliche of finding wizards sitting along in a tavern swiftly became a cliche and a strain on credibility. It makes sense to burn down villages and kill families since the game doesn’t provide anything to do with those things.

No need to wonder about downtime if your downtime activity centre was burned down by orcs.

Mechanics are the main way that games tell the players what to do, but you can always reinforce this so much with the setting. Space Invaders only let you move left and right and shoot upwards at the squiggles, so you did that, but it also told you why you were doing it very clearly: these guys were invading, from space. D&D hints at what you’re supposed to always be going – going into dungeons, killing dragons. All names are like this, not just titles: when D&D gave you abilities like Find Secret Doors, it told us much about what kind of things we were supposed to be doing. The Apocalypse World RPG (Baker and Baker, 2010) made sure to frame every roll around “moves”, which are always written in the active voice like trade harm for harm or dig in. By contrast, character sheets in the World of Darkness games provide a wide array of skills anyone in the setting might have, to simulate the world, but in a static way. There’s no obvious button to press to interact with the setting.

If you want your game to be about negotiation and the mechanics or presentation doesn’t spotlight that, or the mechanics or setting elements for other things are more exciting, negotiation is unlikely to happen. Players go where the interesting things are. Along with understanding what you want your identities to do all day, you also have to understand how to make sure they don’t do anything else.

There’s a rule that comes from old school horror film writing: if you don’t start act one with a reason why the characters can’t just call the cops in act two, it will feel cheap when you write around that. The audience won’t buy that the power went out or the phone battery went dead at just that moment. So in act one you should establish the abandoned cabin in the woods is accessible by only one rickety bridge or have the rich person demand all phones be turned in to stop publicity getting out. In the same way if the world is bright and pretty and all the villagers have lovely lives, it feels tacked on to have the orcs show up and murder your parents just to get motivated to get stuck into adventuring. Yes the people we are interested in playing are protagonists who may live vastly unusual lives compared to the average person but the setting should make it easy for players to feel that taking on that life is normal for the player.

A game is an object that we must insert ourselves into. Unlike non-interactive media, there is no room for the character to have a strong internal hunger to push them through the narrative, because the players need to take on that hunger. If The Great Gatsby were a game, one might stop chasing the unattainable green light at the end of the dock if we weren’t getting experience points for doing so. On some level, we play Mario because we believe we – we the player – will get the Princess at the end. You can and should acknowledge this in your worldbuilding. Frodo’s journey to destroy the ring is unique to him but we can see all around him struggles against Sauron being played out, ready for us to step into and take on. The Warhammer Fantasy setting similarly doesn’t leave adventuring motivation to only be provided by the player: the setting goes to great lengths to describe the wandering adventurer and mercenary as part of the setting (while the career rules provide insight into what everyone else is doing). In The Call of Cthulhu there are many short stories that show how and why people stop being antiquarians and are driven to try to hold the Old Ones back. So that choice is easy for us to step into and embody.

A well-built world will also consider the Richard Scarry Interrogative on a wider scale. Of course the hero will go into the haunted house to save their loved ones but what is everyone else doing meanwhile? The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (Hooper, 1984) isn’t set in midtown Dallas because then the plot wouldn’t work – other people would interfere. So yes: you need to think about what every single person in Busy Town is doing all day, and is that working towards keeping your world and its narrative on track and making your game work. This is true no matter if your setting is tight in scope – your setting might be about the same four god-like corporations, say, or set entirely inside a remote lighthouse, or be just one pellet eating circle in a maze with four ghosts. But there’s always something offstage that needs to be thought about, to add meaning and context to that world. Who works in the factories owned by the corporations? At least think about their lives and why they might work there. Who rows the supplies over to the lighthouse once a year? Why are there ghosts in the maze? Who killed those ghosts? Was it Pac-Man? Is this about revenge? I’m not saying Pac-Man suddenly becomes a better game if you add this. But Angry Birds remembered to have the pigs steal the birds’ houses to make them angry. The birds used to live in those houses. Of course they want to get them back.

One reason that superheroes tend to be popular for games is that these questions are well answered by the genre already. Not only do we know what superheroes do all day (patrol, train in the Danger Room, save people, solve mysteries, punch villains), that very question is often discussed, sometimes inside the comics themselves. The original superheroes stole from classics like The Scarlet Pimpernel, with Bruce Wayne having to spend all day establishing his alter ego and using it to also gather information about crimes. Spider-Man and the X-Men reminded us that heroes also had to go to school and were richer for it. In superhero comics we also know what the rest of the people in the setting are doing: they are being rescued, stumbling onto villainous plots, being used as bargaining chips by villains, almost discovering secret identities, getting too emotionally involved and also sometimes hating the hero or judging them for their mutant nature. Go back and watch the first two Raimi Spider-Man films and look at how much those films feature everyday citizens of New York and how much they matter to the story and to the character of Spider-Man.

Busy Town is an exciting place to visit because everyone is doing things all day. We are invested in the town because their lives are so busy and so rich. Pay heed to Richard Scarry and do likewise.

On a Quest

In Chapter 13 the exercise was about producing a cover image for your game. Grab it, or make one again. Are there protagonists or identities on it? What are they doing? Are they showing a key activity of your game? Are there other characters in the picture not doing that? What do they do all day instead? Why don’t they do what the heroes are doing? Why don’t the heroes stop and do what those other characters are doing?

Stopping By

Imagine your setting, its heroes, its events, its identities, motivations and laws from the point of view of someone not connected to any of that directly, who doesn’t have or want the motivations and thus isn’t running into the barriers of the laws. It doesn’t have to be interesting, but does it still connect to the world? Or could that life be like anybody else’s in any other setting? Like the exercise with the barn, you want your average member of Busy Town to reflect your town, as well as your heroes.

CHAPTER 17 Gods and Monsters

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-19

OUR WORLD IS STARTING to come together. We have a big idea, and we’ve made sure it hits home. We’ve remembered to set out clear identities with strong motivations and fearsome laws to stop them getting those things. We’ve made sure to shine a spotlight onto what those identities do all day and thought about what everyone else does as well. But there is one more thing we need to make sure we have before we start developing our world in detail.

It is time to speak of gods and monsters.

Of course if you’re dealing with a world that has no supernatural or cosmological elements of any kind, this is less important. But even there there are edge cases where these things matter. As we discussed in Chapter 11, a lot of settings that appear to be completely hard science fiction still have elements where technology “just works” or unknowns that are kept offstage or in the shadows. You need to understand the logic and structure underlying all of that so you understand exactly how those principles are upheld.

But first let’s talk about why this matters.

Modern worldbuilding has indeed come about thanks to Tolkien and Gygax elevating the subcreation to creation, but part of the success of that model is that worlds are easier to market than stories. When Charles Dickens was writing Oliver Twist in weekly newspaper instalments, the series was so popular that long before it was even finished three different theatre companies were staging dramatic versions of the entire story, complete with their own ending. Nobody thought this was unusual; nor did anyone think that Dickens was owed any money. It was only with the invention of intellectual property and copyright law that such things began to have a sense of belonging to someone. Once settings themselves could be protected like this they were linked to trade dress, logos and iconography. We tend to think of Star Wars and Star Trek as important in making science fiction more mainstream but what they really did (and Doctor Who and Planet of the Apes just before) was make merchandising the core of genre fiction. And that merchandising swiftly began to operate much like the model car and train hobbies, in that what mattered was not just that an object be beautiful but also that it be faithful.

Alongside all this, with the properties now protected, it was always in the interest of the creators to keep extending that control and making more and more material, over longer and longer time frames, within the same setting. And so canon became both more and more important and harder and harder to keep track of.

This is all very new. It is only very recently that we have come to understand worlds as having an unchanging truth, with each additional element adding to that truth, instead of adapting it or developing it. And whatever other benefits this approach has besides marketing dollars, it has one key restriction: worldbuilding these days is required to be additive. Before the game has any products released on the market, we can use our erasers and our backspace keys as much as we want. But once a product exists, the world has begun to be defined and we can no more erase elements as we in the real world can pretend the Roman empire never existed or the Civil War never happened.¹ Although in truth we do know that historical interpretations can change, we tend to view fictional universes as always revealed to us accurately and perfectly, at a much higher standard than any of our own history! If Spiderman said something in issue #218, that is a historical fact, sealed in amber, and anyone who says differently is wrong. This doesn’t mean settings can’t change somewhat, but it does mean you have to constantly deal with the past: if Spiderman said one thing and now something else is true, then the writers are expected to explain why things changed. This isn’t how fiction used to work in the past, when stories were always seen as changeable each time they were told.

All of this means that before we put our world out we need to get some things really nailed down hard because we will not be able to change them later. Some of those key things are key events, major location geography and significant characters, but nothing is more important than cosmology. You absolutely could not insist at this late stage that the Force has six sides (Light, Dark, Up, Down, Cool Ranch and Extra Crispy). You couldn’t simply assert that the Christian religion was observably literally true in the Star Trek universe. Or that the planet Dune was flat and carried on elephants standing on a turtle.

The great thing about being in charge of the world is you get to say once and for all if any gods exist and what they look like and how mysteriously they move. The downside is that with great power comes great exposure to mistakes. Cosmology has a habit of connecting to everything else, as well as causing trouble if it isn’t connected. The moment you hint there’s any kind of divine plan or consequence, or moral certitude of goodness, it can put every action characters take in a new light or under new scrutiny. You can of course choose not to say but there are reasons you might want to at least have an opinion or clearly mark such things under the aforementioned category of Rigorously Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty.²

More than one comedian has observed that characters like Marvel’s Sandman or Dracula (Marvel’s or otherwise) being able to turn into a powder of a gas raises a lot of questions about the location of the human soul, and the same goes for transporter technology in Star Trek. Star Trek doesn’t talk about this (much; it is occasionally interested in philosophy) but it does have a very clear cosmological and philosophical view of the universe, and that is a liberal secular atheism: broadly speaking there is nothing in it that science cannot explain, including any and all gods and monsters. And exploring the impact of this position when encountering the Greek God Apollo, Satan, religious faith, creationists and more (in the original series, Next Generation, Deep Space Nine and Voyager, respectively) is possible and much more interesting because it has a point of view on the subject at hand. You could argue it has some variety of opinions: the revelation that the gods of the Bajoran people were aliens was accompanied with the idea that prayer and ritual still matter deeply, but it has never violated the view of a non-spiritual world.

Stoker’s account of Dracula also has a clear view of cosmology: Dracula is repelled by the symbol of the cross because his soul is damned, and this is also suggested as why he casts no reflection – there is no “identity” behind his living flesh. By comparison, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) has no surface explanation for how and why the dead return, undead or otherwise, which if nothing else robs them of having any real sense of menace. In a world so filled with monsters, nothing is in fact a monster. The rules assure us that a spider the size of a horse is classified as a Beast but a bear crossed with an owl is a Monstrosity, without that really meaning anything. D&D has, at times, made attempts to have a cosmology that mattered more than just providing more places to visit, but it rarely sticks to any of it.³ And as a result there is that constant lack of meaning. By comparison, Warhammer Fantasy makes it clear that when you die you go to an eternal resting place and summoning the undead wrenches the poor person’s soul out of that rest, back into their body, driving them mad in the process because it is fundamentally against the rules of what is natural – even though the setting also has magic and dragons.

This is really what gods and monsters are all about: establishing clear(ish) ground rules of what can and cannot happen, and what is and isn’t normal, and what happens when those rules are broken or appear to be so. Participants in the world and audience members alike can have neither investigation into possibilities nor wonder at their results if they don’t have some sense of what is and isn’t likely to happen. Alice in Wonderland is full of whimsy and surrealism but it is also therefore not able to be about horror, because things turning into other things are not defined as unnatural or frightening. And lots of game experiences depend on exploration, suspense and fear, so it’s worth figuring this stuff out and including it. You don’t have to be sure yourself, and you certainly don’t have to be explicit in the text – certainly the characters within the world might be unclear on things! – but you should know what you definitely don’t know or can’t know and what you definitely have decided. You need to know what you’ve actually said is true about the big stuff like un/normality and the super/natural. And since worldbuilding is additive, you want to figure this out before you do anything else, because you cannot change it later. The characters in the world can be shown to be wrong about what they believe, but the facts you show about what is true cannot change.

Setting out your cosmology doesn’t just give you a solid base and a clear framework; it can also help provide fuel and fire to talk about. For the most part, all ideas of right and wrong come from some belief of what is and isn’t sacred, and that belief exists either against, with or in tangent to what the universe says on the subject. If your characters are going to want things and take action, they will need to have some sort of sense of right and wrong and that means you should have at least some idea of how that view arose and if it is in conflict with the truth. Once you do this, those answers help you build your identities, motivations, laws and actions. The sense of scientific exploration drives the crews in Star Trek to keep exploring, no matter what, and identifies the barriers they face (the wild unknown where anything is possible) and gives a sense of what they do all day (figure out the science of that unknown thing, and/or debate ethical points of view with it) and things that are definitely evil monsters they fight to destroy (militarism, fundamentalism, collectivism, judging others). The ever-present lure of the Dark Side drives heroes to action in Star Wars, while posing constant risk of seduction and providing a source of terrible monsters and awesome mysteries. Gods. Monsters.

Also, it’s very clear that the Force can’t just intervene like an interventionist God and fix everything, which is the other important thing that cosmology can sort out: making sure that nobody else but the heroes in question can save the day. Having an interventionist god or god-like figure can ruin a lot of narrative possibilities. Cosmology also confirms that those heroes are making a difference! If your universe is nothing but cosmic nihilism, you risk sucking away all the motivation to act. The same goes if you make your afterlife too nice: it can suck all the motivation out of shooting bad guys if you and they both know that they are going straight to heaven (or can come back whenever they want). Again, D&D and things like it having consequence-free resurrection mean that killing yourself and shipping the body home become a cheap form of travel – and destroy almost any sense of stakes. Many things have made the Marvel Cinematic Universe less compelling; being able to just move to a universe where things turned out better was one of the biggest offenders.

Finally note that when we’re talking about cosmology that’s not just other planes of existence or a pantheon of gods and so forth: it also includes philosophy. Soon enough you’ll want to think about the philosophies your characters and factions have developed and the best place to start thinking about those is thinking about what kind of universe they find themselves in. People are rarely logical but if you want a shadowy cabal inside the Catholic Church in your ghost-hunting setting, how is the Catholic Church actually dealing with the dead coming back to life? And how are church attendance numbers going if this is all on the evening news? The beliefs that led Andew Ryan to found the city of Rapture in BioShock (Levine, 2007) only make sense in the 1940s because of the repudiation against eugenics that came from World War II. The game simply wouldn’t work if it was set further back in the past or more recently.

Speaking of philosophy, a brief warning for the next chapter: I’m going to have to talk about Plato.

On a Quest

In the world you are building, is there a god or gods? If yes, what are they like? If not, why not? Does anyone know or suspect? Have they told anyone? Does that god approve or disapprove of what the identities are doing and want them to have what they are motivated to get? If so, why did God make it so hard to do?

Stopping By

What happens to individuals when they die in your world? What would happen if that radically changed?

Notes

Obviously, settings actually do this all the time. However the more they do it the more continuity and rigidity are thought of as meaningless or rather become divided into things that can always change, like “Is Marvel Girl dead at the moment?”, and things that cannot change, like Marvel Girl always has psychic powers. Superheroes are the best example of this because nothing in their actual lives is as important as their costume changing.

Refer back to Chapter 11 for the importance of Rigidily Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty, but also look at Chapter 24 on being careful with closed and opened doors.

The Planescape setting while ostensibly really just a way to visit more realities made some attempt to discuss philosophy alongside cosmology, and that was part of its appeal.

CHAPTER 18 The Map Is Not the Territory

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-20

A WORLD BEGINS IN OUR head and then perhaps as a series of notes. We brainstorm some big ideas and make sure they hit home. We figure out which identities and motivations we will bring into our game and make sure the setting has verbs. We’ve nailed down our core cosmology and philosophies. At last it is time to start actually describing it all. So how do we do that?

Essentially, worldbuilding comes down to creating information, and information can come in many forms. Again, we live in the shadow of Tolkien with special privilege given to maps and chronologies and histories. We also tend to think in terms of the epistemology of our age – that is to say the way we learn about the real world is typically how we want to learn about fictional worlds too. Much of our worldbuilding information has thus been presented like an encyclopaedia. Now that Wikipedia is commonplace, wikis of settings are as well. Indeed, in 2016 the Wikia foundation that set up Wikipedia rebranded as Fandom, moving all their game and fan wikis into a central hub, and spent nearly 40 million on rebranding as the central information portal for all genre fiction information. This made the brand profitable enough to be bought up by TPG Capital and in 2024 it absorbed massive websites like Gamespot, MetaCritic, TV Guide and more. As Fandom has faced criticisms of being too commercialised and censoring, big wikis like the Minecraft and Zelda wikis have now left the brand. Wikis are big business, because worlds are big business, and wikis and worlds are now intertwined as concepts.

Twenty years ago, unless you could get to a library and look something up in an encyclopaedia, it simply remained a mystery. If it was about something fictional, you couldn’t look it up at all, unless some random person fiercely devoted to some niche product had done a huge amount of work on a half-broken website or written a book about it (often published only to other fans). If you were lucky enough to like something that was popular, you would be able to buy some of these resources for your fandom from a bookstore, but only the very largest franchises had these. The 21st century fundamentally changed all of this and so fundamentally altered our entire consciousness. Urban myths vanished – albeit briefly, before finding a new way to exist. Some of you reading this might not remember what it was like before this; even those of us who can easily forget. As a flow-on effect, the accuracy we can get about our own world has caused us to focus deeply on factual information about fictional worlds as well. Never before in history have we had so many wonderful worlds to enter; never before have we had so many resources devoted to chronicling and detailing all of these elements and such insistence that they always hew to these facts.

The poet T. S. Eliot once asked: “Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge? Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?”. I would argue that we’ve become addicted to information and that can make things weird when building worlds, and it has resulted in times of us knowing them less and understanding them not at all.

The year of writing this, Games Workshop courted some controversy by revealing that members of the Emperor’s Custodian Guard could be of any gender. When they added female Custodes to their online-only animated TV series set in their Warhammer 40,000 universe they announced on their website:

“Tyrith Shiva Kyrus (the first three of a long list of honorific names earned fighting for the Emperor) has the privilege of being our first portrayal of a female Custodian Guard since the recent revelation that Custodians can be any gender. This fact came as a real surprise to many, since it wasn’t something previously explored. That, in and of itself, isn’t a particularly unusual thing for Warhammer 40,000 and its lore; there are simply loads of things the Warhammer Studios have never expressly stated, whether that’s ruling them in or out….

…We sometimes call these ‘gaps’ and they are quite intentional. They let you as collectors, players, and fans fill the spaces with your own characters, stories and narratives – making the Warhammer hobby truly yours. They also allow us to revisit factions through miniatures, stories, and animations and offer something new and interesting. (Imagine how sad it would be if we ever said “And that’s it. That’s everything you’ll ever see in this army. No new models ever.” – that’d be rubbish.)¹

It was a good reminder that when the audience looks at a fictional world, they are looking as through a tiny keyhole into a large room. They are only able to see the things in the world that the creators make visible. But let’s also realise this goes a step further: we as creators, when we fill this room, are also looking through our own keyhole, at the Thing Itself. We are bringing it to life rather than exploring it but only seeing a slice just the same. We have not thought about those things, but we know they must exist: it is creation in a way that runs through this idea of the simulation being whole, exploring what must be true as much as creating that truth.

The Greek philosopher Plato argued that there was (or could be conceived) a sense within everyone of what he called Platonic Forms. As humans we can see a wooden chair, a metal chair, a chair carved from marble, a rock shaped like a chair, a chair with three legs or four, a chair with a back or without one, a chair that is broken, a picture of a chair, a miniature chair in a doll’s house, the word chair, the description of a chair, the definition of a chair…and we know all these things are part of the same class or category or idea. Plato reasoned then that since we aren’t explicitly told any of this, we must have a sense in our head of the idea of a chair, and that idea was something we knew instinctively. We sense this connection as if the world is expressing a flawed, material example of a higher, spiritual concept of the Thing, and because we can sense this higher truth, we know those things are all chairs. Plato further argued that therefore this knowledge was pre-natal and that there might then be a place somewhere that we come from, before we are born, where all the Ideals of things exist, and that knowledge comes with us into life. Moreover, we never see things properly in this world either because we can’t because our eyes are now unequal to seeing things truly or because things can’t ever be ideal chairs in this corrupt world. We talk as if chairs exist, showing that our minds prefer to think of things in their idea form, even while only ever encountering the projection of a chair into reality, a fallen, lower expression of the higher truth.

Exactly how literally we want to take all of this is debatable, but it was a core part in epistemology and the beginning of derived philosophies like phenomenology and semiotics. For our purposes, it provides a useful separation between the idea of something and the expression of something. As we said back in Chapter 14, worlds cannot be finished. It doesn’t matter if an author writes down every single thing they know about a world and that information is collected, collated and put on a wiki. Just like our world, there is always more to come. Worlds are inherently fractal and infinite, so of course they can never be exhausted. More than that, they can never be completely accurately described or delineated. Or even particularly accurately.

Of course, the wonderful thing about building a fictional universe is you can do what cannot be done in our world: declare something absolutely true. You get to say God is real, dilithium crystals are typically blue, the Battle of Important Gulch happened on year 0 of the Gulchian Calendar. But you should think about what that means when you do so. What does it mean for something to be true. And once it is true, who knows about this and how do they know about it? This question goes for the people in the world and the audience of the world and even to you. The way your world stores, accesses and thinks of information will determine how they interact with everything that is true: how they come to think of something as known, how they explore, invent and do research, how they add new things or make corrections to that body of knowledge or prevent such things, how they share knowledge or prevent it from being shared. All of that is not just the core of the culture and life of your world; it is also going to drive any part of your game that involves exploration or investigation or the unknown – and almost every game has these things.

And yes the way your audience stores and accesses information determines how they interact with things that are true in that world. If they get that information from vast connected wikis they will get a sense of how everything is connected, but also that everything is very known and defined. If they read Dwarven runes on an in-world map in the front of the Hobbit, they will get a sense that knowledge is ancient and secret and powerful. If they read a gazetteer they will tend to view the world like tourists, sampling the local monsters like local delicacies. If they build the world themselves in play, they might be very attached to it in a completely different way; or they might also have the opposite sense: if they can just make it up, it might not feel very real. Video games have done much with the idea of environmental storytelling, where the world is discovered through moving through levels, listening to recordings and interacting with dialogue trees; and the worlds and stories that feature in video games – the good ones at least – tend to be created to fit these delivery systems! Portal provides an in-story reason for the computer to be giving you audio instructions, and so does Bioshock, and that’s why they worked so well and stood out so much. It also allowed both delivery systems to lie to you, while still feeling fair in doing so. Very careful consideration went into both of those games about not just what was said but what was true. The cake, as was so famously noted, was a lie, and it taught us a valuable lesson that sometimes it is good to lie to your audience.

For the most part, modern audiences do not want to engage with settings where there are a lot of unreliable narrators or their gazetteers cannot be trusted – again, because that’s not how we think about information. Nor is there much tolerance for worlds where what the audience knows and what the characters in the world know are different.² This makes it even more important to be very clear about what is and isn’t released to your audience. If you want your world to have secrets and mysteries to the characters, you will likely need to keep them from the players as well. Be very careful to control what is and is not player-facing, especially around mysteries, secrets and Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty.

You shouldn’t however keep them from yourself, but you should be aware that for you also, the way you store, access and think of information affects how you interact with what is true also and what you make true. If you draw maps, you will likely turn your mind to geography, and the limits and restrictions thereof; if you create histories you will build a world where history is important. Likewise if you never draw or describe what people wear or the architecture of their buildings or the scripts they write with, you’ll be in danger of forgetting to add those things into the world and the world might feel lacking in those details. You’ll be much more likely to include the kind of music they listen to if you start to actually write or perform some of that music.

I’m not saying don’t make maps. Maps are lovely. But always keep in mind, with maps or any other thing, what kind of information you are making true and what kind of information you are making known to the audience and to the characters and how you are representing that to yourself and to them. A good map should do far more than just tell you where things are: it should reveal much of how the world works and how the characters in it think and how you want your audience to relate to it and to them. An in-world map is a truly wonderful thing because it contains all that kind of information. Just don’t make the mistake of confusing an in-world map with an audience’s map of the world, and understand how both things drive the nature of the world and how you and the audience interact with them.

And always always remember that no matter how many maps you make or how absolutely sure they are that the information is true and only you will ever see it, that’s still not the territory. Worlds only exist in our heads. If we think of them too much as being what we’ve written down about them, we might stop being able to be creative with them and get boxed in by our own creations. We might forget that worlds always change, and should do, so they keep surprising even us, their creators.

We’ll talk more about how to deal with changing your world later in this book. Right now we should get back to getting started.

On a Quest

As you start to write down some of the key facts, places and dates about your setting consider which ones are well known, which ones aren’t and which ones might not be true at all. For those that might not be, who thinks otherwise? How would they find out if they’re right?

Stopping By

Pick something in your setting that you’ve made definitely true or very likely to be true and make it definitely or likely false, or vice versa. What changes? Who, if anyone, is first to know, and how? What do they do with the information?

Notes

Website: https://www.warhammer-community.com/2024/09/04/the-tithes-episode-2-custodes-dont-ask-twice/ as of 9th of September 2024.

Except of course in wrestling, where the whole point is to buy into the completely fictional nature of it. Although even there we find a constant debate about how much of it is “fake”.

CHAPTER 19 Genesis and the Bible

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-21

WE ARE NOW PAST halfway through this book, so it is time to really get started making your world(s). Something I always do whenever I start any project is to build an inspiration source. Or several of them. Some people use images more than text, others vice versa. Some people like to pin things up on a board or on a virtual space in the same way. Being able to look at things every day can really help both fire your imagination and keep you motivated. I tend to prefer a linear fashion so I just keep word processor documents mostly. That lets me write as much as I want and stick pictures in as I find them. I also like to keep quotes and longer sections that I cut and paste from books or scripts. If you’re doing this, don’t forget to note the source carefully – you never know when you’ll need to look it up again. This goes hand in hand with building your source media, too. I start by making a list of everything I can think of that I’ve already seen or read that I think will be good inspiration and then all the things I might want to read or watch. This is also a good place to list what I might want to research as well.

One of the great things about the internet is it is very good at tracking connections so once you have a list like this you can type the names of the movies, TV shows and books into IMDB, or Amazon, or anything like that and the internet will automatically start suggesting things that might be related. The internet is often wrong, but it usually errs on the side of inclusivity and so should your lists. You don’t know what might inspire you or might be useful later. You’re also sending out feelers to find ideas you don’t know you’re missing. Allow yourself to do deep dives and go down rabbit holes. All of this is building up fuel for your engine. Or sand for your sandcastles as Jordan Peel said. You can always go through later and find the stuff you really like.

I like to use my phone to take photos of things for inspiration too and to jot down notes and thoughts as they come to me. It could be not only anything you’re watching or reading but also things you see in the street or come across at your work. Your phone is also handy for late at night when those ideas come just as you are falling asleep. Your brain thinks about things even when you’re not conscious of it doing that, particularly when you’re doing something else like moving physically or falling asleep. Pen and paper work just as well for both situations and can let you sketch and doodle. Your brain works completely differently when sketching so even if you have no artistic skills it’s worth drawing things as well to shake out ideas. Physical movement like walking or driving can work the same way. Talking out loud works well for the same reason, and it’s even better if you can talk to someone else. “Rubber ducking” is a phrase borrowed from computer programmers where you explain each line of your code to a rubber duck sitting on your desk: the act of explaining things is what helps your brain see it more clearly. This is what we talked about back in Chapter 10 – you’re learning which ideas you like by trying them out on yourself (and then others) over and over again.

You’re also teaching your eyes, too, with all this. There’s a well-known phenomenon where the more you think about something, the more you notice its existence all around you.¹ This makes your passive research easier and easier; soon it appears as if the universe is willing you to make your world by putting these inspirations in your path. The more you fill your idea box, the easier it becomes to fill! In fact, you can sometimes get too many ideas! You can become overwhelmed with reading and thinking and exploring and making notes and you can get stuck at this stage. It may seem as if there are too many things that excite you and you can’t see how to distil them down, or that all the information shows that your work isn’t needed. The art of sifting is not a simple one. It can take a lot of work to know what to throw away and what to keep, as Kenny Rogers observed.

I often have two levels of idea boxes. There’ll be some massive files where I jot everything down and only when I really like things and begin to get a sense of what the project is really about, I move things over into the more precisely targeted idea file. That’s my process. You might like to sort more inside your idea file but keep it all one thing. The point is that the next step is the act of rarifying, drawing the purest, most important stuff out and getting rid of what doesn’t belong. Don’t be afraid to throw things out! You cannot make your game be about everything and you wouldn’t want to if you could: it would be an unfocussed mess. In testing players will always think of something you haven’t considered and you can’t add all of that in as well. Remember that they want it to be what their idea of the game is, and as much as a game is a tool for others,² you can ultimately only make it about the things that most matter to you.

From your idea files you’ll draw and sift and extract the materials to begin to build your setting bible. That term comes from television writing but it’s very appropriate: here will be kept the things that are the holy writ of your setting – the things you’ve decided are definitely true or at least until something better is decided. You can still use your eraser in the bible but you only want to keep things in there that you’re happy with for the moment. You’ll want to do “version control” as they say in software: when things change you’ll want to update them and take the old things out. Don’t throw them away though! Put them back into the ideas pile. I tend to just call all the stuff that leads to the bible my ideas folder, but since they come before the bible I also like the term dinosaurs. It also has a nice reminder that you take the barest bones from the idea file and draw them into fearsome beasts, and only then do those get shown to the audience.

Tolkien also used the metaphor of bones, saying that audiences “must be satisfied with the soup we see before us and not desire to see the bones of the ox out of which it has been boiled”.³ He was arguing that a story is not always illuminated by dissecting it or uncovering its history or pointing out recurring motifs. An equally good message for creators is, in our modern world so drenched in media, to not undo ourselves by thinking our bones are too derivative. It is the boiling that matters and also selecting precisely which bones to use. Your selection and purification will be unique – that is the nature of the artist’s work. Art is about making choices and killing at least some of your darlings.

So how do you decide what to keep? This is when you go back to your keynote, or keynotes, that we also talked about in Chapter 10. They become your north star, your calibration principles. Whenever everything comes up, you can use your keynote to tell you if it belongs or not. If you haven’t identified your keynotes, that’s what the ideas process is all about. Somewhere in those big heaps will be one or two big ideas you really want to talk about or ask questions about and things that really hit home. You want to find those and turn them into statements of intent. As you move through your ideas you will notice patterns and divisions and you can use those to slowly give shape to ideas and then build those into keynotes. Art is a work of discovery, finding out what the work is about: you don’t have to put keynotes down on a blank page. You can also change or add to your keynotes.

I like to have at least two keynotes when I create anything. This way I can always double-check before I throw something away, and if I am finding nothing inspiring in chasing one keynote I can switch to the other. More than five is probably too many. If you’ve gone through your ideas and have six or more things you want to talk about, you probably need to swirl through those six and rarify again.

Keynotes can also be goals you want to achieve too, and they may be more related to the game’s design than the world itself. Game design can feel a lot more like engineering than making art and that implies a blueprint and a problem the engineering is trying to solve. “Make a cool game” is too general. We can drill down using repeated questions, as explained in Chapter 7. What kind of cool game? What games do you think are cool? Why are they cool? Chances are there’s going to be a lot of other games in your games, especially your first games. “Make a game like Magic: The Gathering” is getting close to a good keynote, but not specific enough. Does it use the colour system? The idea of mana-providing cards? Or is it about summoning amazing creatures or controlling wizards?

A keynote I’ve used for game design includes things like:

A game like Love Letter, with just a few cards and some deduction, but fully cooperative

A cooperative deckbuilder that uses double-sided cards and push-your-luck mechanics

A roleplaying game played entirely with eighteen cards

These are all mechanical goals that I offer those for comparison and inspiration. You may find your world ideas emerging from such things. My keynotes for worlds have included:

For a fantasy setting for a roleplaying game, I wanted to explore the way that traditional fantasy worlds like Dungeons and Dragons tends to have pockets of urban life surrounded by big bad forests and what would happen if we inverted that. So one of my keynotes was “reverse urban and wilderness at every level”. For the same game I was looking at exploring the idea of rebellion and persecution⁴ so I also had a keynote that read “culture can oppress as easily as the jackboot or the bread line”.

For a dice game about racing cars in a near-apocalypse where global weather collapse had caused mass freezing events, I simply wrote down “Is your car on fire? Is it on fire enough?” because I wanted the game to be about pushing your luck by literally setting your car on fire if need be to keep it warm and moving, and risk exploding.

For a collaborative two-player word game I wanted to evoke the feeling of espionage during World War II or the Cold War but in a way more domestic and personal and romantic so that’s what I wrote down: “it should feel like a WW2 romance movie”. A keynote doesn’t have to be poetry!

You can also use keynotes as a place to start your ideas too. For a planetary romance setting I started with one single idea: “What if J. D. Leyendecker had drawn astronauts?” That gave me something to simply start piling ideas around anything related to that. I don’t yet have a greater sense of what the keynotes for that world might be. It’s still in the ideas stage, building up the sand. But I had a keynote for the process of gathering the sand.

Note that keynotes are not something you show to the audience. That’s a blurb or a byline or a pitch – but if you have a great idea for those, then they absolutely can be your keynotes. Making a mock-up cover, blurb for the back of the box or advertisement is also a great way to conceive of your game as a product as a whole. It also provides a sense of who your audience might be and what they might value the most about it.⁵ So again, these can be great keynotes to help with the rarification.

The distinction between what is shown to the audience applies everywhere: your idea file and your bible are just for you (and any creators who work with you). This is especially important when you have a setting with secrets, lies and big reveals. Open secrets can also exist too but it’s always good to keep some things back. You’re a stage magician – you should keep some tricks up your sleeve. And you’re an entertainer: if you put everything into the opening number, you’ll have nothing to wow them with when you reach the finale.

This can be the most important role of the bible: it lets you write down all the wonderful plans you have and all the things you have in store, so you can revel in them. If you don’t write them down, you might instead blurt them out to anyone who will listen and give the game away when you don’t mean to. Your rubber duck can come in handy too, but an even better version of the rubber duck is an actual person. They can be a co-creator – those are wonderful things to have – but just as good is a friend who is interested to hear about it. You can tell them all the secrets that make you want to burst and enjoy their excitement, so you don’t feel the need to give away the whole show to your prospective audience. They don’t need to do anything – they don’t even need to say they like what you’re doing! – because mostly they are just a rubber duck. If they do say they like it, that will also be very useful. Sometimes being an artist is terribly lonely and isolating, with long periods where you have no idea if anything you think is worth putting down or presenting to an audience. One person to listen is an incredible resource, especially when finding your feet on a project, or as an artist as a whole.

If you do have a co-creator, of course, then you’ll need your bible to be absolutely clear on what the world is about. Just as you can compare everything to the keynotes to see if it belongs, so can they. But you’ll also want to go further and give them a broad overview, and that’s what we’ll be tackling in the next lesson.

On a Quest

Make sure you identify what is and isn’t your idea file and your bible. Set up both and label them. Make sure you want to keep everything in your bible; if not, move it back out! If you haven’t got anything in either of them yet, it’s time to start brainstorming and chasing white rabbits to see what you’re really interested in.

Stopping By

If you don’t have a friend who you can download all your ideas to, your task here is to find one. If you have one, your task is to thank them, perhaps with a small token of appreciation!

Notes

This is known as the Frequency Illusion or the Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon.

We will return to this some more in Chapter 33.

From his essay On Fairy Stories, published in 1947.

Then along came Spire (Howitt and Taylor, 2019), a game about very much this, so I had to rethink. That’s going to happen, and it’s why you brainstorm before you publish.

We’ll come back to this idea in Chapter 37.

CHAPTER 20 Top Down…

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-22

IN HAL HARTLEY’S INCREDIBLE film Trust (1990), his characters say that love is a combination of admiration, respect and trust. I’ve always thought those three things are the pillars of any great relationship, especially one of shared creation. If you have a co-designer or designers it is vital that you admire the work they do and respect their skills are up to the tasks before them. Trust can be the hardest one because we all want to come in and change things others have done but for it to be a co-design it must be a work of multiple voices, and you have to trust that their vision is as important as yours and trust that they will do justice to your ideas.

But respect and trust are built on clear communication. That is, if you hand something over to another designer, you want to be able to draw a clear line and say “this belongs to them, so much and no more”. Here then we look to the top-down approach of setting design as we draw these kinds of lines across our worlds.

Note that I said lines, not sections. Yes we’re building categories and classes and members thereof, but whenever we do this we do it by drawing lines between things, and I want you to notice what those lines are. We tend to have a very mathematical view of the universe, especially when it comes to making games – there are this many factions, this many nations, this many types of powers, this many fancy hats to wear and so on – but in the real world these kinds of things don’t naturally occur so neatly. Being aware of why the lines form that make the sections will help those things feel more natural and believable. Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) as a negative example has never explained why or how someone becomes a certain class or how they know they are in one; these things therefore have no actual representation in the worlds around them. It’s fine for things to just be game mechanic terms but because D&D doesn’t do this the Game Master or players are forced to constantly remember that their class isn’t “real”. You can do better and build as many connections between mechanics and world as you can find space for.

The lines tell you a lot more about your world than just the categories they create. D&D draws a fundamental distinction between a priest, a knight and a fighter, which suggests that the society at large would view those things very differently! Likewise between a priest and a wizard! But the game doesn’t want to tell us how someone might know which is which or how someone might move between those things, which could be a rich story opportunity. But no – D&D is just circular definitions: the only difference between holy magic and arcane magic is a priest does the former and a wizard does the latter. By comparison Star Trek has different specialities of its crew members and there are lots of stories about moving between those and choosing which one you want to be and why. The Dune setting doesn’t allow you to move between the royal houses but the lines that create those houses are very clear – they are all about birthrights and blood: Paul cannot be anything but an Atreides because of who his father is. That is a major plot point in the books!

The kinds of categories you are creating in your world should be more than just game mechanics or character options, of course. It’s time to remember what you learnt in geography at school.¹ Things such as maps not only can be political (showing national borders) but also show things like topography, climate, ecosystems, population density, land use, population trends and so much more. If you’ve ever paid attention to an election, you’ve seen maps of geography coloured in bit by bit by allegiance and perhaps things like education levels, employment rates, average salaries, rent prices or all sorts of measures of social-economic status. Yes, it’s time to be a geographer² and a statistician. An ethnographer too. The only difference is that instead of examining the world as it is, you get to make it all up. You get to decide not just who thinks things but what things they think.

This is true no matter what your setting is, however large or small. Even if your whole game takes place in one Edwardian drawing room, statistics and geography are always present. Where are the entrances and exits? Who is here and where are they standing? What kind of furniture and decoration is in the room as a whole, and is one side of the room different to the other? Where is the drinks cart and which characters are more likely to be standing near it, wanting a drink? What books are on the shelves? What kind of outfits are the people wearing? All of these things are divisions, divisions not just across the room in physical geography and across the people in the population but across subject matter. You might know exactly what each person’s job is and their secret vice, but you might then want to hand over to someone else to decide what they are all wearing because that person knows about fashion of the time. Or you might ask someone to figure out what religions they might hold or political views. This kind of separation into subjects is just as important as giving someone half the characters to work on or to draw the plan of the room and deciding what goes where.

Even if you’re not handing things off to another person, you will have to hand things off when you worldbuild to someone, and that someone is your future self! It is impossible for anyone to instantly write down every single fact about a world in one single sitting. So even if you are alone, you must start by looking down at your world from above and dividing up the task before you.

The lines you can draw are infinite, of course. You will always be able to draw more. So the ones you draw first are going to depend on what is most important to your game and what you are excited to write about. That’s why you have keynotes and have decided on your identity, motivation and law and have answered the Richard Scarry Interrogative. If your game needs factions, then those sections and those philosophies (and the dividing lines between them) might be the first things you will want to draw. But before you start filling in every detail, you want to stay up at the top level and think about what else those lines and sections imply. Why are those the fracture lines that divide things? What other big lines run alongside those lines, and which ones run perpendicular or cut across? Where are the factions located geographically? What kind of technology or weapons do they use? What kind of umwelt led them to adopt those philosophies or politics within their faction, and why are the fracture lines something that affects everyone in the world so these groups form? What kind of signals do the groups use to show that they are different from the others? Since games are so often competitive, the identities in your game will likely take great lengths to make a show of their difference from those they compete or struggle against and to find ways to show that they are strong, blessed or virtuous and their opponents are weaker, lesser or evil.

A lot of the time, we communicate these things with not what people do but how they live: the things they eat, drink, wear and do to stay alive. In other words, don’t ignore physical culture and lifestyle. You might not define those things now but you need to now think about what lines will exist that will or could be filled in later. For every faction you create, you can think of them as columns, with various aspects making up the rows – where they are, how they think, how they live and so on.

Think also about what all each of your divisions have in common with each other and also what lines go across those divisions. Does each faction have rich and poor elements or weak and strong? Would a weak person have more in common with a weak person from another faction than they do with a strong person in their own faction? If yes, can they find that out somehow? If no, why not? Why does membership in the faction matter more than that? And you can generalise from here: which things do they rank more importantly than others? These things can be important reasons why the factions might ally against others or why they might fear alliances between their enemies. They might also lead to conflicts: if every faction likes to put their hair into cool styles using hair gel, then everyone will be fighting over the supply of hair gel. In other words, this isn’t just scene-setting: this is vital information for your game.

Roleplaying games have famously since their inception used this kind of “matrix” design approach to their worlds. As discussed in Chapter 14, D&D had players choose a class, which tells them their job and role in the game world, how they go down holes and how they kill the things that are down there. They choose a race to determine why they might go down holes and how they feel about doing so and how they talk about those things. These 2 things intersect so the 16 different classes and 18 different races produce 128 possible “builds”, with each combination providing points of difference and points of overlap. A dwarf fighter might be more likely to use an axe than an elven fighter is; a human cleric may worship a very different god to a tiefling paladin. But both clerics are people of faith who might share an opinion about the fighters, and the fighters likely have no time for god-botherers.

In constructing characters for drama and fiction, these are sometimes called points of connection and points of disconnection and they can be a great way to think about any scene or piece of dialogue. When any two characters interact, they will have some things in common, which will determine much about how they connect (if they had nothing in common, they wouldn’t be talking at all!), and some things that they do not share, which will drive the conflict between them. In games we look more at contesting points or goals rather than points of dialogue but the logic is the same. If your game has, say, a sentient computer virus and a giant squid, it might be hard to think about why they are fighting over the same thing or even harder to think about what they might agree on to fighting together. This is why settings have wants and needs as discussed in Chapter 3: these tend to provide both points of connection and of conflict. The virus and the squid perhaps both want to control the sea (maybe the virus uses hydroelectric power to run its computers), and neither of them want the humans to hunt them down. Now we can imagine a conversation they might have about how much they both hate humans. Your game may not allow for alliances or much time for conversation but you should still consider these points of connection because they help you draw more interesting lines and develop more interesting things inside those lines.

Thinking like a geographer and a statistician is also important because both those disciplines are about the art of representation.³ A map cannot reflect every possible part of the territory, and a statistical snapshot of a population is unable to reflect the individual. Your lines and sections should not therefore be homogenous. There will be some in each group that don’t reflect the broad trends of the group very well, and there should be reasons why they are then counted as doing so. There will also be people who are just hard to categorise or fall outside classifications, who slip through the cracks of categories. Our human brains love categories but nature abhors it: only mathematics is pure and clean. Games then have a tug of war between our maths brain and a realistic setting: it is extremely useful for there to be only, say, five kinds of werewolves and it being instantly obvious to each werewolf which kind they are and what kinds they are not, but how does the universe announce this? As we talked about in Chapter 18, what makes something true? What makes it known? Who tells you what kind of werewolf you are? Again, it may be obvious – perhaps werewolves all grow different coloured fur so the grey ones fight the black ones – but there will always be exceptions. Are there rare werewolves born with both colours? Do they get drafted into one larger group and told they have to follow that one? Or do they split off and form a loose collection of the unaligned? Have some blacks joined the greys, despite their colour? What does that imply?

As well as things that fall in between categories there are also always things outside categories. Every time you make a categorisation there will be things that aren’t part of the data set or aren’t thought of as part of it. Perhaps there are werewolves with no hair (creepy!) or whose hair grows in all colours, or maybe weretigers aren’t counted (even though they also may be black or grey). There are also things at the far edges which can’t be captured. Geographically this is easy to think of as things beyond the map, but you can also think of things too high or too low for the scales you’re using or too broad or too fine. There’s rich, middle class and poor but there might also be the destitute or the billionaires or the people just about to tip over from middle class into poor. There might also be things that used to be in the classes but aren’t there now – or new groups emerging that might soon be counted. Finally there’s the things that are out there but are hard to see or hard to know. Some werewolves refused to be surveyed on their fur colour and ate the survey-taker instead. Maybe there’s a lot of rich people in the Black Tower but nobody has ever come out alive. Or you haven’t decided yet, so leave it blank.

You may also want to note certain mechanics or game elements you want to associate with the section you’re talking about and graphic design choices. This faction may be coloured red, use a certain font or be associated with larger dice pools. Now is a good time to jot these down too. You’ll want to think about if those choices match the in-world elements, as discussed back in Chapter 2.

As stated above, there’s no way you can fill in all these sections and lines across your world in one sitting. Most of the time you will only note that the lines or sections exist (or if they definitely don’t) and how much it intersects other things (or which things it doesn’t intersect with, because, say, everyone in the Black Tower is rich). Even where you can fill things in right away, you won’t want to write the full encyclopaedia of all the fancy haircuts worn by those who dwell in the Black Tower. Instead, your collaborators (your future self or otherwise) will need guidelines of what each section is like, and this means we return to keynotes. You need to be able to sum up each section succinctly but vividly and also sum up the nature of that sectioning (how the lines are drawn). And then for each section within the lines, for each aspect of a faction or place or belief, you’ll need keynotes again. It is, in fact, like the turtles in the saying, keynotes all the way down.

Luckily, the matrix effect of interconnection can help you here too. Yes, maybe the wizards of the Forest are very different to the wizards of the Plains but if you know the keynotes for wizards and the keynotes for the geographical areas, you’ve cut your work down greatly. There might be exceptions of course, but this is something pretty easy to note in your keynotes.

As discussed in Chapter 19, using a wiki for all this will give you a different sense of your world than a folder full of maps might, but wikis are enormously useful for helping you get down all these kinds of intersections, because you can always create a link to a page even if the page has nothing in it yet. There are paid websites that help develop and catalogue your bibles, but wikis are free on sites like Mediawiki, Wikidot, Slimwiki and more. Wikis not only help you connect everything to everything else but also track changes made and who made them, which make them great for working with co-creators, including your future self. Although they may still have no idea why you wrote “HAIRLESS WEREWOLVES???!?” on a napkin at four in the morning.

Even with good notes, though, the need to fill in all these sections will mean some things will get lost because you’ll forget before you get to them. That’s okay. Your brain is storing them away in your subconscious and most likely turning them into something better. I’ve spent too much of my worldbuilding terrified I’ll forget something but your brain is an ever-growing forest and if one idea is lost, ten better ones will take its place. Everything ripens in its time.

If you do find yourself stuck for ideas up at the top, however, you can go and work from the other end, as we’ll look at in the next chapter.

On a Quest

I’m sure your game needs some kind of groups or factions or locations and you’ve already got some in mind. Think about the lines that exist that make these sections separate. How did they emerge? Why do those lines matter so much? What’s outside or between those lines?

Stopping By

No matter how exhaustive you think you’ve been there’s always some part of your world that goes across every other aspect that you probably haven’t thought about much. Grab some friends and find out their area of expertise. Then figure out how that area of expertise looks in each group, faction, location or culture in your world. Ask the friend for help if need be!

Notes

If you don’t remember your geography or want a refresher, one of the very best resources is Physical Geography by Strahler and Strahler, which is available online entirely for free on the Digital Archive.

After all, geography comes from the Greek meaning literally to draw the world.

We will go into this a lot more in Chapter 31.

CHAPTER 21 And Bottom-Up

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-23

LOOKING FROM TOP-DOWN, BUILDING a setting can be overwhelming. So many possible things to create and detail and explain. Even with the mighty power of the Gods, it’s so much to do that it can become paralysing. The alternative is to work bottom-up instead. Shift positions and narrow your focus down. Right down to a single individual. Think of one character in your world. What do they need to know? And what do the players need to know about them?

Obviously, a character in the world is going to know a lot, instinctively, about their environment. So let’s go even further and think only about what they need to do an activity in the game. Not even all the activities – let’s just start with one simple thing that the character does, in the game. We want to really come down to the smallest possible thing. This is also good for understanding your game too: what is the smallest action, the atomic game element, and what does it represent?¹ As discussed in Chapter 14, we want to find the smallest possible setting to work with. Who is the character? What do they want to do? What is stopping them? And how are we modelling that?

Let’s imagine that we are making a superhero game of some sort, and the simplest action is your classic sock to the villain’s jaw. (We could also do this for a hero crawling through a dungeon, too, or a space jockey firing a lasergun at an alien.) We want our hypothetical game to model some kind of cool comic superhero fight. Let’s start there. What do we need to know?

Obviously we need to know who we are controlling – what is our playing piece. Some kind of superhero. So they need a name. Superheroes are nice because the assumptions are all very “built-in” – we always know that heroes want to punch bad guys and the bad guys want to rob banks and not get punched. So we have identity, motivation and law. But not quite. After all, this hero isn’t likely to just be any hero. They need a name and some kind of costume or aesthetic, and those things should indicate that they are a superhero (we won’t just call them Eric). That’s a great few things to start on. We need someone to embody, so they need a name. They don’t need a motivation because they’re a superhero and have one built-in: they want to punch villains. They do need some kind of power to do that though. And they need a target to hit. And presumably this isn’t happening in the middle of nowhere, so they need an environment for it to happen in. So our simple short list is: a name, a power, a bad guy, a location.

That’s a bite-size task to attack, and it also provides enough to get us started on everything else we want to put in the game! A street, a bad guy and a hero is much like the village, the orcs and the fantasy hero from Chapter 14. It’s bite-size. We can start there and establish those things and from them get a clearer sense of those keynotes and goals. But then what? Well we start to build outwards. From the bottom, upwards.

A name lets us ask: what kind of name? Are our heroes given titles like Captain, or names about their abilities? Are they pastiches of popular heroes in other media, or unique creations, or somewhere in-between? The same question applies to powers: do we want some things that are very recognisable from the suite of superhero powers? If this is someone like Superman, does he have the same sort of powers? Are there lots of types of powers? Do heroes have a whole collection? Or are we thinking of a single power, or a single kind of power source or a single style of hero? A street leads us to ask: what kind of street? Rich, poor, dirty, clean, cracked and broken or smooth and newly laid? In what kind of city? Under what kind of sky? Is our target a low-life punk who is easily defeated, or someone equal to our skills, or a terrifying villain that will take all our strength to defeat? Do they have superpowers? Are they the same kind as ours, or are they of a different flavour?

(We might also have some things arising from the mechanics we’ve laid down, of course, but we’ll leave that aside for now.)

All of these are choices for us to make, and that’s what all art and creation is: making choices, one after the other. The advantage of starting bottom-up is you know that no choices you make are going to get in the way of the core gaming activity. Bottom-up choices also don’t cause as many intersections or risk as many contradictions. This approach lets you go step by step, building your setting by accretion rather than trying to eat the entire elephant at once. This also ties in step by step to the game design process: building a core mechanic and then figuring out the structure that mechanic sits in. How do we deliver a punch? Is it by playing cards? Okay then what do the cards represent? What does having more or less in your hand mean? Is there a central deck and a discard pile? What do those mean (if anything)? Are there more powers? More heroes? More villains? More streets? In setting terms, where are these streets? Where do powers come from? How do heroes find villains to punch? Bit by bit we build lists of things that then become things in categories, rather than the top-down method of drawing up sections and having to fill them all in later.

This organic sort of process is the way a lot of authors work with their worldbuilding as well. This is another reason why the plucky hero often starts in a tiny village – you don’t have to work out the whole world until they take their first steps. Yet at the same time, the nature of the hero and the village is laying down ground work. The first lines of Ursula Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea (1968) reads: “On Gont there is a saying: ‘weak as women’s magic’ and also ‘wicked as women’s magic’”. Here we have learned so much already about the world and its contents and the prejudices it carries. Early in Lovecraft’s The Outsider, it reads: “I know not where I was born, save that the castle was infinitely old and infinitely horrible; full of dark passages and having high ceilings where the eye could find only cobwebs and shadows”. Much can be said in just a sentence, just a scene, just a turn of phrase or item. A beginning can imply everything about the world, like a seed containing everything that becomes the tree.

Bottom-up building can feel a little bit uninspiring since we often think of settings as being vast and epic and full of a grand narrative and built on clever conceits. But you have your “go big” ideas to inspire you, and you’ll get to the bigger stuff in time. Bottom-up can also lead you to contradictions you don’t see coming because you aren’t viewing the whole world at once. If later you decide that heroes are summoned with something like the Bat-Signal, you might not have written that in your first encounter. What if Eric the Cleric belongs to a faith we late decide requires a vow of non-violence but we already have him listed as fighting zombies?

We can always erase things and perform checks² on our settings, but I find another part of keeping things in line is to work top-down at the same time as bottom-up, with each informing the other and keeping the other in check. Swinging up to the top is a great way to make sure the choices at the bottom are making sense, not contradicting anything and are leaving plenty of space for other elements to come. Swinging down to the bottom stops you from going down rabbit holes of too much setting that has no application or relevance to what the players are actually doing, which is always vital.

Which brings us to the other inversion: just as there is the bible that we are building that contains all the details of the world for us as designers, we have to also start building a sense of what the players need to know and how things will be presented to them. Working with our audience is in fact also a case of combining top-down and bottom-up. We want to get them excited by the scope and grandeur of a big world with big ideas and amazing possibilities, but we also want to be clear about exactly what they will be doing and how easy that is to get a handle on. Much like a great game, a world should appear as if it was so easy to learn you almost feel like you know it already but so rich it will take a lifetime to explore and master.

Pulling that off requires a deft combination of the exotic and the familiar, which we’ll talk about in the next chapter, but also keeping in mind top-down and bottom-up approaches. Only instead of using this to build your bible, you’re using it now to build the next step: the blurbs. Setting is communicated to the player in every possible way, intrinsically in the mechanics, extrinsically in the art, the naming of things and every piece of description, fiction or in-world elements. But the masthead of all of that is the technical, expository text about the key game elements you want to communicate, and I call these as the blurbs.³ These are equivalent of keynotes in your bible but designed for the player. Like a keynote they need to be vivid, rich and evocative, explaining as much as possible about who or what it is describing and suggesting so much more, but also be succinct and direct.

The truth is that if you’re communicating a setting in your game, then everything that isn’t done with art and rules is done with blurbs. What kind of identity do you want to take on? What kind of enemies do you want to face? What kind of battlefields or arenas do you want to face challenges in? What modes of play suit your playstyle? In many cases, getting people interested in playing a game is actually about getting them interested in who they embody and what they get to do as that identity. You’re selling people on that as much as explaining it, and you’re selling through blurbs as much as the gameplay and the game as a whole. And selling is the right word: your blurbs are really sales pitches.

Sales pitches and expository text alike depend on coming at things from both top-down and bottom-up. Top-down, who are you asks: how would this identity be described in the history books or geography books? Where are they from and where are they going and why do they wear those funny hats? Bottom-up though, who are you asks: what do they care about and what do they do all day? How do they do the core action of the game? What does the player really need to know about them, for turn one, round one, action one? Top-down is often an overview of the group or classification or style and bottom-up is the example the player is choosing. The Church of the Mace to the Face believes in crushing zombies and is 1000 years old and was founded by Saint Olaf (that’s top-down). Eric the Cleric wants to live up to the example of Saint Olaf (that’s bottom-up). Sometimes top-down is the broad specifications, and bottom-up is how the player uses those concepts to make their choices or put things into practice. Clerics of the Mace to the Face use their holy magic to smite evil (that’s top-down), so when you play your first move should be to ready your Mace card and charge your Holy Symbol (that’s bottom-up).

The thing that sales pitches and expository text don’t have in common is that the former is about getting you excited by telling you why you want to play something, and the latter is about guiding you to getting those results by telling you how to play something. So you can think of top-down and bottom-up like this too. Top-down is the fancy chrome paint job; bottom-up is the 400 hp engine. Top-down is you can go from 0 to 100 km/hour in 0.8 seconds; bottom-up is the throttle is under your right thumb, just push up slowly. But bottom-up doesn’t have to be boring. Bottom-up is also lived-in, close to home stuff. The feel of that throttle sliding under your thumb and the thrum of the engine beneath you, that’s bottom-up. Screeching down the highway in a cloud of dust, that’s top-down. See how they make you feel different things?

You can even see that these are fairly close to Go Big (top-down) and Go Home (bottom-up). Top-down/Go Big is a fantasy world where there is only one church and that church is the sole bulwark against the constant threat of the undead. Bottom-up/Go Home is how it feels for a peasant to know that every step they take away from that church increases their chance of being taken by the hungry corpses beneath the ground. Top-down/Go Big is a megacity where only the rich travel by car and distance is a weapon of class war. Bottom-up/Go Home is a story of someone saving their money to buy their first vehicle, or getting through the streets on their new rocketskates. Top-down/Go Big is Lord Dagon and his Deep Ones are the true rulers of this earth and they cannot die. Bottom-up/Go Home is noticing the fishy scales appearing on your wrist and that your great-uncle lived in Innsmouth.

There’s similarly parallels with the exotic and the familiar, and as mentioned, that’s our next port of call.

On a Quest

By now you’ve likely identified the key identity or identities that players will embody in the game. So it’s time to start taking the keynotes for those identities (and the groups they belong to, or whatever else defines them) and turn them into blurbs. Think top-down and bottom-up as you create the sales pitches and how-to guides to get a player eager to want to embody that role.

Stopping By

Go back over blurbs you’ve already written and make sure they cover both top-down and bottom-up processes. Which do you tend to write more of or enjoy writing more? Does it depend on what kind of thing you’re writing about?

Notes

We will talk more about this art of slicing time in Chapter 28.

We will talk more about stress-testing our settings in Chapter 34.

Just as some things will come out of your ideas files into your bible but also go the other direction, blurbs are drawn from the bible, and when you change them, you’ll put the old versions back into the bible or ideas file. Filtration from ideas to bible to blurb and back again is the ongoing process of worldbuilding.

CHAPTER 22 The SpongeBob Technique

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-24

TRULY, ALL YOU NEED to know about good worldbuilding can be learned by watching Spongebob Squarepants. And in particular, from the theme tune. Let’s look at the lyrics, which begins by building incredible suspense in the audience:

Are you ready kids? AYE AYE CAPTAIN! I can’t hear you! AYE AYE CAPTAIN!

And then

Who lives in a pineapple under the sea?

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

Absorbent and yellow and porous is he!

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

If nautical nonsense be something you wish

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

Then drop to the deck and flop like a fish!

SPONGEBOB SQUAREPANTS

What we have here are four simple steps to describing any element of your game world in an evocative and useful way.

First: a pineapple under the sea. We need to know where we are? What is the context for this? What does that look like?

Second: absorbent and yellow and porous is he. We need to know who is here? What kind of things are they? What is their nature and teleology, so we can imagine their umwelt and step into their psychology¹?

Third: nautical nonsense. We need to know why is this interesting? Why do we care? Why do we want to go to this place, find these identities and spend time with them or embody them?

Fourth: drop to the deck. We need to know what going there and doing those interesting things look like²? What activities will we do when we are being there and embodying or encountering these people?

I keep this in mind all the time, just in case I forget something. For every single bit of exposition or explanation I write, I ask: where are we? What or who do we find there? Why would the players or audience be interested? What things happen there or what will the players do?³

You don’t have to do it in that order of course. But those are things you always want to hit whenever you think about your setting as a whole or any part of it, whether that’s an entire continent or a single individual. Who are they? What is their context? What are they doing? Why is it interesting? You might occasionally leave one element out but do so with extreme caution.

Note that this is about building a blurb. It is an audience-facing description. You don’t always need to remind yourself why things are interesting in your bible. But you absolutely should always be reminding your audience of these things in your blurbs, because again: your blurbs are always sales pitches. The worldbuilder is at heart a carnival barker selling tickets to a show or a ride. It doesn’t matter if your world is the Ghost Train or the Tunnel of Love or the Tilt-a-Whirl or even if it’s a showing of the plays of August Strindberg, your job is always to get people in the door, which means you have to promise them the show is not to be missed.

All art needs to pay some attention to attracting an audience and setting their expectations, but games have it particularly hard because after the audience enters, the very first thing they have to do is sit down and read a textbook or learn a lesson. That is a heavy price to pay and a big speed bump to hit just inside the door. So selling is all the more important.

Worldbuilding is selling too, because it’s all about directing that spotlight we talked about back in Chapter 11. We are obviously only going to be showing people the things we think are exciting and intriguing. It is true that Tolkien wrote a treatise on Numenorean weights and measures. It is also true that very few people have ever read it, even among the most ardent of fans. You can put these things in your bible, of course! Many many things went into Tolkien’s bibles and later into publication. Tolkien spent a lot of his time just building worlds for fun, and you can too. But when or if you want to show the world off, you have to get the customer through the door. And then up to speed. And not, usually, into a discourse on how speed is measured.

Just as the audience needs to learn the game, they are also needing to learn about the world. Luckily this is usually not as difficult as learning the rules of a game, and a lot of this learning is going to happen subconsciously or passively, as they look at art, read flavour text and while they’re learning the rules. Remember that part of the purpose of your rules is to give weight and meaning to the setting but usually things go the other way first: you want your audience to learn a little of the setting so they can use that knowledge to help them learn the rules. I’ll talk more about learning the setting in Chapter 32, but I want to focus first on what makes a setting easier to teach and easier to understand. You want to keep those things in mind as you build your world, rather than building a vastly complicated world and then trying to figure out how to teach it after the fact. Again, your audience already has to learn the rules and they also want to start playing right away: they do not have the patience of a reader of a novel or someone watching a TV show. They cannot let things slowly unfurl because right away they need to know who they are and what kind of thinking that entails. They need to know what they want and how they can get it, what is stopping them and how to not let that thing take their hit points or power points away. They may even need to know which character, faction or power to choose. Games can be a wonderful way to explore a setting and have many secrets to unfold but some things are going to need to be front-loaded and designed so they can be swiftly and easily grasped.

Here again we turn to the inestimable Mr Squarepants for instruction. The strange yellow figure lives in a world that is both exotic and familiar. It is familiar in that the character has a house, a mailbox, a diminutive pet animal and a friend next door, and each day he leaves that home to drive to work at a fast food restaurant with a sullen colleague and a terrible boss. At the same time, all of these things exist in a way that reminds you that they are all Under The Sea: the character is a sponge, the friend a starfish, the pet a sea snail, the colleague a squid, the boss a crab and so on. It’s simplistic, but it works and that’s why it’s a popular formula for cartoons that goes all the way back to The Flintstones.

It’s also popular because it’s relatively easy to draw cartoon characters in any particular shape or style, and there’s a lot of easy gags to be made in the juxtaposition of the two elements. For the same reasons, of course, these kinds of settings don’t feel very intriguing or deep – the setting is just pasted on top and has no real meaning. But the approach of using the familiar and the exotic is powerful everywhere and always key. The best way to connect anything in your setting to the audience is to think about how to make it sensible to them, through the things they already know⁴ without it feeling like you’ve just put a new coat of paint on old ideas. To pick another example take the show Slow Horses (created by Will Smith, 2022). This spy thriller-drama feels a million miles away from Spongebob and has a difficult problem in communicating the complex and shadowy world of international intelligence work to the audience. Smith who created the show from the books by Mick Herron has explained that the central concept of the show is deeply relatable to the average person, and he approached the show with that in mind. The premise of the show is that the fancy, rich end of the British intelligence service works in the fancy, rich building in London, while those who have made mistakes or enemies end up working for the poorly resources, poorly thought-of agents based in nearby Slough. Everyone, Smith observes, has familiarity with the idea of getting the short end of the stick, of being unfairly punished or set back because of lack of resources and of being underestimated or judged because you lack the polish of others. In essence, Slow Horses is exactly like Spongebob Squarepants: the main character is an idealistic youngster unfairly taking the scorn for mistakes not his own and working in a run-down place with a tyrannical boss and at times resentful and unpleasant co-workers. (They’re also about evil enemies trying to steal the secrets of the boss.)

The point is not that two TV shows are exactly the same.⁵ The point is that both shows use familiar anchor points alongside the strange or unfamiliar. As mentioned in the earlier chapters, fiction has an easier time here, but it works the same way in games. Let’s return to the Church of the Mace to the Face we looked at in the previous chapter. Let’s say that they are a lot like the Catholic Church in medieval France, only their faith annihilates zombies and zombies are everywhere. You can see that right there, the familiar anchor point is “the Catholic Church in medieval France”. Not every audience is going to be familiar with that of course, but it is a good bet players invested in a fantasy setting might be, or know where to look such things up.

Note the conjunction in our description there: only. It has friends like but and except as well. Their job is to take the familiar and connect it to the exotic. He’s a fast food worker but he’s a sea sponge. He’s like the worst boss you ever had but he’s the only good man in MI5. As I covered back in Chapter 15, Star Trek was Wagon Train but in space. Star Wars was swords and wizards but in space. Dune is a bit more complicated, but the royal house intrigue is straight out of medieval France as well. The familiar, plus the exotic, every time.

Of course, to your audience you typically can’t mention existing media and don’t want to draw the comparison anyway. Also not every audience is going to be familiar with the historical thing you wish to evoke: you may have to playtest your cultural touchstones to find the ones that resonate the right way with most people. Sometimes the easiest way to do this is to work bottom-up. Your audience might not know about the power of the church under feudalism but you could talk instead about how when the little children stray into the woods their father panics and bellows for them to rush back to him as already the hungry earth ruptures and the dead sense that prey has stepped outside the church’s protection. We all remember a time when we felt unsafe, or our parents were afraid for us, or we were afraid for our children. That’s the familiar. The zombies are the exotic.

Top-down we might liken the priests to the fire brigade or lifeguards by a pool. Not necessarily directly, in those words of course. The formation of these ideas stays in your bible, until you’re ready to build the allusion, and you can do it with just allusions to the ideas you’ve chosen. You can think of children wandering near a busy highway or straying away from the lifeguards at the beach and then use that same kind of language to describe the town around the church. Or you might go and research the medieval church and use the words you would use to describe those organisations or those buildings and finding ways to make them hit home to the reader using their points of reference. Or take ideas from popular zombie horror films, and allude to them but not by name. We’ve all squeezed an orange too hard and got covered in juice; maybe that’s what crushing a zombie under a mace is like. Maybe St Olaf is like a modern-day influencer, and we can describe how it seems the children never stop sending prayers to him even when there’s work to be done. Again, not the actual words of “squishing an orange” or “watching TikTok” but those ideas. And so on and so forth.

All art uses this technique, and so it’s worth studying it in every form. It’s also worth studying marketing and advertising too, because they have to work incredibly hard to create a strong emotional connection while only having a split section of your attention. It’s manipulative and often damaging to our brains and our society, but the techniques used are still worth understanding. Watch Mad Men or some of the clips of the show online and see how those ad men make campaigns that connect to the shared anxieties and aspirations of their market. You’re more of a tour guide than a salesman,⁶ but you have the same narrow window to make an impression about your world or any slice of it. You have to make them care so much that they can’t stand it, and to do that you have to hit their emotions hard. You keep them safe with the familiar and then sell them the wonder of the exotic. You go big to get their excitement and make their heart ache by going home. In essence you’re selling a fancy rocketship to the stars, or a magic portal to a wizarding world, and the chance for them to not just go there but take part in it. You should always present your world like a tourist brochure, not like a textbook or an atlas. And just like any tour guide you’re selling adventure, but with a touch of safety, which comes from our identity and the cool powers we get from that. The world is likely not a nice place to live but the beauty of fictional worlds is we just get to visit and do so in the form of someone built to kick ass while there, and we’ll show you how to not die. You’ll thrill to the rugged life on the frontier but it’s right by the hotel and the gift shop. It’s exotic, but it’s familiar. It’s dangerous but it’s safe.

Humans are naturally drawn to risk and danger and excitement and change – that’s one reason we love to play games! But we are also drawn to safety and control and predictability – and that’s another reason we love games. Games combine total control over the rules with the unknown of the play. Visiting other worlds offers the same combination, which is another reason why this goes hand in hand with games so well. There’s the obvious safety of it being fictional, but we also like to start with the familiar in the settings. We start in the village and then go out to fight the orcs. The village provides the entry point, it gives context and it makes the exotic element (fighting the orcs) hit harder because the familiar elements resonate with our own lives. The purpose of worldbuilding is like all art: to climb inside the audience’s head and make them feel a connection. But because worldbuilding is also teaching, and also selling your world, it’s even more about identifying how your audience thinks and how to speak to what they know, think and feel. You’re giving them a car to drive not a painting to look at, so you need to know how they drive.

Game design is more psychology than maths. Worldbuilding is more psychology than geography. And on that note, we’ll go even further into psychology in the next lesson before we return to the art of world communication.

On a Quest

Back in Chapter 10 I asked you to summarise your setting or a part of it in shorter and shorter blurbs. Go back and retry those exercises with the Spongebob Squarepants Technique in mind. Does it make it easier? Does it make the outcome more exciting?⁷

Stopping By

Imagine your world has been turned into a theme park like the Walt Disney parks. What would the different parts of the park be called? What would be the big attractions? How would you design a brochure to guide people to things they might enjoy on a day out?

Notes

Refer back to Chapter 5 - Astrology not Astronomy - and Chapter 12 for the discussion of umwelt.

Answer the Richard Scarry Interrogative, as described in Chapter

You can see parallels also to identity and motivation here too and the Richard Scarry Interrogative – who are we, why are we here, what do we do?

Making sure you hit things that the audience cares about is why you want your setting to Go Home, as discussed in Chapter 15.

TV Tropes has a lot to answer for in this regard. What began as a comic exercise of literary observation turned into the belief that everything was exactly the same. It certainly is true that good writers learn to use strong structures, but it kind of made everything feel flat and uncreative. People became too concerned with analysing stories into identifiable DNA instead of understanding how structure is used well. See the comment about the bones of the soup in Chapter 19.

I will return to the tour guide approach in Chapter 32.

Note that it might not make it more exciting because my methods might not work for you, and that’s perfectly reasonable. You should look for something else that does work for you, with the same goal of getting people excited about the world and hungry to play.

CHAPTER 23 Good, Evil and Other Popular Brands

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-25

IF YOU’RE READING THIS you’re probably a fan of games and as a fan of games, you’re not going to like what I’m about to say: games are not inherently morally good. Or even necessarily morally neutral.

Games have been called empathy engines,¹ and they certainly can be. Play is a process of sharing and intimacy that connects us to ourselves and each other. But games are also inherently combative and thus in some sense anti-social. As Huizinga observed, they allow us to present aspects of ourselves that are socially unacceptable. Even in a cooperative game state, as soon as we move away from pure paidic into the ludic² we are fighting some kind of battle. Even if for a higher cause, we are motivated to struggle and to overcome.

It is possible to construct a setting where that struggle is not against any opposition that wears a face: the board game Pandemic (Matt Leacock, 2008) puts the players against the ravages of disease; The Grizzled (Riffaud and Rodriguez, 2015) has the players fighting against the ravages of weather and shell shock in the trenches of World War I, with no sense of an enemy besides that, and the goal is survival, not victory. Although a peaceful setting does not ensure a peaceful game, Tokaido (Bauza, 2012) is about a walk across beautiful vistas but features brutal competition and can cause bitter arguments; Photosynthesis (Hach, 2017) is about trees reaching for the sun but a skilled player will crush their opponent mercilessly. In tabletop there are few gentle games; video games have been much more ready to explore games that are just meditative, artistic or otherwise without orthogame conflict or victory conditions. Those too are outnumbered by combat and conflict games, though. For the most part games make us think of battle and battle makes us think of an enemy, and as such most of the worldbuilding we do is based around war. Even the enlightened world of Star Trek has had mostly wargames attached to it. And war brings with it a lot of baggage.

Ursula Le Guin writes:

War as a moral metaphor is limited, limiting, and dangerous. By reducing the choices of action to “a war against” whatever-it-is, you divide the world into Me or Us (good) and Them or It (bad) and reduce the ethical complexity and moral richness of our life to Yes/No, On/Off. This is puerile, misleading, and degrading. In stories, it evades any solution but violence and offers the reader mere infantile reassurance. All too often the heroes of such fantasies behave exactly as the villains do, acting with mindless violence, but the hero is on the “right” side and therefore will win. Right makes might.

What we might choose to do with this information is a very big question. For the purposes of this book, we can begin by simply acknowledging this fact and thinking about what it means for the worlds we are building. If you are building anything at all besides the most carefully structured cooperative game that is about sharing, building together and exploration, then there is going to be a battle and your setting should reflect that. You can fight it but if you don’t do a very good job of that, it will look like half- measures. A game where heroes swing “batons of peace” at “monsters of division and hate” is unlikely to feel very different from any other battle game.³

As discussed way back in Chapters 2 and 3, the kind of game you want to make will determine the kind of world you are going to build. Multiplayer games tend to suit situations where there are lots of individuals or factions racing towards a goal; two-player games or games set against an AI tend to suit worlds where there are two sides in direct conflict. In the latter situation, it is common to make one of those sides pretty clearly the Good side and one of those sides the Evil side. This is a strong choice, because as humans we love archetypes and we love cleaving to them. We love knowing that for once all our struggles are, in this world, absolutely morally pure. We also love revelling in the anti-social thrill of knowing our cause is irredeemably evil. The former ties in perfectly to our Western, Christian belief system that good is locked in a constant battle, beset on all sides, so even if we lose we feel righteous. The latter ties into those anti-social urges that Huizinga so easily identified in games: if we are going to try to destroy our opponent, let us do it in a way that luxuriates and glorifies in how evil we are.

It’s for these two reasons that game worlds so often feature darkly, conspicuously and consciously evil factions and their absolute opposite. This is typically true even when there are multiple factions set against each other. Magic: The Gathering is about sorcerers battling over territory but features the good White magic and the evil Black magic. Twilight Imperium is a baroque political tug of war but the originally unarmed, diplomatic turtles of the Xxcha are specifically listed as being the first victims of an unprovoked attack by the warlike and imperial Barony of Letnev, who are very much like House Harkonnen in the Dune setting. You can tell House Harkonnen are evil because of the literal metaphors: their bodies are warped, sickly and repulsive.

Carl Jung, the Swiss psychologist who invented much of modern psychology along with Sigmund Freud, suggested that in cultures we have popular archetypes which are so powerful on both the individual and society that they drive our whole way of thinking and the subsequent cultures we develop. We have an idea of what is a man and what is a woman or various other concepts, and we create ideas of rites, rituals and ceremonies that demonstrate that a person cleaves to this category or the other, and we tend to punish those who refute or steer away from these ideas (until divergence becomes an acceptable variant). Jung suggested Woman was an archetype that was often associated with a mother figure and caring; our Fathers cast as patriarchal Generals even if they never fought a war. He also suggested the archetype of the Self, the idea that there is a thing that represents who we “truly are”. This is typically invoked by Hollywood movies where the hero finds their own sense of identity and destiny. There was also the Shadow archetype, the darker version of our self which is, like the Christian devil, a tempter to our cruellest and most sadistic selves. Although this is often conflated with animalistic or “primal” tendencies, Jung put the idea of a natural tendency under the banner of the Animus. You’ll see these motifs clearly in our games. Magic: The Gathering associates wildness, growth and natural power with Green Magic, very separate from the Shadow, given over to Black magic; Twilight Imperium also has the ever-growing Arborec, but in both Magic and Twilight Imperium there is also “bad nature”: black magic is drawn from the swamps, and the infectious computer virus in Twilight Imperium is considered so anathema that it cannot vote in the political part of the game, something that is available to gigantic battleship-swallowing leviathans, ghosts made of electricity, living suns and other strange and unusual beings. From a biological point of view, a swamp and a forest are no different, and a virus no different from a flower; a computer virus is no more terrifying than a dinosaur. From a Jungian archetypal view the former examples are vastly different: they stink of death and make us fear our own mortality.

Magic completes the set with red, which both in the game and in our culture is associated with fire, heat, anger and direct violence, and blue which again in both the game and our culture we tend to associate with coolness and calm and intellect. The use of colours in this way that echoes cultural mainstays provides a strong sense of the familiar to guide players into the exotic elements of the setting. We see this in lots and lots of settings too, as well as other Jungian archetypes like the wise old man, the eager eyed youth, the rebellious outsider and the hidden puppeteer.⁴

Games also are made of their own language with each game needing to develop its own vocabulary of mechanics, value and codified meaning, and this, as stated above, needs to be imparted quickly. This means they tend to rely heavily on the things that the audience already knows. It does not matter if those things are true or realistic! As a result of all this, language also develops swiftly between and across games as well. Since Diablo (Brevik, 1997) pretty much every computer game has used red to represent health and blue to represent magical power or mana. Even the word mana is now used almost everywhere for magical power, and that use comes directly from Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) originally.⁵ Levelling-up originally meant a specific process in D&D but has come to mean any acquisition of new abilities.

The word archetype uses the Greek prefix of archaio, meaning ancient. Closely related is the word stereotype – stereo being Greek for solid or hard. Archetype and stereotype have different meanings but they both deal with the snap assumptions and judgements we make in our mind. This is another reason why games are not morally neutral: they depend so much on what is already commonly believed so they tend to reinforce and replicate stereotypes. They can be amazing learning machines, but they also play to our prejudices.

Again, we can try to do better. We can also, again, use our awareness of this when we design. The identities we present to our players will be more easily understood if they use familiar archetypes. You may find it useful to have a dark evil force associated with death, a bright shining light, a wild untameable wilderness, and so on; your players will often be confused if dark forces are bright pink.⁶ Fighting this is possible, but it is a battle and you can only have so much exotic in your world before the audience tunes out. You must pick your battles.

One of the other very popular archetypes is the plucky rebel, the David facing the Goliath, which also plays into the American myth of themselves. Since games are also about rules, players of games are naturally drawn to the archetype of the rule-breaker and also to the strict arbiter who sets those rules, both in the idea of a true neutral figure who observes fair play as the ultimate virtue and in an authoritarian police archetype who keeps order. Other archetypes play into gameplay styles: you will see identities that are heavy hitters who do lots of damage, often linked to big violent natural creatures and archetypes of destruction like boars, bears and bull. There are shrewd and cunning manipulators (often linked to archetypes of advisors or wizards), deceiving types who bluff or play in the shadows (perhaps linked to clowns or actors), daredevils who take huge risks for huge rewards (wide eyed proto-children or fools) and calculating types who think several moves ahead (perhaps a brain in a jar). Players often look to things that represent what they might aspire to or recognise in their life: caring healers are increasingly more common in games as our feels full of cruelty and isolation, but you will also see identities that speak to other real-world identities like creative artists, builders of machines, keepers of animals or plants, collectors or hoarders (gamers love this one), sages and scholars, dreamers and outcasts, hermits and wanderers.

This idea of conducting a typology of the broad archetypes at work in a target audience, or in their imaginations, and designing separate advertising campaigns to target different archetypes is known in marketing as psychographics. Over the last century, marketing has got incredibly good at identifying and shaping these profiles and again, and this is why gamers can learn a lot from the field. At the same time, marketing can go so far into appealing to stereotypes that it is typically banal, flattening ideas into their most marketable form and identifying the cheapest and nastiest path to an emotional connection. You want to do more than just that. You also don’t want to just copy every other game and its identities or power choices or just repeat popular stereotypes. This is the core challenge in worldbuilding for game design: you need to use some amount of archetype to have a way for players to easily understand what the identity is, how they fit into the world and how to play them but you also want to be original and exciting. You need the familiar. You need the exotic.

I won’t lie: finding that balance isn’t easy. There’s no magic way to be original or exciting. If it were easy, everyone would do it. I can only suggest what has worked for me is getting the keynotes in first. Game designers are asked all the time whether they start with the setting or the rules of a game and usually it’s a bit of both, working back and forth. Eventually though you will have your design brief which is basically the keynotes for the world and the keynotes for the mechanics: a clear summation of what the game is going to be about in terms of its setting and the play experience so it communicates what you want it to communicate. Once you have that, you have a strong grounding point to work on everything else. It provides a point of comparison to check every idea with to see if it fits and it also provides a font of inspiration. You can then see what kinds of archetypes naturally arise, or, as the elements of your game come into focus, what sort of archetypes they speak to as ways to represent them. By choosing the bones to make the soup as described in Chapter 19, your keynotes will be unique, which means the kinds of archetypes they present will be idiosyncratic. You can also come at the question the other way: asking how to represent popular archetypes within the setting as you have defined it (just like Spongebob in Chapter 22: same terrible job, but how would it look under the sea?). If you have vivid and powerful keynotes, then it should naturally generate what any sort of idea would look like under that framework. Or it will instantly tell you that there isn’t a place for that idea.

If an archetype doesn’t fit, you have a choice to make: change your setting so it can accommodate a certain archetype, or decide not to have that archetype appear in your game. There are certainly plenty of player options or styles that won’t fit your world or game: a game of conniving vampire clans does not need a white knight faction, and a game of duelling cowboys probably has no need to represent the caring mother archetype. It’s your design brief and keynotes that will tell you who is going to want to play your game and what kind of play styles and setting engagement they will want to find on offer. You should try to identify and please that audience for the most part, rather than trying to make a bland game for every possible player. To get into identifying audiences we’re going to take a further look at psychographics in our next lesson.

On a Quest

Go back to the summaries you did in the last exercise and see if they invoke any key archetypes. Is there a good and bad side in your setting? Why/why not? Is there an obvious player faction and an obvious opponent faction? Why/why not? How have you marked these things out, so the audience can instantly see the lay of the land? If there are choices of identities, show them to playtesters and ask them what they prefer and why. Ask them if they feel like there isn’t one that suits them. Look at similar games and their archetypes to see if you are missing any!

Stopping By

Find an identity, faction, place or game option in another game world, and see if it has a corresponding equivalent in your world. If not, create one. (Or, if it doesn’t belong, find the nearest equivalent). You can do the same with real-world elements as well. Who is the Elvis of your world? Where is the Paris of your world? What is the coffee of your world? And go the other direction as well – take something in your world and find the nearest equivalent in this one. That will bring you back to how to ground the exotic in the familiar, as discussed in Chapter 22.

Notes

Primarily by Elizabeth Sampat in her book Empathy Engines (2017), which I recommend.

Paidic gaming represents the pure play state, where we play without or with no concern for rules and solely to seek pleasure, immersion and engagement. It is set in opposition from the pure ludic, which is play in the sense of the orthogame: there is a goal, there is a challenge, there is success and failure, measurement and opposition, winners and losers. Of course most games and most gaming have elements of both.

An interesting attempt is in the game Paco Sako (“Peace Chess”) by Dutch artist Felix Albers. Pieces are not taken but embraced to make a shared piece that both players can control. Embraces cannot be undone unless another piece enters the embrace. The aim is to embrace your opponent’s king. However since an unembraced piece is more able to attack the king, the game is not really at all about peace.

The use of these archetypes in roleplaying games is so common that the game Unknown Armies (Tynes and Stolze, 1998) has a post-modern setting where this preponderance of archetypes becomes textual. In the world, anyone who can identify any of society’s archetypes and embody that strongly enough can gain magical powers.

The early adopters of fantasy gaming in the USA, and of fantasy literature, were typically those who intersected heavily with the 1960s “hippie” counter-culture and neopagan subcultures in California, and it was that neopagan movement that found the concept of mana in Polynesian spiritual practice and brought it into fantasy roleplaying, first into D&D and then into Runquest – Greg Stafford is a practising shaman.

As mentioned back in Chapter 6, reality doesn’t matter here, only popular belief. Enough imedia and products have been associated with pink that it has trouble standing in for darkness and evil.

CHAPTER 24 Psychographics and Psychodrama

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-26

PSYCHOGRAPHICS IS A PORTMANTEAU of psychology and demographics. It is the study and classification of people by their attitudes, aspirations and other psychological elements. Marketing began by studying demographics: identifying buyers by their age, gender, occupation, income, location, education level and so on and crafting not just different advertising but totally different products to each demographic. Psychographics was the next logical step: looking to understand what the person believes about themselves and how their decision to purchase or use a product interacts with that. This idea of market segmentation began as soon as we had mass markets and dates back to the 1920s; according to business historian Richard Tedlow the modern world since the 1980s is under hypersegmentation. The growth of the internet and then social media in the 2010s has allowed complete surveillance of the consumer and that data being a billion-dollar product in itself. Thanks to AI advertisements can now be crafted in real time in response to real-time tracking of the customer. At the same time the total domination of capitalist and consumer culture has led to what is known as feral segmentation, because rather than the segmentation being directed by the marketing, the audience has rushed to apply segmentation to itself as a matter of pride and identity. Today, our chief source of identity is no longer our faith, nation or political agenda but the products we consume now or consumed as children.

A key example of psychographics ascendant in gaming came in 2006, when Mark Rosewater, then a head designer on Magic: The Gathering, made a public blog post where he identified to the public the three psychographic profiles they had produced of their customers.¹ These terms entered the jargon of that game and games as a whole as a way to identify and communicate one’s play styles and preferences. Rosewater called these profiles Timmy, Johnny and Spike,² and each had a different goal in how they played. The Timmy players want to feel something when they play, so they tend to like to go for big characters, big effects and big combos, building decks that make a splash whether they win or lose. The Johhny players want to express something when they play, looking to build strange decks and difficult combos with lesser known cards, so that the deck might even be suboptimal but will still produce something special and creative. The Spike players want to prove something when they play and fundamentally design and play to crush their opponents as efficiently as possible. Rosewater then added Vorthos, who is less interested in playing and more interested in collecting.

In 2012, Fantasy Flight Games rebooted the collectible card game Netrunner (Garfield and Litzinger, 1996) and although they did not discuss play styles overtly, the three factions they developed for the hackers in the setting were the high-emotion, heavy-hitting political troublemakers, the hackers who hacked for creativity and self-expression, and the cutthroat, win-at-all-costs criminals: a perfect match for Timmy, Johnny and Spike. It was not the first time that psychographics and play style had played a big hand in worldbuilding, but it was a sign of how important and powerful it could be to do so. Around the same time, Warhammer products began including in their opening sections of their rulebooks the four streams of the hobby: collecting, painting, building and playing the game, and encouraging the audience to figure out what they wanted most out of the hobby.

You might not be so naked and direct in your design, but you should consider who is playing your game and build your world with that information at hand.

Defining and describing how and why people play have been something we have been studying for some time. Huizinga laid the groundwork, of course, and since developmental psychology emerged in the 19th century, various psychologists, sociologists and anthropologists have looked at how and why individuals play and the cultures and subcultures around that. However it wasn’t until the 1970s that adult play began to be investigated academically, and it is only in the last thirty years that it has become a popular field of study – thanks largely to the sharp and sudden rise of video games. So in many ways this is still a very new science and an exciting one as a result. It’s important to remember that the taxonomy of players developed by Wizard of the Coast was not academically rigorous and was something as much created by them as it was observed by them.

Although a new field, the big business of video games has led to a drive to catch up and a great deal has been written in the last thirty years on types of play and types of players, and covering this properly is far beyond the ability of this book. A few good places to start looking include Nicole Lazzaro’s four kinds of fun,³ Cathie LeBlanc’s eight kinds of fun⁴ or Garneau’s fourteen kinds of fun.⁵ We’ve already mentioned another good model back in Chapter 13: the taxonomy of players developed by Richard Bartle.⁶ Bartle identified two switches, giving four categories of players: Achievers (game-focussed players who act on their environment), Explorers (game-focussed players who interact or react to their environment), Killers (player-focussed players who act on other players) and Socialisers (player-focussed players who react or interact with other players). Bartle also brought in a third variable creating eight subtypes, but for now the four will be enough. There are obvious parallels here with Rosewater’s groupings: the pathways of feeling, expressing and proving something are close to Bartle’s achieving, exploring and killing.

Although big-budget video games often try to appeal to as many play styles as possible, few games have the scope or audience size to make this a realistic goal. More and more though tabletop games are being sold with several game modes included so they can be tweaked to suit the group’s varying needs. It is a foolish designer who thinks there is only one way to play any game and a careless one who thinks they can rule out a potential audience. Building a game for publication these days means building up profiles of the ways people will play it and encouraging each of those profiles to find a mode that suits them and encourages their style. Your settings should be designed to accommodate and highlight this also.

As discussed in the previous chapter, this can be a great way to generate ideas for your world: once you establish your keynotes of theme and subject matter, you can use those as a guide to providing places to explore, achievements to gain, arenas to crush one’s opponents and opportunities for socialising. You’ll also want to look not just at gameplay styles though but how and why audiences seek to engage with fictional settings.

Although they may not contain any of the elements found in roleplaying games, engaging with settings in any kind of game is a kind of roleplaying. Roleplaying gets its name from an element of psychodrama, which is a psychological technique where a therapist asks their patient to act out or observe others acting out scenarios or thought processes in their life, real or imagined. Roleplaying in the psychodrama sense always involves the patient taking on the role of the person, object or concept they struggle with. The sense that arose from gaming typically describes a theatrical game of embodying a fictional character but like all mask play this inevitably involves some connection to psychodrama.⁷ Although rarely used for adults, therapy with child patients can use elements of fantasy and imagination.

When we conceive of a fantasy world, we inherently take on or embody a sense of that world being real, even if we are yet to take on any particular identity within that world. Tolkien called this idea “Secondary Belief”⁸: as adults we do not believe that Robin Hood and James Bond are real but we very much believe, for the period of the story, that his world is real and he cannot simply walk through a wall because the author wants him to do so; children take this even further and experience so much emotional connection with the protagonist and feel the world as being so easily imaginable that the world’s reality and the character’s emotions can overwhelm them. Adults, Tolkien argues, have lost this ability but I would argue that games and fictional worlds offer us a way to glimpse this again.

As soon as we engage with a game we have the rules and mechanics telling us what we can and cannot do and what does and does not have a consequence and we intuitively give great weight to these commands. And as discussed back in Chapter 2, the fictional meaning attached to the mechanics is also present, as is the belief in them. The setting communicates mechanics to us and the mechanics reflect back the setting. We do not feel particularly devastated to lose a pawn in chess, but at the same time we might not appreciate our opponent discussing the piece we lost as having hopes and dreams and a family now lacking a father! That would be considered even unfair, lest the added fictional meaning makes us not want to play optimally. Meanwhile, in a wargame where a player has spent great effort building, painting and creating a personality and backstory for a certain miniature or force, losing that piece takes on a new kind of meaning and the player likely identifies strongly with that piece, even inhabiting it as a role. In an interactive medium, the players become audience, author and inhabitant of the narrative, so this is not the same experience as mourning for the death of a fictional character or thrilling at a suspenseful showdown. In games, through the “back door” of the emotion tied to winning and losing (and through permission to play with dolls and dollhouses, which games very much are⁹), we regain some of this power. Likewise the reality of the fictional world beckons us back into Secondary Belief; the reality with which these sub-creations are imbued makes them like a dollhouse for adults. It is this sense of immersion into the truth of another world and interaction with it that makes fictional worlds so appealing to us and so enmeshed with the idea of play.

And this play involves roleplay: entering the world not entirely as ourselves but rather someone who would be in that world. When a child grabs a stick and brandishes it like a sword they are rarely imagining they are still themselves still in their backyard with the sudden acquisition of a sword; rather they become a knight (or a jedi knight), imagining a world where that sword has more meaning and context. As we are drawn slowly into a game’s world, we draw connections into the world itself and into the point of view of the participants we are inhabiting. We may try to only play a game by its mechanics, this play-acting psychodrama is lurking below, always part of our experience, even if only at the smallest level. Likewise when we engage with a fictional setting, we may try to be a disinterested party reading history books, but beneath that is our child-self putting on a mask. A very complex mask, perhaps, but a mask nonetheless.

As Stephen Fry wrote in The Guardian in 2006¹⁰:

In the end, I suppose history is all about imagination rather than facts. If you cannot imagine yourself wanting to riot against Catholic emancipation, say, or becoming an early Tory and signing up to fight with the Old Pretender, or cheering on Prynne as the theatres are closed and Puritanism holds sway… knowing is not enough. If you cannot feel what our ancestors felt when they cried: ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’ or, indeed, cried: ‘Death to Wilkes!’, if you cannot feel with them, then all you can do is judge them and condemn them, or praise them and over-adulate them.

History is not the story of strangers, aliens from another realm; it is the story of us had we been born a little earlier. History is memory; we have to remember what it is like to be a Roman, or a Jacobite or a Chartist or even – if we dare, and we should dare – a Nazi. History is not abstraction, it is the enemy of abstraction.

Imagining ourselves as our ancestors as a crewman on a Federation Starship is really the same activity, and we read fictional-non-fiction in the same spirit¹¹ and play fictional-historical games the same way.

With that in mind, I will attempt to follow in Bartle’s footsteps and construct a typology of setting-engagement.¹² Like Bartle I have interlocking switches; unlike Bartle I haven’t developed names for the four categories these intersections create. I also have two more switches I think apply which could be used to build sixteen categories. Since these switches are not black and white but preferences one might tend to or shy away from, I think identifying which elements you prefer in each pair is more useful than naming each individual intersection.

The first switch is the scholar vs the creator. The scholar sees the world very much as fixed and being revealed to them by an authority. They understand on an intellectual level that the authority is just a person making things up but they may come to think of that authority as the company, brand or the world personified, since it is a force that they cannot control. The scholar could not create anything of their own in the world because they do not have that authority: the canon of the setting is indeed handed down very much like the church rule that the word was derived from. The creator on the other hand understands that there is official material but its authority is arbitrary and it has no more weight to what is true than anything else. Creators often engage in roleplaying games and fan fiction and create what are now called OCs – “original characters”.¹³ Scholars may do these things too, but they would only cosplay existing characters and would ensure that any roleplaying they did was strictly according to the canon.

The second switch is the engager vs observer, which is about how actively or passively the scholar or the creator engages with the material. The active engager will go to great lengths to find out what they need to know or create their new identity; the passive observer is happy to imagine new things or absorb new information without needing to go beyond the material itself. An engager-scholar will try to collect every possible fact from every instance of media and reference material and perhaps argue fiercely for a truth state within the world. An engager-creator likely builds elaborate cosplay of their OC or writes vast amounts of fan fiction. Both kinds of engagers may eventually come to disagree with canon, even though they feel it is authoritative or irrelevant, respectively: the more work they do, the more they feel they have a stake in what should be true or what should be done with the material. In contrast the observer-scholar may collect comics or films or TV episodes but allows their knowledge and connection to build up more organically. Their connection is often more with characters and narratives than facts and figures or with things outside the work such as the writer’s other work, a fanclub or a social group that they watched the show with. Likewise the observer-creator imagines things beyond the edges of the map, but since they engage less actively they are happy for their imagined stories to exist more in theory than in practice, within and around the material they encounter, not in competition.

A third switch is the divide between the tourist and the local. Both of them know their settings well: indeed, sometimes the tourist has stumbled onto things the local never knew about or had forgotten were there. The local is typically an old hand and the tourist new but the real difference between the two is the tourist thrives on and seeks out the wonder and thrill of the new and the local thrives on and seeks out the depth and comfort of the familiar. The local loves a callback and is excited to see the world follow the rules it has given itself. The tourist would rather canon be broken than be given the same old thing. That said, tourists can find too much change also annoying just like the local. The difference is that in such instances the tourist will just as likely find a new fandom to explore while the local will retreat to a rewatch. The local scholar tends to be the most affronted by a change in canon, whereas the local creator might simply recall all the fan fiction they have read that presented the same idea.

Finally there is the Doylist/Watsonian split. The stories of Holmes are narrated as if written by John Watson but are written by Conan Doyle: Watsonian reasoning is therefore an interpretation of the text as if it were real; the Doylist lens approaches analysis from the point of view of a writer crafting a story. A Doylist fan of Star Trek is likely more interested that the Borg in Star Trek were invented by a fan fiction author and were brought in when the original antagonists, the Ferengi, did not work out well. The Watsonian fan speculates more about the Borg being from the machine planet seen in the first Star Trek film or about the Borg encountering the Q aliens. A Doylist scholar hunts down a shooting script, and a Watsonian scholar hunts down clues about a character’s past. A Doylist creator writes a spec script. A Watsonian creator writes in-world Klingon poetry. (For the local, this will be for that one episode featuring Klingon poetry and would be what they might imagine the characters on-screen might have said; for the tourist this is more likely to be a new book of poetry from their OC Klingon poet.)

The point of all is not to classify, dissect or deconstruct your audience. Rather it is to, as an artist, see your audience more clearly and more wholly and cater to it. When you build any setting, it is a good idea to picture all the ways someone might want to interact with it, from the structured ways within the rules of the game itself to unstructured modes of play such as cosplay, fan fiction and simply daydreaming in their heads, and the many things in between such as making their own content or house rules. The four switches of setting engagement can serve as a reminder to cater to all the types of audiences and not letting some be forgotten. Most of us remember to hint at mysteries in our world for Watsonians; for the Doylist fans you want to drop hints about early drafts or write a design diary. Most worldbuilders tend to hew closely to canon for the locals but it is vital not to forget the tourists who crave variety or want to take an introductory sample of what is on offer and are not necessarily here to stay. The squeaky wheels of the engagers tend to get all the grease of attention with things like leaks and trailers and Easter eggs; if we build our entire universe on this we create the problems that plague the Marvel movies now: they feel like impenetrable encyclopaedias made only for locals who want to work hard and collect everything. Likewise the Marvel films are now too much for the locals, trading on deep comic lore instead of what appeals to the casual moviegoer. The local engager fan base is loud, fierce and loyal(ish) but it is a mistake – often a fatal one for your franchise – to pander to them exclusively.

Finally, we tend to remember to get our dates and names correct for the scholars but forget to explicitly leave space for creators. Since games are interactive media, they are about creating parts of our world, and any game design in a world needs to be clear about what is and is not under the control of the players. That’s the focus of our next lesson.

On a Quest

Imagine your game and world become a huge success and there are conventions across the world. What kinds of characters are popular to cosplay and why? What kinds of allusions or references or Easter eggs have fans uncovered? What sort of strong opinions have people formed about your rigidly defined areas of doubt and uncertainty or philosophical viewpoints? If you don’t have these things, start adding them now! It is always worth designing as if your work will be beloved.

Stopping By

Ask your friends and family about their fandoms that you don’t share. Are there ways they choose to engage with those fandoms and (just as importantly) choose not to engage? The answers might be obvious (such as having no desire to write fiction or make costumes) but it might not be (the world might simply not provide the kind of characters that encourage lots of speculative ideas or good costumes). Do they engage with one of their fandoms in a different way than they do with another fandom they enjoy? Why?

Notes

The original post appears to be lost, but the follow-up, posted on 18 December 2006, can still be found here: https://magic.wizards.com/en/news/making-magic/timmy-johnny-and-spike-revisited-2006-12-18.

The inherent sexism and narrowness of culture in the name choice are worth noting.

These were introduced in her 2004 lecture “Why We Play Games: 4 Keys to More Emotions”. Her list is close to Bartle’s: Hard Fun (challenge and overcoming challenge, close to Bartle’s Achievers), Easy Fun (curiosity and surprise, like Bartle’s Explorers) and the last two overlapping with both Killers and Socialsers: Serious Fun (relaxation and surrender) and People Fun (amusement and competition).

These were first put forwards in 2014 and are collected in her book Creating Games (2020). The types are Discovery, Sensation, Fantasy, Narrative, Challenge, Fellowship, Expression and Submission.

Garneau’s list is from a Gamasutra article in 2001 titled “Fourteen forms of Fun”. It is no longer online but the list can be found in many academic papers. Garneau’s list is Learning, Immersion, Discovery, Problem Solving, Advancement, Altruism, Beauty, Comedy, Competition, Social Interaction, Thrill of Danger, Love, Physical Activity, Creation, Power and Application of Ability.

Also worth looking at is the work of Nick Yee, who has spent decades collating play information from MMORPGs and video games both around Bartle’s typology and in general.

In roleplaying, the sensation of having the fictional character’s emotions carry over into your own, and vice versa, is described as bleed and is often greatly sought after. I would argue that bleed is always present by default, in the same way that the separation between the two worlds is present by default, and this is true in all games and all play, for the same reason we get angry when we lose a game or our team does poorly at a sport. Bleed is really just a matter of degree.

In his essay On Fairy Stories (1947).

I will talk more about how games engage us into a “doll house” imaginative state in Chapter 31.

“The Future’s in the Past”. https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2006/jul/09/featuresreview.review, Accessed 8/12/2024.

Likewise, we tend to read modern genre fiction the way we read historical fiction.

Something like this likely already exists but I could not find it in my research; please get in touch if you know more on this.

This qualifier is a significant one since it shows a sense of asking permission to create within a world, and I teach my students not to use it. I also teach them never to refer to a world or setting as an intellectual property or IP, as that is applying a lens to the world of art that sees only monetary control. But these terms reveal the world we live in.

CHAPTER 25 Plot Armour and Railroading

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-27

I’VE SAID EARLIER IN this book that Tolkien is primarily to blame for the modern idea of worldbuilding, in giving us a sense that the setting of a work exists and has meaning outside of the text of the work itself. This isn’t really true. When the Syrian satirist Lucian wrote his fantasy tale The True History in the 2nd century CE, he describes a journey back from the moon as passing by Cloud Cuckoo Land, the fictional world created by Aristophanes in his play The Birds 500 years earlier. The truth is that as soon as we have a sense of a fictional location, that location gains a sense of permanence and extension beyond the work. Its geography gains a fixed truth, in the same way that if an actor on a stage says the swimming pool is in the wings stage right and leaps off that direction, we know that they will get wet – and that they cannot enter stage left and say they have come from the pool.

But the very same principle that locks geography down makes time the opposite: we know in fiction that time is an illusion and speeds up and slows down in the blink of a punctuation mark. In essence, stories are eternal: although inside them there is a beginning and middle and an end, Luke Skywalker is always fighting against Darth Vader, Batman is always chasing the Joker and Hamlet is always struggling with the question of revenge. The events are happening in an imagined now, even if the setting is a galaxy a long time ago.¹

The same is broadly true of games: every game of chess is a new battle. Although experiments in “legacy games” have explored some carry-over and matches in a tournament depend on all the previous matches, we generally want every instance of a game to reset to zero and have little or no memory of what came before. The scores go back to nil-all. The hands are redealt.

Where stories and games overlap, however, there is friction because their passage internally from start to finish can be in conflict. A story or game set during the events of the first Star Wars film runs the risk of lacking meaningful suspense or stakes when the audience knows that Luke Skywalker is waiting offstage to make everything alright again. Even worse is a sense of apathy if we know that the bad guys will do something terrible no matter what. Sometimes even if we can change a story we don’t want to! A related problem is the sense that even beyond what we know has happened or must happen, we often feel like the more central characters are simply better choices to handle the events of a story. This is sometimes because the central characters have immense power or unique attributes, but it can also again just be narrative habit. Like the audience, we would rather wait for the “real heroes” to show up.

Games can solve this somewhat by allowing players to take on the identity of the main characters in the world. This can also ameliorate some of the sense of “it must happen a certain way”, just as historical wargamers like to recreate Gettysburg or Waterloo and see if their own tactical choices can alter the outcome. This is where many sci-fi or fantasy games take their inspiration! The war depicted in Twilight Imperium is to decide the fate of the galaxy that will be written in the history books of that setting just as Waterloo and Gettysburg are in our world. The design casts the heroes as the greatest generals and statesmen.

The problem comes when we leave the aforementioned “permanent present” and want to have both a setting that changes over time and one that also allows interaction. Of course we can imagine that we are fighting Trafalgar and then Waterloo (or their fantastical equivalents) and are broadly happy to consent that games of Waterloo must follow accepted canon. Eventually though this suspension can grate since the design is serving two masters: unrolling a story and allowing interaction. It is not as much fun to play Trafalgar if we know it always leads to the same set-up for Waterloo. It is here that the term “plot armour” arises: certain characters must triumph or certain events must take place and all of the fictional reality and gameplay outcomes will bend to make sure that it does so. One can riddle the fantasy Napoleon with bullets at Trafalgar but he will be unharmed on the field at Waterloo regardless.

Although players talk about how much they want a true branching narrative and total story control they have also resigned themselves to plot armour being the accepted standard in the increasing homogeneity of narrative digital gaming. You can, in other words, get away with this, especially if you gain in the trade-off a well-told dramatic tale or deep lore for the scholar types to untangle from slivers of environmental hints. You can also design stories and worlds so this feels more natural: non-player characters can have strong reasons to act at a distance or in the shadows so it is reasonable that they aren’t in the arenas where the play takes place. With enough in-setting reasons, this can feel less forced.

What players object to far more is false presentation: if it seems as if they have choice or agency or that their gameplay is going to affect a larger narrative, only be later told it does not. Or to be promised that they will get to be heroes of a certain stature who should shake the world but then being prevented from being those figures or having those effects. Even if there are good game reasons not to have someone as powerful as Superman be a player character option it feels like a cheat if Superman is on the field as well or if he is there but his powers have been “nerfed” to be balanced. Either he should be playable as he is or the field of play be such that he isn’t involved. Nobody wants to be Jimmy Olsen – unless the game is about who can race across the newsroom fast enough to warn Superman in time for him to save the world. In that situation being Jimmy Olsen makes you the most important person on earth and your knowledge of the newsroom the most powerful skill imaginable.

But even here players will likely tire of constantly being Jimmy Olsen in a world that is entirely built around Superman.² That again becomes a false promise: you cannot have the world speak of great superheroes and then force the players to be the also-rans. You can get away with this in fiction, but you absolutely cannot in games. Games have an implicit promise that you will be the star.

Games also come with an implicit promise of interaction and this brings us to the close friend of plot armour: the railroad. This term arose in tabletop roleplaying to describe a sense in players that they had no ability whatsoever to control the story. If the gamemaster decides that the plot must only proceed with a scene in the inn, then players find every single other building inexplicably closed and boarded up, and trying to leave the town they face impenetrable forests or endless attacking forces. Or worse, they can go into any of the town buildings but will find nothing at all interesting or that moves the narrative forwards, only characters who keep saying that the players should go to the inn. The players must first intuit what the gamemaster wants from them and then oblige, or they have no game to play. Plot armour is really just a kind of railroad centred around a person, place or event and it feels bad for the same reason: players want, expect and deserve the thing that games are made of: interactivity.

Allowing the passage of time in your world also risks the loss of interactivity through obsolescence. If a player has bought Hamlet: The Card Game and really likes playing their deck based on Polonius, they will lose four things when Act Four drops and they are summarily told Polonius is now dead and everyone has moved on. First, they lose an emotional connection they have to a character and their narrative. Second, they lose a sense of insight into and mastery over the game and all the time and effort they spent creating that. Third, they lose all the money they spend on their cards, and fourth they lose a sense of social connection to a subculture that may have provided a great emotional and social support structure. society provides fewer and fewer subcultures that aren’t linked to consumption and products; we should not be surprised when these things evolve to suit mostly a need to keep making money. But the demands of money can cause people to be summarily ejected from the subculture, leaving participants feeling abandoned and cheated. Most gamers who have participated in long-term games can mark exactly the moment they felt frozen out or left behind.

If you want your game to have this kind of longevity then some of these kinds of changes are inevitable, and over time designers and companies have got better at handling these changes and audiences have got more used to the cycles. Magic: The Gathering developers have admitted they design weak cards precisely so that later products will be desirable for purchase, and “power creep” is now seen as something to be managed by the designers and tolerated by the audiences rather than an inherent design flaw. Like so many things the key is managing expectations and reducing surprises by communicating your intent clearly.³

This can be done through directly speaking to the audience but also in how you build your world and how you present that world. As already mentioned, you want to design reasons why if the players are the movers and shakers of history, those figures are remote in some fashion, or in other ways protected from change or interaction. If those figures are on the field then you should design them so they are never more powerful than the player identities (and usually you want them a bit weaker – players will forgive a very powerful non-player identity or a non-player identity with plot armour but never both). If you have events that really do shake things up you will want to warn players they are coming and provide options for play in the old timeline so their old material and knowledge is still useful or develop play modes or product lines that allow them to imagine new or alternative timelines to explore.⁴ The prominence of multiverses in nearly every single major franchise of the day is not because the audience is hungry for those kinds of plots but because they allow differently segmented merchandising prospects to co-exist (and encourage crossover) through in-world explanations. Marketers are very aware that in-universe explanations are more powerful and more convincing to us than the actual reasoning.⁵

It can also be baked into the very nature of the world or the expression of the world. As discussed earlier in Chapter 18, the universe of Warhammer 40,000 takes great pains to point out that much of its published material, no matter how authoritatively presented, is probably also propaganda so is inherently unreliable. Even more so, the fact that space travel in the universe involves engaging with the malevolent and unpredictable “warp” is used as an explanation for competing and contradictory information: the information is correct, but the universe itself cannot be trusted.⁶

It doesn’t have to be this overt or specific though. It can also be done by building into your world an inherent cushioning to accommodate change. Change and development are the topic of the next section of this book.

On a Quest

Does your world have key people, places or events that are not locked entirely into an eternal present? What would happen if you decided to add in previous moments in time or possible futures? Build those things in now and delineate how you will handle them, rather than waiting for the game to be a success and then trying to accommodate them.

Stopping By

A great way to simply get new ideas for your worldbuilding is to think about the flow of time. You likely have a strong idea of how things began and moved forwards to reach where your setting “begins”, the point where the player identities step onto the stage. But what would happen if they arrived later? Or earlier? What if a player wanted to fill in history you’ve left unexplained or divert things elsewhere? To use the jargon of Star Trek, what is your world’s mirror universe, and who lives there?

Notes

For more on the perpetual now, see Chapter 28.

For more on Jimmy Olsen, see Chapter 33.

I’d argue that one reason we have become so enamoured of not knowing “spoilers” about media, with the definition of spoilers now expanding to mean “any fact about the work whatsoever”, is not just because we are inundated by so much advertising but because so much advertising means removing any element of surprise. Customers hate surprises, but audiences, for the most part, love them.

Even worse than events that change the setting are events that promise to change the setting but change little or nothing or make only cosmetic changes. This again feels like a false promise: if you promise changes, you absolutely should follow through on this. We will talk more about this in the next chapter.

I was like everyone else dazzled to see different Spiderman film characters coexisting in the same film but that was amazing only because of draconian copyright laws created by the same corporations that later agreed to this “ceasefire”. It really should not be a thing of wonder that two corporations found a way to make money together, but we feted them for doing so!

This can however also lead to the same false promise issue, as in Endnote 4.

III Developing Your World

CHAPTER 26 Never Say Never Again

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-29

IN CHAPTER 8 I mentioned the “Door Problem” is game design. The addition of a single closeable door anywhere in a game causes a sudden sharp rise in complexity because it implies that every doorway the player has moved through now has two potential states – closed or open. Worldbuilding has its own equivalent to the door problem. Closing a door – by which I mean here making absolute statements in the technical writing – can throw an entire world into disarray. In a flash it can make some other things impossible or nonsensical or ridiculous, perhaps causing the whole setting to collapse. Worse, from a player’s point of view, it might kill something they made up in their head and destroy all their fun.

One of the things that makes us human is our ability to see patterns and attach meaning to them. That’s why we love our fictional worlds to have bold delineations – tribes, groups, factions, races, nations. As well as the fun of trying on different masks, it feeds our love of labels and group and sorting as well (and living in a culture full of advertising and commodification that wants to keep us there). A big reason that fictional worlds are so popular now and so wanted in our games and media is because we don’t have as much belonging any more in our real lives as religions fall away, capitalism creates monocultures and the internet erases borders. We want so much to belong and feel safe. And right next to those desires – and equally on sale from Amazon or Disney – is for things to stay the same.

Yet worlds will change. Worlds, in fact, should change, as their audiences shift and their creators come and go. It would be a sign of a dead culture, not to mention just being dull as hell, if a Star Wars movie made now could have been made exactly the same in 1977. Moreover, as the appeal of fan fiction, tabletop roleplaying games (RPGs) and interactive media grows wider and wider and as media becomes ever more niche, fans expect worlds to change to fit their needs.

As the SF writer Cory Doctorow recently wrote on his blog¹:

… fans raised on interactive media rather than the static printed page or celluloid reel of film invariably argue in their own heads with the official story lines they’re handed. And they sometimes write down their alternative takes on the stories – not just happy endings in place of tragedies, or attempts to fix what they perceive as broken plots or world building, but their own stories that try to make sense of the worlds of the imagination they’ve been presented with. Fans who write fanfic or play games from the original adversary’s point of view in hope of getting a happy ending are not fans who accept the author’s privileged position as narrator for granted.

You absolutely want this to happen, of course, in games. It is what we call unstructured play – playing your game without actually using the rules – and it is a big part of why we love fictional worlds as well: even when not playing we get to imagine ourselves in them, immersing ourselves in them as psychodrama.² Doing so encourages us to believe those worlds can and should be changed by us. Indeed, if we keep watching or reading a long-running story it can feel strange if it doesn’t change. What allowed The Simpsons to run for thirty-six years is that the cast, being animated drawings, have not aged out of being able to play their characters (and can be replaced by soundalikes); now CGI has evolved to keep Luke Skywalker’s face somehow always resembling a young Mark Hammil, so it may be that eternal media will become the new norm but at least for the moment it still feels odd to most audiences if things don’t evolve with the passing years.

Advertisers and merchandisers want worlds to change too: this is why we have the terrors of the Cthulhu mythos and the grim space fascism of the Warhammer 40,000 universe now being moulded to fit pop-up books for three-year-olds. Star Wars doesn’t care if the old dads and granddads like or don’t like the new cartoons because they can also make something father and son stand-in for men aged 25–45 (The Mandalorian) and something a lot like Cold War spy stories for men aged 45–65 (Andor). We are all unlikely to be creating something as popular as Star Wars but we all want our worlds to grow up and out with our own creative drives, and with its fans, and to have many different expressions and to allow all the flights of fancy of fanfic and character generation. And if we want to do that, we need to be very careful with closing doors.

Or as James Bond said: never say never again.

Every time you say something never happens, can’t happen (or the inverse, something always happens) you’ve closed a door. You can never go back on that without violating a promise of canon and as a result risking losing your audience. You have to be careful even when implying something isn’t done, which you are likely doing all the time. If characters always seem to be punching in coordinates before they leap to light speed, or choosing not to cast fireball spells when it would help, you are broadly suggesting it is always necessary to do the former, and they can’t simply always do the latter. So if you later suggest that you can jump to light speed whenever you want, or could have always just used a fireball, it makes those earlier scenes seem at best strange, at worst meaningless.

The reason this is important is that limitations are the very heart of what makes good stories and good games. The ability to just vanish when you go through hyperspace is a key plot point in Star Wars, and so much hinges on that fact that the setting is rocked by the discovery (in the film The Last Jedi) that the Empire now has the ability to get around this restriction.³ However, the film Rogue One which came out a year earlier established that Princess Leia’s ship uses hyperdrive to escape attacks above the planet Scarif and reaches the planet Tatooine, only to be followed and captured as seen in the opening of the original film A New Hope. So within a short time there were two very contradictory facts, changing dozens of plot points and scenes in the core films alone, likely affecting millions of subsidiary works! It took a lot of setting explanation over two different sources – The Rise of Skywalker Visual Dictionary (Hidalgo, 2019) and an unrelated novel Shadow of the Sith (Christopher, 2022) – to explain all of this. It turns out that Vader was only able to follow Leia because damage to her ship had left a trail that Empire scanners could detect, and the new technology allows tracking something heretofore unable to be detected by said scanners. Tellingly, this was pieced together and communicated not by fans on internet forums but by online media news journalists.

This was of course the application of some of the lessons we talked about in Chapters 6 and 11, with eager writers jumping in to fill in the blanks with clever justifications. Star Wars fans are unlikely to abandon a franchise for such sins and wait patiently for Perfectly Reasonable Explanations: you might not be so lucky. The Last Jedi meanwhile also ran into more criticism when a character used jumping to hyperspace as a weapon. Again, nobody had ever said this wasn’t possible, but the fact that nobody had ever talked about doing it meant it had been heavily implied to not be an option. Rian Johnson, being a nerd with deep knowledge, had read of it being done in the comics from the 1980s, but for the younger audience, it raised questions which had to be then explained in the next movie and other material. Running catch-up like this on your worldbuilding can come across as lazy, and much of this might have been saved with some extra dialogue at the time suggesting a little more as to why the move wasn’t done before, besides it being suicidal. Sometimes the tiniest explanation, or even suggestion of an explanation, can go incredibly far. Note that I mean explanation when it comes up in new material: the writers of the original Star Wars trilogy could have never expected their world to involve so much extra material or could have ever covered such extensive possibilities!

Of course, movies and books and comics have a luxury in that they aren’t technical writing like game books and setting guides are. Even though we should think of games as also simply being representation, as fallible stories, the fact that rules are written in technical language and have so much certainty means they come across like encyclopaedias and textbooks, telling us what is absolutely true. Mechanics also give incredible (and subconscious, to the player) impressions of absolute truth. If the rules say that a certain type of character cannot do a certain thing, that reads like a scientific certainty that cannot be broken. It even feels stronger than a cultural or historical rule: it is not that, say, a person who is not aligned with Good would simply not choose to be a paladin or no knightly order would accept him; rather it reads like the universe would know about it and make sure it was impossible – and presumably, therefore, nobody is trying to get around this. This also matters more in games because while in a world we might imagine ways around things, rules being absent are much harder to add. All of this can be directly shutting down someone’s idea of fun. If there are no rules for robots to be wizards, the player who has been busy dreaming of this amazing character idea or experience can feel like they’ve been thrown out of the party, for the crime of having an imagination.

Much like I discussed in Chapters 6 and 11, the solution here is in how you present things. It’s fine for characters and in-world documents to say something is the way things are or are not, because those we accept can be wrong. Another simple trick is to use conditional adverbs and adjectives to suggest that any statement is not entirely absolute. Things seem to be a way, or all known evidence suggests it, or nobody has found otherwise. “All attempts or experiments have so far failed to prove otherwise” is a mind-space that not only doesn’t close a door but also opens up the possibility that someday this might change. Maybe this can be what makes your character special or be something they (seek to) find out. As a scriptwriter once told me, a character having no bullets left is nowhere near as exciting as them having one bullet left; just so an impossibility is less interesting than a virtual impossibility. You can see these kinds of things in Star Wars all the time: near the beginning of A New Hope it is Tarkin who gives his opinion, not fact, that the Jedi’s flame has burned out. Han Solo gives his opinion that the Force doesn’t exist. When Obi-Wan explains the Force his dialogue is very carefully vague. The Force “partially” controls your actions, but it also “obeys your commands”. It’s contradictory and doesn’t really mean anything. It leaves lots and lots of room for writers to play around.

It sure sounds great though.

This is harder to do with rules, of course, but even there you can be careful to write your rules so they are showing the current state of play and there may be other rules later that could say otherwise. These are some of the factions and powers to choose from. In the core game, paladins must be Good. Most collectible or expandable games state up front that cards and later rules can and may contradict the rulebook. And so on.

Before we finish on closing doors, we should also note to be careful about opening them as well. The setting as it is first depicted is an implicit closed door, suggesting that all the things you depict are the total sum of the world. Any time you add in a new place or group or technology or magic or type of anything, you have to explain where those things have been the whole time – you’ve opened a whole new door. It’s good to keep your setting expanding and feeling new so it’s natural to bring things in but you’ll want to be ready for the combinatorial scope increase, as every past event in history and every location and every faction now needs to be filled in about how they interact with this, as well as the explanations of why they either weren’t around before or were around but were invisible to the audience.

Once you invent a Holdo Maneuver or a Picard Maneuver you need to explain why it can’t then be used in every situation, as well as why it wasn’t used every time in the past. If is a new idea, you have to explain why it wasn’t discovered and you’ll now always have a “time-jump” moment in your chronology, disrupting the eternal present. You’ve opened a door to all these possibilities. Again, fiction has it easy: a huge amount of Western media uses the “magic key” structural trope where the status quo or the great opposing force has one key weakness or the heroes have one key strength. The Ghostbusters can’t defeat Gozer except if they can cross the streams of their proton beams. Great for stories because stories end. Every Ghostbusters threat thereafter, however, asks the question of why not use the magic key again. In our world if someone unlocks a new technology or strategy, that always fundamentally changes how everyone lives or fights from that point on, and any world with any pretensions towards realism (i.e. anything more cohesive than a Looney Toons cartoon) is likely to do the same.

This can be a good thing! We love our settings to get shaken up. But we have to be ready for everything those changes can cause. If Star Trek decided that beaming people through space was now possible at a much greater range, it would make sense for them to simply stop using spaceships so much and then maybe nobody would watch any more. On the other hand, you can write around opening a door but you can also lose your audience if every single promised change eventually leads nowhere. You swiftly end up with Gilligan’s Island Syndrome,⁴ also known as Schmuck Bait. This is where both the narrative and the marketing suggest big changes but – like the end of every episode of Gilligan’s Island – the writers reveal that the all the foreshadowing and presaging were narrative tricks and the status quo remains unchanged. Gilligan’s Island though shows that audiences are conflicted. We all want to feel as if great changes can happen in our worlds just as we want dramatic tensions in our fiction, but we also understand that if Gilligan gets rescued, the TV show is over. In a similar way audiences can be very accommodating for things in worlds that are justified in the name of game balance and what makes things fun.

The other extreme is just as bad: if things are constantly changing, with characters switching allegiances and romances back and forth, changing past and future events, then change becomes a kind of status quo and there are no stakes because nothing will last. Then there is a combination of the two: the setting constantly being changed but then rebooted or reset back to a similar start point. Everyone knows that if Gilligan gets off the island in this storyline, he’ll be back there when the show reboots, or he’ll be instantly marooned somewhere else: a change that is actually no change.

Too much use of conditional language and a lack of absolutes can have your world feeling like this latter example: if nothing is really known or fixed, nothing has weight or consequences. It is hard lines and impossibilities that tend to make fictional universes interesting. Likewise, breaking those hard lines quickly or easily can just suck away all the pathos of the setting. The RPG game In Nomine (Pearcy, 1997) famously fell afoul of this, by stating in its rules that certain kinds of angels were immune to becoming demons and then basing their first published adventure arc on this being proven false. It was such an obvious and swift reversal from an interesting restriction that it felt like a cheat to bring it up in the first place. It is no magic feat to make a rabbit appear in a hat that the audience never saw was empty.

Much like the balance between familiar archetype and fresh originality, knowing when to have hard and fast rules and when to allow room for wibbly-wobbly possibilities is not easy and is an acumen that only comes through practice. But you can hedge your bets a little with the clever use of language. Every now and then a clear bold line is good, but you can go a long way with almost bold lines. Design as if most things are absolute in theory, but take a few moments now and then to acknowledge that you could be wrong about that.

Apart from rarely actually closing doors you can also cushion for change by being sure to build beyond the edges of the main map, in both time and space. Before your audience sees any part of your world you should know what came before and after and what lies outside the map edges. It’s not just making things feel more believable and more intriguing but it’s laying the groundwork so the audience is ready for more things to come, even if they don’t know they are. In narrative fiction they call this laying pipe and we will talk more about it in the next chapter.

On a Quest

What are some of the absolutely unbreakable rules of your world? Are they actually rules or just the common experience? Are they legal, moral, supernatural or natural laws? They might be the same as in our world like the laws of physics. Yet we know from history that those laws are, if not breakable, vulnerable to interesting ways of bypassing them. What happens to your world if exceptions to the rules are found? Are there options that players are going to immediately want to do or rules they will want to break, because of how they are presented (players can react to these kinds of things like a Wet Paint sign – it immediately creates the idea of wanting to see what happens if they try to break the rules).

Stopping By

Choose a hard line or binary state that exists in your world and create an exception. Choose a line that has lots of exceptions or options and change it to an absolute state or into a binary yes/no or in/out. See what happens. It will likely provide some exciting new ideas.

Notes

Website: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/08/they-dont-make-readers-like-th.html, accessed 10th of September 2024.

See Chapter 24.

This is an important jump forwards in time, bringing in the concerns from Chapter 25.

Running from 1962 to 1964, Gilligan’s Island was a moderately successful television sitcom featuring seven castaways marooned on a desert island. Due to syndication, it was shown over and over again through the 1970s and 1980s, gaining it enduring popularity (much like Star Trek). Many of the plots involved the constant struggle for the castaways to be rescued; the nature of the show continuing to work involved them of course not succeeding. Gilligan’s Island became famous because rather than the main characters rushing around to preserve the façade (such as in shows like Bewitched or Mr Ed), it became increasingly unbelievable that the many visiting guest stars failed to rescue the castaways, with this being justified by increasingly unlikely last-moment denouements. As the audience changed over the decades, there was less and less tolerance for what seemed like the show wanting to both create tension and maintain its status quo.

CHAPTER 27 Pipe and How to Lay It

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-30

BEING A CREATOR OF settings means being a student of history and geography and one of the joys of being a student of those is finding out that humans throughout all of time and space have remained very much recognisably human, especially in how they make and consume art. It comes as no surprise that as soon as the ancient Greeks invented the idea of theatre, they also invented the theatre critic. As discussed back in Chapter 2, one of the earliest and most famous theatre critics was Aristotle.

Aristotle argued that a truly great play observed the three classical unities: everything happened in the same place, at the same time and was all about the same thing. He could use Sophocles as an example: in Oedipus Rex, everything happens in front of the palace at Thebes, in the same afternoon, and everything is about Oedipus trying to find out why Thebes is suffering a pestilence. The story was a well-known one to the audience and has plenty of preambles: Oedipus is raised far away, comes to Thebes as a stranger, defeats the terrible Sphinx with his incredible acumen and then founds a city and brings the people dominated by the Sphinx into that city, and for many years they enjoy prosperity until the great pestilence arrives. Plenty of contemporary versions of the tale would have included some or all of that; Sophocles starts the story not only with the pestilence a big problem but a farmer sent to appeal to the king for aid and, in fact, Oedipus already having sent messengers to the oracles to find out why – and that messenger comes back a few minutes later. To this day, this is given as storytelling advice: to start the story right where the action really begins.

Settings are not able to do this. There is the moment of eternal present that the game takes place in, but when we build that moment we are doing everything but telling the story. That said, we do want to start our settings at an interesting point in time. If the game describes the great houses of the galaxy fighting over the planet Dune, we don’t really want to play out or hear about the founding of the empire or the discovery of Dune. Games can and do have first acts but even more than films they need to start with the action, because as we said in Chapter 25, games demand interactivity. Most films and books have a lot of introduction and exposition and character introduction and development that we won’t tolerate in games. We already had to read the rules so at best, we can tolerate a sentence or two of the preamble.

Aristotle also said that ideally every scene in a play should accomplish two things: establish character and move the action forwards. Establishing setting (geography) or backstory (history) was not sufficient justification for an element to appear. That’s why in Oedipus Rex we don’t just hear that the crops in Thebes have failed; we learn that Oedipus has already sent the messenger and is awaiting news: the plot is already advancing and we have established that Oedipus is perceptive about the fate of his people, compassionate to their plight and forward-thinking in seeking solutions.

Although Greek plays often were part of connected stories, they were very much singular events, not like the long-running TV shows and comics of our day. Needing to fill longer and longer works, our media often has scenes that neither establish character nor advance the plot. Sometimes they establish setting, especially if that setting is new and exotic to us in the audience. Sometimes they establish mood and theme or the interior thoughts of the characters, since we don’t have a Greek chorus to do these things for us. And sometimes they exist to “lay pipe”. This is a phrase from television writing where the dialogue talks about things that aren’t at all relevant to the current storyline but provide story hooks for the future. It’s not quite foreshadowing because foreshadowing is more planned and more immediate. It is foreshadowing when Luke talks about wanting to leave Tatooine and find adventure, because that’s what Star Wars soon becomes about. It is laying pipe when Obi-Wan explains his backstory of knowing Luke’s father and the dark days of the Clone Wars, because Lucas had no real idea if he would ever tell those stories.

It has been said that one of the reasons Star Wars was so successful was it laid so much pipe. Typically, science fiction movies of the 1950s and 1960s took such pains with special effects for aliens, robots and creatures they would linger on them and explain them in detail, and even have a long pause with only a musical sting for audio when any alien or creature is shown, for the audience to gasp in wonder and fear at such a thing. When, quite early in the film A New Hope has the camera pan across several dozen aliens in the cantina, it was like nothing else. It made people want to see the film over and over again to notice these details and imagine what they might mean. In television laying pipe is more about character histories: characters will drop hints about their pasts and their relatives so they seem believable and real and when the writers later need a new character to enter, well, the hero has already mentioned his brother who lives in New York. Like building a house, the earlier scenes have laid down the pipes so that taps can be put into them when needed.

This kind of “Star Wars cantina” pipe-laying is what you are almost always doing when you are creating a game. Unless it is a very narrative game then apart from the aforementioned introductory blurb, much of the game is in the rules and mechanics. The world is then implied by a series of glimpses through a crowd, a selection of tastes picked out to be the names and references and quotes and flavour text, all pointing to something larger and beyond. We are not just viewing a world through a keyhole, but a keyhole aimed at a very small set of slides in a slideshow. In this sense the pipes extend into the work rather than out at the edges or back and forth in time. In this way you don’t have to know what any given name or flavour text refers to: it can just be pipe for the future.

Extending pipes outwards is just as important. Even if you do produce a roleplaying game with endless supplements, a setting guide or vast in-game library that provides endless encyclopaedic knowledge written in technical language about the ancient ages and faraway lands, chances are not all of it is going to be in one book or indeed one game.¹ And you don’t want it to be. You want your world to have room to grow and to have surprises in store. Some of these can be hiding in plain sight of course – we all understand a gazetteer cannot list every single detail of every single place and person and concept² – but you also want to draw up some lines around your time and place and say “this is what it is”. And then you also want to lay pipe to everything else that’s out there. Or rather, everything else that isn’t out there, yet. Things that are there in places where the audience can’t see yet. Lurking in the shadows of rigidly defined uncertainty.³

The opposite of laying pipe is the retcon, or retroactive continuity, which is so often used in comics. When Superman was revealed to have a cousin and a dog that also escaped Krypton’s destruction, this became true for the entirety of Superman’s continuity, working backwards, retroactively. It was just that all the scenes we had seen of Superman being sent into space failed to mention these two. After long exposure to extremely long-lasting media we are quite nimble in building these things into our understanding, even if there are outright contradictions.⁴ There was also no way the inventors of Superman could have anticipated the great volume of stories that would come. But if they had, laying pipe would have meant having Superman’s parents mentioning in that very first comic that they hoped they had time to send other companions for their son.

We know we want our settings to grow so we can leave space for these things. You don’t want things to feel unfinished – if a magician walks on stage with a mysterious suitcase and then never opens it or refers to it we feel cheated – but we don’t have to show all our tricks at once. If you have built a whole galaxy you can have your setting be just one planet. If you’ve designed a whole planet, just have your setting be a continent or a nation. If you have a nation, choose a city. And so on. This way whenever you need to layer “zoom out” or “pan left” you both know what is there but also you’ve built your world knowing that these other things are there. Your language and descriptions will naturally (even without thinking about it) have indicated these things are there beyond the map.⁵

It doesn’t mean that the creators should have drawn in every single comic panel an undefined figure next to Superman just in case he is later revealed to have a conjoined twin! You don’t want to constantly be saying “and the other planets are also there” like a nervous tic. But you can describe travellers, goods or trade routes from the other cities or planets. You’ll remember to metaphorically pan across your cantina with hints of everything else. Your connections to three other things will happen naturally, so your setting doesn’t feel unmoored in space. Your connections will run out of “frame”, which is realistic and makes us curious. The audiences know there’s an extra suitcase that you might be opening in the future.

Writers of narrative often get hung up on completely shocking or surprising reveals that the audience never saw coming (especially these days when spoilers are a commodity and drip feed marketing is required and constantly over-analysed). But those are far less interesting than things the audiences had an inkling about. The latter creates both surprise and satisfaction. We love things to pay off, for the Chekov’s gun to fire. Some people will always suspect and some will always be blindsided, but the best place to aim is in the middle. And what this chapter is really saying is the inverse of Chekhov’s Gun: if you intend on firing the gun at some point, you want to put that gun on the mantelpiece early on. Laying pipe is going around putting as many guns on as many mantelpieces as you can so when we are ready to fire them they have a sense of always being there.

The above examples are all about space but of course all of this is also true of time. Even if you have a long timeline you want to lay out you should think about not giving your audience a chronology going all the way back to year dot. Leave room for what came before that. Or better still, build your setting and then run it forwards through several iterations. Now you have histories and futures and you can set your game in one of the ones in the middle. Now you have your past and future well defined in your bible and can lay pipe towards both of them.

You might never set your games in or provide full explanations of those pasts or future. Like every one of these pipes sometimes all they do is provide mystery or possibility. Engineers know to build in more capacity than you plan, just in case. You also want to be super careful that having too fixed an idea of the future doesn’t lead to removing the players’ sense of agency as discussed in Chapter 26 or not being ready to adjust your own vision to audience reactions and testing and your own creative evolution. But the more you have thought these things through the more prepared you will be for any expansions and extensions. More importantly your present will feel deeper, richer and more exciting.

Choosing exactly which of these times is the moment for the action to begin can be tricky of course. That’s the topic of our next chapter.

On a Quest

Zoom out in time and space around your world and make sure it is moored to both extents. Then zoom in further than you originally planned and consider making that narrower focus the setting that you present for your game.

Stopping By

Think of another time or place in your world that you haven’t specified or thought about much at all. Imagine you must now make a game in that setting instead. What would that look like? How would you lay pipe back to your original world?

Notes

You also can’t write that all at once, as discussed in Chapter 20.

But be careful with those implied closed doors, as discussed in the last chapter.

See Chapter 11.

Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer was often meta-textual, and in series 5 they played on the retcon trope, where a new character being introduced that everyone remembered exigetically despite never existing before diegetically was caused by a magic spell.

We will talk more about what to present and not present in Chapter 35.

CHAPTER 28 The Slice of Life

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-31

THERE IS A QUOTE in the second edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay by Chris Pramas that became an unofficial motto of some of the writers on that game: “the Empire is always one dagger thrust from anarchy”. What we took from that was that the setting was unstable and vulnerable to vast changes. The political stage was always highly volatile with wars on the brink of breaking out between religions and nations, and revolutions and secessions poised at the ready. But this came with a caveat: those changes were likely only things that happened at the players’ game tables. When I worked on the World of Darkness the setting was less fluid. We were guided to present organisations and power structures as more stable and enduring. This was not to rob players of agency and of course at a personal game players and game masters could do as they wished but the reasoning was that because major changes came through published products bit by bit there were rigidly defined areas of change and unrest and less so outside of those zones.

A game, much like a story, takes as long as it takes, which is to say we are for the most part happy to surrender our time to it and to its internal clock: we count turns and rounds not minutes and hours. Sometimes those internal chronometers simulate an in-game measure such as each turn representing a generation in Terraforming Mars or a round in Dungeons and Dragons representing six seconds of combat. Even if not specifically stated in the rules a game with any sort of simulation will have an approximate sense of what time it encapsulates in its whole play and in each action. This gives us a sense of the game’s represented timescale.

This consideration is vital for emulative design. If your game is designed to model long sea journeys across the Atlantic in a few moves, it would feel out of place to have a card represent a single shot of a cannon or a musket. I like to think of a single move of a piece or play of a card or roll of a die as the game’s “atomic time”. This atom of play is an indivisible slice of the action, and, except in games with modular phases, remains relatively static in what it represents. You may attempt to figure out atomic time by first getting a sense of what a round or a game represents and from that extrapolate down. Or you can figure out the atomic time of an action and how many atomic actions are in a game or session and extrapolate up. Eventually you’ll have a sense of the total time frame: what an action, a turn, a round and a game represents.

This is crucial because it gives you the tempo of your game, and that tells you the tempo of your world. When you describe your setting and all its history and context, you will likely begin with wide sweeping statements that encompass vast swathes of time and enormous areas of geography. Once upon a time, in a wicked age, the mists lift on an ancient city – these are big broad steps, where little that is critical is communicated. As you approach the topic of your game, the time and place you want to evoke with each game, round, turn and action, you’ll need to slow your sentences down to match that pace. You’ll start to say things like “every night” or “each encounter” or “everything turns on this struggle” – tiny steps, each with huge import. Just as there’s no point modelling a single cannon shot mechanically if the average turn is a three-month voyage, there’s no point detailing extremely detailed descriptions of loading a cannon (or how magical cannons work in this universe) when you set your scene if the corresponding game mechanic or action is about sweeping clear across those seas in a single turn.

There are exceptions, of course. When you step aside to provide more incidental text or fiction (and indeed art), you sometimes do want to zoom in or out far more than the tempo might indicate. In this case the narrow moment becomes a synecdoche for the larger one (or vice versa), just as a bellowing face of a swordsman on the front cover can suggest a massive army in fight.¹ But for framing the game, for priming your players about what your game is about, and for the technical language around that, you want your timescale in your worldbuilding to match the timescale of your game actions. This is also generally how you want to choose what things you model in your game as well, and how you name them, describe them and illustrate them. Again, it’s not “fire cannons” if the scale is much longer; instead you would have a card that says something more like “a sea battle” or “An epic voyage”. The flavour text might describe a moment in that battle but only if the intent is to reflect the battle as a whole. A power in a roleplaying game is likely to describe an actual physical blow or manoeuvre of a single combatant; a card in a civilisation game might describe a thousand years taking place, and they should be named, described and depicted accordingly.

I assume by this point of the book you have a strong idea of what your game is going to be about but if you don’t, this technique can help immensely. If you find yourself writing a blurb for your setting and after more than a hundred words you still haven’t got past the establishing information and the wide descriptions and have yet to drill down to the Richard Scarry Interrogative² then either you’re waffling on too much or you haven’t picked the right time for your setting to start. Or your game is actually about the wider context and that’s what you need to fix, refocussing your design not your world.

This is often how I know a setting isn’t “game ready” yet: I’ll start with a few random ideas, consider how they might interact and what they might lead do and then see if I’ve found a point of short, sharp actions that fit some kind of mechanics that suit the kind of game I want to make. If I haven’t got that, if I’m still talking about nations and the tide of history, then I either roll the consequences forwards a few more times or zoom in or out or both. Or maybe even pan or tilt the camera in a different direction, to extend the metaphor: maybe the reason the story hasn’t matched into the pace of some atomic game actions is because I’m looking in the wrong place, and the more interesting action is somewhere else or exists in a different context. Those are always your handy worldbuilding tools: roll events forwards in time or consequences, zoom in or out, pan or tilt to a different angle. If there’s still nothing, add more elements to spice things up or go back and start again. Or let it incubate: sometimes an idea will be missing the key element that makes you see the gaming moments within it and no amount of conscious tinkering will reveal it. Your subconscious may have more luck. Or you might just need to live your life a bit longer until you see the story you want to tell or discover the key fact or inspiration you were missing.

For roleplaying games, this moment of matching pace is easy to spot because most of them are about individual people: if there aren’t any people taking exciting actions you can describe yet, then you know you must adjust. Likewise, computer games that involve first-person point of view or singular characters are aiming for the same point. Remember though that in computer and tabletop roleplaying games your atomic action is really a whole party of characters doing something, not in fact one person. A lot of worlds and stories have fallen foul swiftly because they prime the players to be lone individuals swinging a single sword instead of part of a larger group in an ongoing adventure. The group as a whole takes actions and the atomic actions build into sessions; so the group must have a place in the setting and their lifestyle as a whole needs to match the tempo. There’s no point building a setting around killing dragons in holes if you haven’t also considered how new holes get made and new dragons end up in them.

Outside of the first-person narrative, the key actions could be anything and likewise the tempo be anything. Many a great game has come about by finding a new “level” to set the action or a new angle on how to model it. But there are many established forms to show you the way, and you’ll know it when you feel it.

Finding your pacing synchronisation also helps you prepare to create all your blurbs, because now you know what kind of world description fits your actions, turns, rounds and games. As discussed in the previous chapter, tabletop games are like a slideshow, each slide offering a momentary glimpse of some part of the world. Although computer games provide an ever-moving dynamic landscape, this idea of a slideshow also applies: each room, each level, each enemy, each character, each mission, each power or loot item, each rule tip or quest guide, every button, screen or heads-up display; it is all a series of slides or slices of the setting. If you pile a lot of them up at once it feels more like a world but that only really happens on the player’s side. For the designer, worldbuilding being put into a game is done entirely in slices. Each slice is a discrete moment of time or space or a singular person, place or thing that provides a momentary snapshot of a world. So you do want as many as possible, and you want them to be as vivid, evocative and individual as possible. Not just guns, not just spaceships, but teacups and toasters, power stations and subway platforms, signposts and signal boxes. Show us the world in all kinds of slices.

In Chapters 12 and 15 I talked about how you want to aim for not just every item or character or event but every word and every description to reflect you world and no other, and this is why you don’t get the luxury of an author or filmmaker to put your particular toaster in a context that makes it say, “this toaster is telling you something about this space station”. In a game, a player may be looking only at the toaster, in complete isolation. Your art, naming, description, flavour text, fiction…it’s all got to come out of that one toaster. Or one teacup.

This is a good time to remind you that a picture paints a thousand words, and you should be paying your artists more. But of course, they can only draw what you tell them, so as well as writing incredible blurbs that communicate everything that makes that toaster speak of your universe, you also need to learn to write a great art brief. Art briefs need to be very clear but still leave room for the artist to show their voice, but at least here you can go back and forth with your artist to find the right balance and to make sure you’ve been clear about what you want. You can of course – and should! – test your art and your worldbuilding too, both separate from and placed in situ with mechanics and design. As I said at the beginning of this book, “fluff” is not so fluffy: it is a part of communicating what your game is, who it is for, how to play it, why it is fun and how to have fun with it. Like every part of your design, you need to be testing it and iterating on those tests at every step. That may mean actually going back and changing your world, too. If you can’t make the art or the text work, the problem may be coming from the world itself. Just because something is in your blurbs doesn’t mean it can’t be taken out and things reworked at the bible level or put back in the ideas file.

You won’t need to write an art brief if you are lucky enough to be the artist yourself, but given the volume of art needed that can be an enormous task. An art director can free you up to focus on game design. Likewise, consider having a narrative director in charge of building your world and expressing it well. Yes, even for tabletop games, although obviously the tiny amount of money in game design is always prohibitive to getting the talent we want.

There are ways to make all this expression easier though, and we’re look at that in the next chapter.

On a Quest

It’s time to really work on those blurbs, but this time specifically for game elements. In twenty-five words or less I want you to make a blurb for your whole world, for this game, for each identity it features or the role the players take on, for a round, a turn and one or two actions.

Stopping By

What is the atomic action of your game? What would happen if you zoomed in one or two more steps? Or zoomed out? How would you present your world then?

Notes

I will return to the issue of synecdoche in Chapter 30.

See Chapter 16.

CHAPTER 29 Signs and Signifiers

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-32

ONE OF THE GREAT powers that lies in art is the ability to transmit two or more levels of meaning at once. The most obvious version of this of course is allegory, such as where the loyal workers who believed in the Communist revolution become the noble workhorse Boxer in Orwell’s Animal Farm or Aslan’s death and rebirth being a retelling of the story of Jesus Christ in C. S. Lewis’ The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Less direct allegory becomes what we often call the stand-in. Charlie Chaplin in Modern Times dresses in a uniform and goes to the factory to work and we can see those things around us, and we may even be someone who does that. We recognise that he is not just a single person doing a single thing but emblematic of any or even all factory workers. This kind of stand-in can be very specific: the evil casino-building Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future movies was not just based on the idea of evil property barons but explicitly based on and a reference to Donald Trump. The movie character mimics the traits of Trump and people like them so as to bring those emotions over and attach them to this character. Also, the artist perhaps hopes that by highlighting in fiction a parallel character, the audience will carry over that disdain to figures in our world that the artist feels deserve it. In the case of Chaplin, the sympathy we feel for his character The Tramp and the experience he has as a worker on an assembly line will both trade on and extend into increasing our real-world sympathy for the poor and the assembly workers.

The flow of information goes in both directions: we bring in our ideas of the world, and the artist has those things to work with to create meaning. Then the artist shapes things into new meanings which change how we see the world. In essence, everything in fiction, and indeed in communication, can be considered a stand-in for something in the real. This is the theory of art and language known as semiotics and in particular the theory of signs. The Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure coined the terminology of this theory of language in the early 20th century. A sign is an element of language, and according to Saussure’s theory, it has two elements: the signifier, which is the thing that is doing the communication to the observer, and the signified, which is the thing that the signifier is communicating. In its simplest form, the word red is the signifier, and the colour we imagine in our head is the signified.¹ On a larger scale, fictional representations are presented by encoding information into them, which is in part drawn from and operates within the culture in which the art exists. We know that if we see someone wearing a fancy suit, standing in a boardroom, looking out a window high above a city, this person is likely a rich person, with a well-paid job, perhaps a lawyer, stockbroker and so on. It may be that the story tells us that he is unlike the categories we have already placed him in, but in isolation the character represents and encodes many ideas and many larger groups and concepts. Stand-ins are a more particular kind of sign where the cultural encoding is referencing very specific things, such as people, places or companies (although not so specific to become an outright parody or reference).

Art often takes this one step further with the use or metaphor, where an element of the art is a representation of a feeling or an idea. The great appeal of what is now mostly known as genre fiction – fantasy, horror and science fiction – is that it can do what is known as the literal metaphor. Through the addition of the supernatural we can encounter the “hyper-real”, where the metaphorical becomes an actual physical character or force. In Modern Times when Chaplin’s tramp feels that he is merely a cog in a gigantic machine, he finds himself pulled inside an actual machine, turned about and flattened by the gigantic cogs. The film is not science fiction but we are also able to set aside some disbelief at the unreality of that scene, because we are drawn into the metaphor. The difference when it comes to genre fiction is one of scale: since we can draw whatever unreality we wish, whole aspects of the world or its unreal elements exist as metaphors, solely to be metaphors.²

Some critics have accused Tolkien’s work of being morally simplistic, because the elves and orcs in Middle-Earth are literal expressions of philosophical concepts of good and evil, and Sauron’s ring is the embodiment of a corruptive force that feeds on selfishness, and that corrupting nature deforms and distorts the physical, visual nature of the orcs and Gollum. But Tolkien was specifically creating works of mythology, where literal metaphor is the whole point of the medium. In a similar way, it is vanishingly unlikely that in exploring space we would find a group of aliens locked in a race war between those who have black coloured skin on the left side of the face and white on the right and their enemies who have the colours in reversed positions; the point is the metaphor.³ Like Chaplin being pulled into the machine, pointing out that it is unrealistic is missing the point; the whole reason to use things outside our known reality is precisely to create these kinds of representations.

Your world need not be so stark in its allegories nor so obvious with its stand-ins or allusions but when you enter into genre fiction and created worlds you have the power to signify the most abstract things with very concrete signifiers, stand-ins and representations. At the same time, because the world is created, you can risk things being meaningless because they aren’t a stand-in for anything and thus need to have the world around them establish the context by reacting to and being affected by those elements. Fantastical elements cannot be completely unknown and unknowable to the inhabitants of your world, or the audience cannot know anything about them at all.⁴ Alien things don’t help us connect to the story because they don’t come with any encoded information, so the characters or text must take great pains to explain how they work. This is why so many genre fiction stories involve a mystery or explore an unknown: it gives an excuse to constantly be explaining the new, strange things being encountered.

The great fantasy author Raymond E. Fiest said that you should never make something in a setting magical unless you absolutely had to, because each time you do so, you get lazier and you take the reader further out of the setting because the world has less in it that they recognise or relate to. Just as a world must be built to have a purpose, every element of a world should have a purpose, a reason it exists or a reason to draw the reader’s attention to it. Good worldbuilding is making sure everything has intent. Every piece of your world should be communicating at least three things: the thing it signifies itself, the world that it exists within and its purpose within the game. The latter might be a mechanic itself or creating an effect or context for the mechanic to exist within and for the player to inhabit and understand, or both. You’ll also want to connect to something in our real world so we can get a sense of what it is and give it depth in the world it exists in by connecting it to three other things. So that’s a lot of meaning to communicate! The more alien the world and the things are, the more work you’ll have to do, and as mentioned in Chapter 23, your audience only has so much tolerance for hard work.

The most important thing to communicate is the larger whole. Ideally you want every part of your setting to reflect the setting and as such everything is a stand-in for the setting itself. Each element is a sign where the signified is the greater universe. Each thing is also a stand-in for the things it is connected to: an elven ring should imply and suggest the aspects of the elves; a run-down library should reflect the dangerous knowledge at the heart of the Cthulhu mythos.⁵ But there is also the inverse of this that comes with fictional worlds: you don’t have to express every part of your setting all the time, because you can express it through signs and signifiers instead.

In storytelling, this is the technique of showing not telling. We don’t need to have the character in the suit at the window turn around and explain that he went to a fancy university, got his law degree and now works in a big important firm; we’ve established that through those signs of his suit and his office. In worldbuilding, we can’t (or shouldn’t) expect every player to read a gigantic history book and atlas about our setting, and even if they will, they certainly don’t want to do all that before they start playing. Encyclopaedia-style worldbuilding has its place, but even Tolkien kept the backstory in the Appendices and The Silmarillion; The Lord of the Rings does have some epic exposition dumps at times but it presents the world through a narrative. With games, we try to tell through the gameplay and the slideshows that assemble on each element of the game. Every piece of art, every place, object and character, every piece of dialogue or narrative, even names and word choices are letting through a slice of the world to the audience. The game can be thought of as a series of thin shutters, opening and closing. Much like how a series of swift still images turns into a fluid motion in our head, we take these slices and confuse them for a living, breathing place inside our mind.

Each slice must then be efficient, pregnant with meaning and context and connection, and using signs and signals. We should not, in other words, devote too much time to showing too many exceptions to the rules when we worldbuild, and where we do, we should mark it clearly. It is no use choosing our central character to be the fancy lawyer above and deciding he is a rare case who did not go to Harvard, Yale or Princeton because now we have missed a vital opportunity to communicate to our reader the names of the Ivy League colleges in our fictional universe. The reader has no knowledge of the fictional space to understand when expectations are subverted, so we must devote content to establishing those expectations, and that means everything we do is heavy with signification. Our worlds therefore are ones where Legolas is a stand-in for all elves and thus drips with “elven-ness”. Again, this is why we use such stark unrealities so that we can communicate efficiently. “Race” in fantasy is stronger than ethnicity so as to communicate differences more strongly.

A particularly good example of using signs in narrative gaming comes from Over the Edge (Laws, 1992). In that game, every character had only a few broad statistics but each one had to come with a sign. If you had an ability, you had to also describe how that ability would be obvious to someone who briefly observed you. If you were elderly you might add that you walked with a cane or had bright white hair; if you were rich you might describe your fancy gold rings or the way you always talked about the stock market. Your world is just the same: for every element it has, it needs to have signs, several of them, that point to that element. For every description you can apply to its nature, you should be able to provide a concrete example of that. It’s no good telling me your world is dark and brooding if you don’t show it in the art, in the word choices and in the characters, places and events you describe.

And of course, you want to show it in your rules as well, and your rules should also be illustrated with or connected to whatever they represent in the fictional world, which sounds like a lot, but the good news is that each one also supports and reinforces the other: if the rules suggest that my figure cannot see as far as they normally can because of the thick rain, that points to the artwork of the rain, and the words describing the rain, which in turn point back to the mechanic, and all of them connect to our ideas about rain in the real world. This gets trickier when it’s not rain but something entirely fictional, like the Momerath Enchantment, but once you establish what that looks like and does and is connected to, you can now use an internal shorthand. If Momerath Enchantments are always bright green or are always protective, then players will begin to learn that shorthand and those stand-ins.

In fact, game mechanics are possibly the most powerful way to do this kind of thing. We have a visceral reaction to game mechanics that go far beyond theme: if the Momerath Enchantment protects my pieces from leaving the board, I will instinctively and emotionally link it to being a helpful, protective force. This is precisely why games are so good at worldbuilding and world-communicating.

And again, once you have this link in people’s minds, you can use this shorthand over and over, with any slightly different effect being coded the same way. Perhaps a card provides an ability that players are having trouble seeing a defensive application for: you can label it with green light or the Momerath name and it will communicate this to them.⁶ And once this kind of connection is established, you cannot break it. If the same fictional concept later represents something else, it will be confusing and likely pull people out of the game.

A great example of this is in the Netrunner CCG (Garfield, Litzinger, 1996). Players taking on the role of hackers tend to have three main resources: cards in hand, actions to play cards and money tokens to spend on actions. Money in the gameplay is directly linked to money in the game world, with card acquisition linked to resources like physical health and energy and actions linked to time. Therefore, cards that represent employment take up your actions and provide money tokens. Cards that describe healing from an injury or drinking an energy drink let you draw cards. If a card introduced called Health Tonic and it gave you money, it would not make sense. It might not be understood or even not be played because of that mismatch! But because we’ve established these links, we don’t have to explain a complicated card as much; the fiction is easier to establish with less flavour text, and the rules are easier to teach since we understand the fiction. The semiotics work in our favour, cycling to create ever more meaning and giving us more leverage to tell more complicated stories with more nuanced slices.

I’ll talk more about this expression of meaning through the signs of a game in Chapter 31, but first, a brief lesson in grammar.

On a Quest

Now that you’ve summarised your world and important parts of it, it’s time to start thinking about signifiers – saying the same thing but with people, places, things, names, monsters, weapons, events, skylines, tones, hues, art, music and, of course, rules. You don’t have to spend money or use gross generative AI tools to get these things: it’s perfectly fine to use placeholder examples that already exist until you can afford to get the real thing. The great thing is it can be shared to any co-creators you have to communicate to them what each thing is like, which is perfect practice for how you’ll be communicating the same way to your audience.

Stopping By

A great exercise to sharpen the worldbuilding skills is to think of every element in your world (the things created by the lines drawn in Chapter 20) and describe something that perfectly encapsulates that. This is a lot like the old barn exercise from Chapter 15, but you get to decide the object (or place or person) that is representative. Next think of something that is connected to that same element but isn’t a good example of it at all. For example, if most elves are excellent sailors, who is the best elven sailor, and who is the worst? What is the boat that shows off this truth and the boat that doesn’t? If dwarves are great weaponsmiths, what’s a fantastic weapon that instantly shows it must be dwarven-made? And why does Kronk the Fighter have a dwarven weapon that’s clumsily cut and poorly balanced so that most people don’t even think it’s of dwarven origins? Can anyone still tell it is dwarven? Why? Or why not?

Notes

Derrida and many others have argued that the connection between the signifier and the signified is never as direct and straightforward as this model suggests, but this is outside the scope of this book.

There are also less direct and even less intentional metaphors in any artistic work. It might be that the long walk across the Dead Marches unconsciously recalls Tolkien’s time in the trenches in World War I, and the internecine struggles between the tribes of Men might be a distant parallel of the failure of Europe to unite against Hitler; both things are different from the literal metaphor of having Sauron be a concrete force of evil.

This is the plot of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, an episode of Star Trek season 3 (1969) by Gene Coon.

I remember feeling cheated by one book I read as a child, which described a vast lake that was “a colour the children had never seen before”, because that was a description I could not imagine. Totally unknowable things are typically dead ends.

Here we get into the interconnective matrices discussed in Chapter 20.

These connections aren’t perfect or infallible of course. As discussed in Chapter 2, mechanics can become too dense to clearly see what they are representing if there is not enough connection to a real-world idea or well-known genre trope.

CHAPTER 30 Synecdoche and Statistics

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-33

IN AN INTERNATIONAL WORLD, English may not be your first language so I’ll begin with a brief review of English grammar. In the last chapter we touched on the power of literal metaphor. A metaphor is when one thing becomes, through language, another thing, as a literary or figurative device, not a literal fact. When Batman declares “I am the night” or “the rain on my chest is a baptism” he is using metaphor. A simile is when we use comparison the same way, such as when Batman “moves like lightning” or his punches “hit like a jackhammer”. A literal metaphor is when, through the power of the supernatural, those allusions become physically real in the setting, like a demon manifesting from one’s own inner, psychological demons or Batman becoming as if an incarnate force of justice.¹

Close friends of metaphor and simile are metonymy and synecdoche. Metonymy is when we replace the actual noun with the figurative form. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, when Mark Antony asks the people to lend him their ears, ears is the metonym for listening. “The pen is mightier than the sword” uses pen as a metonym for the written word. Synecdoche is a close cousin of metonymy, where some part or aspect of a thing stands in for the whole such as calling a car your wheels or your girlfriend your squeeze or an executive a suit. In particular this is often used to express a group as an individual, such as referring to “the British soldier” to mean the entirety of the troops or the way of the Jedi Knight referring to the philosophy of all the Jedi Knights. It also works the other way, when a larger whole is used to refer to a subset, such as “America won a gold medal” (the team won) or when superheroes talk about defending the earth (they usually mean the people of the earth) or saving the day (they saved some part of the day).

Synecdoche and metonymy are useful linguistic devices for any descriptive works but they come to their fore in worldbuilding. Your characters are going to use these things to develop slang and argot regarding the things in their world, and you will be using synecdoche over and over again in your technical writing about the people, places, and things in the world. There are klingons on the Starboard bow (some klingons soldiers are in space on the starboard side of the ship). A wizard is never late (no wizards are late). House Atreides (the Duke and his personal Guard) is sent with his wife who is Bene Jesserit (she belongs to the Bene Jesserit order) to make sure that Dune (the people of Dune) produces spice (vast quantities of spice over many harvests) which the Navigators (members of the Navigators Guild) use to fold space (parts of space) for the Emperor (Emperor Leto) who rules the Imperium (a shorthand for the area and peoples under his control); when House Atreides falls (the Duke is killed), Paul learns to survive the desert (survive in a desert) and fight using a Fremen blade (a blade made by Fremen, in their style). As mentioned in the last chapter, everything in worldbuilding is a representative of its context, and that means it is a literal synecdoche. The Fremen blade stands in for the Fremen craftsmanship and values and eventually for the Fremen itself.

The truth is that humans think in synecdoche and metonymy. The policeman becomes his badge, the knight becomes his sword, America becomes the eagle, the French a man in a beret eating a baguette and drinking wine by the Eiffel Tower. This is another thing that draws us so much to fictional worlds: it excites our sense of signification. There is a joy in looking at Legolas the elf and knowing this is not just Legolas but an example of an elf, an instance, a reference to a larger idea. That’s a completely different sensation from meeting Hamlet and imagining their life beyond the story or even meeting Captain Hook and pondering what took his eye and hand. There is a unique thrill in knowing that what we see is not unique.

Games are also a language, built on the power of signifiers and the joy of translation, even when that translation is simple or the signified is only abstract. It is widely known in Western culture that the Ace of spades is a highly ranked card, but that is a specialist knowledge only available from understanding the language of the deck and the games built around it. Games also are full of the specific and the general. The ace of spades is an ace and a spade. It is not every spade or every ace, but it could stand for the spade suit or the Aces, just like Legolas stands for elves. If we turned over a spade card we might decide spades are the trump suit: the seven of spades becoming a synecdoche and a symbol for the entire suit. We might indeed have the face of Legolas indicating an elven action or elven piece, just as we might use a Fremen blade to represent their rules or their side of the board. Games are made of signs and signs are made of synecdoche: the logo of the blade stands for the blade which stands for the Fremen.

This sense of translation that is constant in games provides a perfect mirror of how we translate other universes. We may come to learn that STR is short for STRENGTH, and this is associated with a number, and that number has a range from low values to high values, and those values correspond to both a conceptualised representation in the game world and a mechanical effect that we have also learned, which comes together to tell us something about the trait of the character with the STR listing. Soon these things become second nature but we are always translating, even if subconsciously. That translation maps to how we translate our worlds, from Legolas to elves, from blade to Fremen. Games are also constant exercises in translation in how they simulate things, as discussed in the last chapter. We want them to have an implied fictional meaning and sense to them. We don’t mind if the simulation is not perfect, because the fun part is the translation. Like masks and puppets, it is in fact the approximation that gives it the power, because we fill in the rest. But it must have some echo of the referent. The stick figure in hangman is no less in peril for his lack of anatomical correctness, but he very much must be human so we recognise that peril and identity with the figure’s worry. The game would not feel the same if it were a stick dog or stick tree! And likewise, we know that every single elf probably doesn’t live in the Momerath Woods, but it does not invalidate the statement that “the elves live in the Momerath Woods”. The approximation is part of the power.

In essence, all game design can be thought of as synecdoche or metonymy: the thing in the world (stabbing a sword at the dragon, say), or some part of it, is echoed in a rule, a mechanic, a piece or some other part of the game’s communication. When we say “I attack” we mean “I am going to make an attack roll” and vice versa, when we say “I rolled a 10 to hit” we know that has the same meaning as “my fictional character performs an attack”. It’s actually much harder for us to stick to one thing or the other, because our brains prefer them to be conflated and overlapping.

When we build our world we represent it through glimpses but we can express those glimpses through synecdoche: through modelling and allusion, extrapolation and approximation, with each part being a representation of the whole, through individual example, implied extrapolation and the simulation element of the game mechanics. We might say that orcs are strong, meaning that, on average, the members of that species have greater physical might. We can also say “Orcs get +1 Strength”, and that may say it more clearly and more memorably than any words could ever do.² Again, this is why worldbuilding and game design go hand in hand: our brains love to turn things into categories and mathematics and simple game meanings, and that allows us to communicate vast impressions of fictional world in a much more compact fashion and store them in our memories in a much more memorable way. In roleplaying games these are often known as statistics, or stats for short – each faction, species or tool will have stats that tell you what it is and isn’t good at, and swiftly these things meld more and more in our minds. The stats are not just another kind of information about the setting element but are stand-ins for the setting element and encode all the other things we know about the setting element into them (and vice versa, the setting element comes encoded with the stats). The blade is associated with +1 damage so the +1 damage comes to mean the blade.

A 2018 study done on all games listed on BoardGameGeek.com found that mechanic that had shown the biggest shift in how often it was found in games from the 1990s to the 2010s was variable player powers. The trend has continued, with it rapidly going from barely visible to now being in the top five mechanics. Other things in the top five are “drawing and playing cards”, “rolling dice” and “moving on a board”. We are deeply hungry for this kind of asymmetry and it’s not just because we find it an interesting puzzle. More and more, we are remembering that the point of games is not primarily (or never solely) to challenge ourselves but to embody another identity.³

With all of this, however, comes the problem of synecdoche: if the part stands in for the whole, it cannot capture every part of the whole. Giving our setting elements key characteristics, classifications, descriptors, labels and measures inherently plays towards stereotypes, formula and pigeonholing. This has real-world significance in our culture and politics: humans are naturally gifted in swift classifications and categorisations but that very ability also makes us always likely to be prejudicial or make unfair assumptions. Gaming meanwhile needs to work with the software in human heads so it has enormous trouble counteracting any inherent beliefs of the players and provides comfort for our reliance on stereotype. Game design has only just begun to reckon with this issue, and it is beyond the scope of this book to really unpack it, but it is worth being aware of it.⁴ It is absolutely worth taking care about linking things like races (even when given new names like species or ancestry) to biological deterministic characteristics, even though this is often the lifeblood of embodiment play.

Our helpful friend is going to be the world of statistics – the other kind of statistics, the mathematical kind. Much as we discussed in Chapter 26 about avoiding absolute statements, we also can avoid trouble by talking about averages. A game designer should have a basic grasp of statistics but again, let’s do a brief recap.

The mean of a data set is the value found by adding up all the possible values and weighting them by how likely they are to occur. Rolling a six-sided dice means we have an equal chance of getting any of the six results, which means the mean is found by adding each result over 6 or (1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 + 6 = 21)/6, which is 3.5. We cannot of course roll a 3.5 but if we rolled the dice a million times and divided the total by a million it would converge towards 3.5. The mean is not always meaningful! Nor is always what we want to measure, however. If you think on it, the mean number of legs on a human is less than two, which doesn’t provide a proper picture of most humans. We also then have the mode which is the most commonly found result. With legs on humans, this is two.⁵ Another type of average often used is the median which is the middle value when the values are ordered from the lowest to highest. This provides yet another view of what the “centre” might be. If we have the number set (1,2,2,2,3,3,5,6,6,6) the median value will be 3, the mode will be 2 and the mean will be 4. Which of those is the best representation of the data (and what other measures we might use) is a fundamental question of statistical science, with no simple or easy answer.

Typically, when we talk about the primary aspects of a culture or nation or species or practice, we tend to be thinking of the mode, the thing we are most likely to encounter. So the language then becomes stressing the most common or most frequent aspects. We can avoid saying that “elves are excellent bowmen” by saying that “most elves are taught the bow from birth” or “the bow is the preferred weapon of elves” or even “the most frequently chosen weapon of an elven soldier is the bow”.

We might also reflect what is known in statistics as the spread of the data. The data set (1,2,2,2,2,3,3,3,4,4,4) has the same median and mode as the previous one but has far less spread. That might reflect a situation where a society is more ordered or structured or formalised: if it is the law that every elven school teach archery, then we might say that “nearly every elf will have studied the bow”, which is very different from the bow being the most preferred weapon: the latter could reflect a society where the bow is a mainstay but then there is a lot of variety in second choices, or the bow slightly edges out the longsword, but it’s one or the other. You don’t have to say to the audience which you have in mind, but you should know the answer.

Rarely do we want to actually present a statistical breakdown of the population (although certainly roleplaying game settings of the past have done so), but by keeping these statistical ideas in our head we can make sure that when we present traits and descriptors of our setting elements we are clear what we are describing, providing more texture and depth. As with Chapter 26 we want to avoid constantly overwriting mealy-mouthed approximation but it is also less interesting to say that the Northern Reach is mountainous when we could say that “only the capital city sits at sea level” or “the majority of the population lives above the snowline” or “although the Northern Reach is known for its tall peaks, only a small section of the population fits the mountaineer stereotype so common in the south”. Each provides a richer picture.

The last example also shows the other important solution to over-generalisation and stereotype: setting things in the context of our tendencies to over-generalise and make assumptions. We live in a world where we understand how complex information can be about a place or a people, and we expect our fictional worlds to be equally nuanced, assuming this fits the tone and feel of the game. Prejudice or myopia is not called for just because it solves our problems of extrapolation though! Rather what we can do is acknowledge that our descriptions are just this: glimpses and approximations. We start with blurbs, but each blurb should also act as a doorman or carnival barker, inviting the reader to step inside, to look further, where more information will be available, and a clearer picture will emerge.

The art of great worldbuilding is being able to summarise something swiftly and acutely so that the audience gets an instant understanding of it, but also with that sense of more below. Just as we balance the exotic and the familiar, we balance the clear summation with the allusion to more. Precisely how this is communicated is what we’ll look at more in the next chapter.

On a Quest

Go back to the blurbs you constructed in Chapter 28. See how much they rely on the whole indicating the individual or the individual indicating the whole. Do they imply a totality or universality of those states? Is that accurate? Are there important exceptions to these rules in your world, and if so, are they worth mentioning or alluding to?

Stopping By

Take some statistical surveys of your world or some parts of it. Compare mean, median and mode information. You might also wonder how such data might be conducted, in-setting. How are such things known and shared by the denizens?

Notes

A close friend of the literal metaphor is the pathetic fallacy, where the world or the narrative bends to the unlikely, unbelievable or impossible to emphasise the pathos – the emotion – of the scene, whether that is internal character strife or external chaos. A classic example is how at the end of a James Bond film the death of the evil mastermind is accompanied by the sudden collapse of his lair or fortress or other technology.

However, see the discussion on the problems with ability scores in Chapter 12.

See Chapter 24, and also more on this in the next chapter.

We talked about this in Chapter 23 too and will take a deeper look in Chapter 36.

A related issue with representing norms is they also tend to erase disability, another area where care in representation must be taken.

CHAPTER 31 A Game Is a Map

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-34

GEORGE ORWELL OBSERVED IN 1984 that “He who controls the present, controls the past”: the authorities in our society determine what we are taught about who we are and how we came to be. How we think about history is filtered very much through how we learn about it. In a skit cut from the historical comedy The Life of Brian (Jones, 1979), Bethlehem shepherds discuss the problem that the calendar is going backwards and nobody knows what to do when they get to 0 BCE. We are so used to how we think about calendars it seems natural that the people of the past must have thought this way as well.

Tolkien constructed a world with a great sense of history but he also constructed that history: the appendices are written very much as early Anglo-Saxon chroniclers recorded their kings and battles, and The Silmarillion is (roughly) constructed like a collection of Norse sagas. You can view these works as a kind of parody: the perfect emulation of a form operating in a situation where no form in fact produced them. It was due to his understanding of these older cultures and their history and language that Tolkien was able to create a sense of great age. When Aragorn, Legolas and Gimli are approaching the kingdom of Rohan (in The Two Towers), Aragorn recites an ancient poem which Tolkien, based on an Old English poem, wrote likely in the 9th century CE. Though translated into modern English, the poem still carries the tone and style of that older world so it is perfect as a model for something that might have been sung for the ancient kings of Rohan. It is the language of The Lord of the Rings that makes it feel ancient, but this is because wonder of wonders, we have this ancient poetry to use, and Tolkien knew to find it and use it in this way.

Moreover, Tolkien was writing in a time and culture where poetry was a principal cultural artefact. Every English schoolboy studied poetry and the great body of English verse from a young age, and was taught history through poetry: learning about the Crimean War by studying Tennyson’s poem The Charge of the Light Brigade, learning about Tudor monarchs by studying Donne. We certainly know that the 9th-century Anglo-Saxons valued poetry but it has also been suggested that our view of medieval Europe is skewed by the fact that the artefacts we have were gathered by the churches. Whether the poetry was so culturally important to the Anglo-Saxons is less important than the fact that poetry was so culturally important to Tolkien’s world of mid-20th-century Britain. The ancient feel of the Rohan poem comes from our view of history as much as its origins. Our worlds are as much of where we are as they are of where they are.

This is why when we see colourised images of the 19th century we are suddenly taken aback: surely these people existed in black and white? And surely medieval people stood still, as in portraits and paintings? It’s possible this blind spot is only true now because of the proliferation of the camera and its sense of presenting a completely accurate picture of the world around us, and that technology has also become so omnipresent for the same reason: we believe it tells the truth. And (so we believe) a better, clearer truth than the written word ever could.

This issue causes a few wrinkles in Star Trek, where we have shows made with current technology being set chronologically before the show made in the 1960s and 1990s, which makes it seem as if some of their technology has gone backwards. Even while we try to understand that the map is not the territory,¹ it pulled some viewers out of the experience. The puzzle-adventure game Space Quest 4 (Murphy and Crowe, 1994) was one of the earliest examples of a gaming meta-text. The game involves the player character discovering time travel, allowing him to journey back in time to Space Quest 1 where the graphics of the game are suddenly much lower quality and the player character, still in high definition, is mocked by locals for putting on airs, unlike they who are content to appear in mere CGA. It would not feel like the past if it had modern graphics!

We also know that how we represent information of the real world affects how we see the world and in turn how we interact with it. For much of the Middle Ages, European maps served to reinforce religious views. Maps were made with Jerusalem at the centre because it was the centre of Christian faith, and then those who saw those maps of the world had those beliefs reinforced – it makes sense that Christianity is true, given that the world has this shape. Similarly, the arrival of the compass and sea charts in the 13th century did not just permit people to sail in straight lines across seas rather than hugging coastlines, it suggested they do so: they followed those lines straight off the map across the Atlantic, now knowing that the world was built on straight lines. When Mercator invented his projection in 1569 it put Europe at the centre of the world and diminished the southern hemisphere, encouraging colonial thinking. When Germany hosted the Berlin conference in 1885 so the Western powers could divide Africa into territories to plunder, they made those divisions using the lines of latitude and longitude. The map suggested those lines were somehow natural or non-arbitrary, even though they might carve up natural or societal groupings. Maps are not the territory but because of how human minds work and how we confuse the signifier with the signified maps dictate the territory.

Maps were so important that people who had no intention of ever crossing the sea wanted them. When Columbus sailed to the Americas in 1492, there were only a few 1,000 maps in Europe. In 1570 when Abraham Ortelius decided to publish a book just of maps, there were already millions owned, by the middle classes as much as the nobility. The book became one of the first-ever bestsellers.² Much like people enjoy pouring over miniature figures or dollhouses, there was an inherent excitement to the map. It suggested a new way to look at your surroundings and the idea of imagining far-off places, without reading a text or seeing a play. The art historian James Elkins suggests³ that maps are part of an artistic tradition called notation. Prose, poetry and drama are designed to be engaged with linearly and contain words. Non-verbal arts such as costume, images and sculpture are designed to be engaged with all at once, in any order, back and forth as the eye and the viewer decide. Notations are things that have a foot in both camps: designed to be encountered in any order, but making use of words and language as well. To explore a map is thus a rare treat for our eyes: we are taking in information as if reading a textbook but in a way we would normally view a painting or a sculpture. We experience the embodiment of fiction, stepping into another world, but we can do it in whatever order we please, through anyone’s eyes. We don’t see how Frodo sees the Shire through narration of his deeds; we get to see what the Shire “looks like”, as if it were real. And it feels more real than seeing a picture of Frodo because we know, somehow, that that is just what an artist thinks. The Shire on a map is different; it is inviolate and true. This is similar to how we view a photo as true, but with more ability to engage the imagination and step inside it.

This is a huge part of the joy of games, of course, and not just ones where we have a map of the world or where we move miniature figures around. Every board game’s board is a notation, designed to be viewed in its own time and path.⁴ Every child enjoys the idea that they might be on the JAIL space in Monopoly but they are JUST VISITING. The top-down map of those locations becomes a way they can experience an embodiment of waving at their friend in jail, with that imaginary story playing out in their heads.⁵ Adults will often feel a thrill, later in life, to travel down Marleybone Street or Pall Mall, in much the same way as stepping into the Disneyland Star Wars experience or visiting a place of historical importance. “Here I am”, we think, “in a place I imagined a thousand times”, and now it looms around me, real and concrete, as if I were the tiny figure on the board, as we might have imagined when looking at an actual map of London.⁶

Maps of fictional worlds have two powers. First, since we know that real-world places have maps of them, the map gives the place a sense of being more real. Second, by allowing us to interact with the map (even if we know the characters in the world might not have access to a map or the same map), we can experience the embodiment of being within the world, just as we would imagine moving around a foreign nation by pouring over an atlas. Third, it also operates how the poetry works in The Lord of the Rings – it allows us to engage with an in-world concept as if we were there. Like the poem, this only works because of how we relate to maps in our reality. Armchair tourism guides existed before the maps became popular and they were often illustrated but they featured views of cities as if from a ship at sea or a nearby hill, and the same goes for fictional worlds. Moore’s Utopia (1519) has side-on views of its fictional landscape; Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726) has cartographical maps, because the map was now our mode of seeing.

Maps are particularly interesting because they are so often part of books and games.⁷ Poetry is not something that works much in either films or games. In other words, it is not just the culture that the work exists in but also the medium we use that determines how we choose to communicate our worlds. We’ve talked already about how games as a medium determine which parts we see of a world, but this extends into how we are presented those parts and how much that medium becomes the message. Games so often need boards of physical space, so the map is everywhere.

As discussed previously, we understand intuitively that games are simulations, so we don’t expect perfect fidelity between the mechanics and the meaning, and our brains are happy to edit out the mismatches a lot of the time. But we also want as much as possible for things to connect to the world we are inhabiting. We might tolerate a map being “inaccurate” to aid for gameplay, but usually we don’t – the maps in most historical games are very much Mercator projections, no matter how much this makes Europe really crowded. A game board – and every game piece – is also a notation, in that it exists to be encountered in any particular order, and also in that it exists to provide information, some of it being textual and ordered. Game pieces and even game rules and mechanics exist for much the same purpose as maps, and with the same joys: they are not just transfers of information but exercises in embodiment. Just as we view a map with an instinctive sense of “we-could-be-there” engagement, we encounter any set of rules that have some level of representation with a sense of “this-could-be-us”. This Monopoly money could be real. “You are the doctor” says the cover of Operation (Spinello, 1964). Slowly the language of the transported reality takes over us: Pac-Man eats the ghosts, and he does not remove pixels; in Cluedo (Pratt, 1943) we say “I accuse Colonel Mustard” as if we are present in the house.

And like maps, we expect this representation to be “accurate” and “true” to what we are told about the world. As we talked about in Chapter 2, it’s the rules that end up mattering more, because we hold them as being more true, although in this case it is the representation that matters most of all. If a rule suddenly lets us pass straight through a wall on the map, we would find it very difficult to justify. In The Lord of the Rings the book tells a story of what happened in the Middle Earth, but its history, its facts and the artefacts of that history are more fixed and more true than the story. Just so in games: the rules tell us the facts, and a single instance of the game tells us a story around those facts; the game may be a poor one we forget or may be played “incorrectly”; the rules are inviolate and persist. The rules and pieces are not an in-world object, but they are like the map at the beginning of a book. They are a thrilling sense of a place to visit and also a promise to the audience that this is the way it is.

For game designers and worldbuilders then, these two elements cannot exist separately. Our rules are a promise to do what we can to reflect the lore we have built. If we make a decision in the fiction, we must make sure the game does not contradict this, and every rules decision we make should be supported by the fiction. The map is not the territory, but it is a promise to do its best to communicate the territory. And we must be aware that how we communicate our worlds is as important as what we are communicating and will colour how that lore is seen in our audience’s minds.⁸

They will not get the lore elsewhere, either! Humans are bad at reading rulebooks. Few games put all or even most of the lore in rulebooks or in encyclopaedias or wikis; if such things exist they are optional extras. Instead games communicate the setting with art, level design, environmental storytelling, narrative, character dialogue, cut scenes and, of course, through rules and through the board. Thus lore is to a world what plot is to a story: it is something the reader extracts from the text, but is not the text itself. The map is not the territory but neither is it the true facts about the world; it is the means by which those facts are transmitted.

I have seen too many worldbuilders devote too much of their efforts to creating and writing out lore and not understanding that that’s not the true job of the worldbuilder. Yes, we build maps and histories and biologies and facts, but it is that communication that is our key job. Whatever lore we might build, how it is encountered is how it will be understood. So we must consider our games as teachers of lore, and we’ll talk more about that in the next chapter.

On a Quest

It’s time to draw some maps. No matter whether your game will not use them, no matter the size of your world, or if physical space seems irrelevant (a map of Pemberley has little effect on the events of Pride and Prejudice), draw one (or more) anyway. Even if you feel you lack visual skills, it’s really useful to engage this part of your brain. Doing so will likely knock loose some important elements you had not thought of and let you see things in a new light.

Stopping By

You can easily gain a new perspective on your world by imagining how it would be presented in different media, or with different technology, or in a different historical period. How would your world be presented in a 1980s arcade game or on a 19th-century roll and move board?

Notes

As discussed in Chapter 18.

Mercator’s own collection of maps was published in 1594, with the Greek titan Atlas on the cover, giving birth to the name for such collections.

In his 2018 book The Domain of Images.

The board in board games is often mistaken for meaning the rectangular thing in the middle of the table, leading to the use of the term “board and card games”. The etymology of the board in board games is in the sense of table, as in the boardroom being the room with the table: it has nothing to do with the cardboard square. Although it is worth noting that cardboard itself is named for board games it was invented originally as a way to make durable playing cards because paper ones fell apart with all the handling. Nowadays the term “tabletop” has become more common for the genre.

See Chapter 24 for more on this “belief play”.

A key part of mental development in children is learning what is known as theory of mind and perspective-taking, which undergoes three key stages, beginning somewhere around age 2 and completing around age 10–12. Since children are constantly learning this skill, they are particularly drawn to things which engage it. This is why a lot of children’s media deals with perspective changes: when Jack climbs a gigantic beanstalk he finds a gigantic castle, where he is only the size of a mouse. Games likewise appeal for this process, in the simple sense (“my pieces must go down the snake, because my piece is on that spot”) to the more complex (“Monopoly has money that is like real money but only in the game, I cannot buy things with it in the real world”) to the highly complex (“I am acting as the banker in Monopoly, but this money does not belong to me the as the player”).

Less so in film, but they were still quite common in films up until the 1960s. They disappeared, I would argue, because television changed how we expected to learn about other countries in a visual medium. Once TV provided actual footage from across the sea, the map vanished from film.

Indeed, as humans we are so familiar with two-dimensional maps that we often skimp on this in worldbuilding, forgetting how important topography is to civilisation and human experience. Always remember to get down to the eye level of your inhabitants as well as peering from above – see the next chapter for more on this.

CHAPTER 32 Teaching and Example

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-35

GEORGE SWINNERTON PARKER (1866–1952) was the founder of Parker Brothers, the original publishers of Monopoly. He was also something of a maverick for his time. Parker believed that games did not have to be educational or express morals and values. Games, indeed, could just be for fun. Wellington never said that Waterloo was won on the playing fields at Eton but for much of the 19th century it was believed that the purpose of sports and games were to prepare young men for growing up and taking their roles in making war and the other businesses of empire. It remains true that we still require games, as something separate from experiences or toys, to have some kind of challenge, be that mental, social or the reflexes required for video games. But challenge is only one of the eight kinds of fun,¹ and it is hardly the only thing happening when we play games. We know from studying developmental psychology that a key role that games play for children is in exploring roles, allowing them to try on adult ideas and experience emotional states in a safe way. The enduring appeal of Monopoly among children is not the quality of the game mechanics but the thrill of being able to have money, that most grown-up of things. So they remain teaching tools, despite the efforts of George Parker.

Games are used for this rather than reading books or watching TV because games are participatory. Reading about being an adult is not enough; we don’t feel as if we are really trying something unless our body is doing it as well as our imagination. As adults, we so often want our games to be in fictional worlds because we don’t just want to see them: we retain that childhood need to live them. Playing games then has more in common with folk dancing: the forms of the rites are taught before the activity takes place, the activity involves everyone (there is no split between performer and audience), there is often a symbolic or educational element (think of the maypole) and there are often roles to take on during the instance, or a sense that we are entering a heightened or symbolic realm. And probably the most important part of folk dances and folk songs is that everyone only wants to do ones they already know how to do.

This is the ultimate burden that tabletop games have never really succeeded to fix: very few people want to sit down to have fun and have to begin that by going to school. Slightly more people do want to go to school to learn about fictional settings, however – there’s a few more geography and history nerds among us than maths nerds – and there’s also an inherent curiosity to the human spirit that wants to travel, try new things and put on new robes. This means that although the worldbuilding game designer faces two problems – teaching the rules and teaching the world – the two can be solved in concert and solving the latter makes the former easier.

A game inherently is a set of levers: we push and pull on actions that cause things to change, hopefully in ways we want them to or towards victory. The question a player must solve at the beginning of learning a game is not really “which levers do what?” but “which one do I pull first?” This is why so many games give players a hidden goal, a simple agenda or a recipe to fill. One of the best ways that people learn is through doing and experiment. These starting tools ground players so they can do those things more safely and more confidently. This is also a function of individual player powers: if I am good at something, obviously I’ll try to do that thing first up; if my identity is described as bellicose, I will adopt an aggressive approach. A neighbouring player can also provide a proxy goal, to ally with or attack; similarly, being a member of a group or having a belief structure swiftly gives you a sense of who you are allied with and who you are set against. The more open the play space, the more important these elements become, and this is why so many tabletop roleplaying games use character modules that you can pick from a list, like classes, which tell you what to do (swing a sword, cast a spell, seduce the baron, pick a pocket), and races, which tell you how you do it (grumbling, like a dwarf, elegantly, like an elf). Along the way we’ve also magically learnt things about the world: it is full of things we need to swing swords and sling spells at; it features dour dwarves and elegant elves.

The other really good way people learn is through examples, and this is the beauty again of games: players get to become those examples themselves. This may be by becoming a specific individual (“I’m playing as Gandalf the Grey”) or as an instance of a skillset, group, side or aspect (“I’m a wizard”, “I’m playing the Jedi, you are the Sith”, “I’m putting out an attack class ship” and so on). As discussed in the last chapter, we lean on the rules in this area, trusting that they will provide accuracy in their representation of the thing we embody if we simply follow those rules and make rational tactical choices. If the rules allow us to fly and we feel like Batman should not be able to fly, it is not our fault if we use those rules and fly into space! It is the rules that are at fault for modelling Batman inaccurately.²

This is of course the downside of world and rules being so entwined: we are likely to come into a pre-existing knowing, say, that Batman cannot fly, but if you are teaching your players a brand-new world, they have no touchstone to understand that an error has been made. It is not enough to say, “most players won’t do that” or that the rules should be interpreted reasonably: rules exist precisely because we cannot rely on what is “reasonable”.³ No game designer can ever account for the player truly determined to go against every convention, but it is a poor designer who leaves things ambiguous and then blames the players. Doubly so when the world is not our own so there is even less sense of what is true, let alone reasonable.

This means that when we talk about examples, we don’t mean only the roles or factions being examples, or the signature characters or typical builds: every action is an example of your world at work. As players we understand that it is an abstraction of that world, and only a small slice of it, but we also are looking to the rules to show us how the world works. We want to roll a die to attack a monster because it feels like an active step to take, building a bridge to the action our character is taking, and we learn through that roll how good we are at attacking and how dangerous the monster is. Again, it is no good telling us in the art and text that something is fierce and dangerous if we can easily kill it mechanically. We are, of course, limited then in the kind of things we might model and do and therefore in what we might learn about the world doing so!

A large reason that horror, fantasy, superhero and action stories go so often with games is they all typically involve very direct threats that are met with violence or at least some active force. Since games are often vested in things like discovery, surrendering to the vagaries of fate and a sense of narrative, we often get worlds driven by discovering new worlds, tempting fate with new endeavours and heroic folks creating stories of their deeds. These things can lend themselves to stories that involve colonisation, expansionism and the Great Man theory of history. Outside of games based on communication, few deal with building stronger or more intimate connections; fewer still deal with the theme of interpersonal or internal drama, or romance. Internal states also offer limited insight into the world of the game: it makes sense to focus on conflict, achievement and exploration because those things paint our worlds vividly. However, because of this we often forget to think about and represent the internal and the intimate, and that can be detrimental to worldbuilding and to world-teaching.

Such things may be a million miles from your games’ mechanics, but there are other ways to step into the personal, such as through art and flavour text. It is a staple now but one of the things that Magic: The Gathering popularised was the in-character or in-world quote on the cards. Those moments pulled us out of the game mechanics and the way those mechanics made us view the world, soaring above a battlefield where we summoned creatures and sent them to their deaths, to imagining how it felt to be down on that battlefield, fighting those creatures. That gave us new information about the game and its mechanics and the setting and sparked our imaginations in a way that the game had not before and made everything feel more real. Eventually, the game changed to give the players actual avatars of themselves, creating even more connection.

For much of the early history of Dungeons and Dragons and similar roleplaying games, they were designed to emulate things in fantasy books and films. It was only with the release of the Dragonlance setting that people thought to go the other direction. Now you could not only see how to build and play a wizard in a rules example or a guided play example, but you could then read prose fiction about how that wizard might encounter things and think about things, which would give you new ways to learn about the world and the game (as well as deepening your connection to both). You might not be able to publish novels but there can be a place in rulebooks for sections of prose fiction alongside the technical writing. Much as we expect maps in our worlds because we see maps in the real world, we are now so used to mass merchandising tie-ins of properties that it makes our game worlds seem richer and more engaging if we also build in other media or other merchandising opportunities.⁴ Selling dice or pins with in-world logos on them isn’t just an exercise in wringing money out of the gift shop: it does make your world feel more real. This is also the whole point and appeal of theme parks (or the mock-up of Station 9 and ¾ at Kings Cross in London): to let the player be inside the world.

Even if you’re not a big business, you can design your world with these things in mind, with the idea of things like cosplay and collection being possible. Get a logo designer and make your factions have cool symbols so your players can wear them – or imagine they might, which is just as good. Again, this lets them become examples of the setting, and everything they then do echoes the setting, teaches the setting and evokes the setting as a real, concrete and exciting thing. This brings us back again to the idea of the folk dance: you’re making more ways for the subculture to gather and dress up for the event, which makes it more visible as a cultural event, which makes it all the more appealing to join. All of this builds a connection to and participation in the world, making it feel more real and more meaningful. This is why the marketing juggernauts of the day are so invested in worldbuilding: worlds bring with them such strong and automatic connections to a subculture, and people then aren’t making purchases based on the actual value of the item, but as a way to bolster their social health and their sense of self.

If your game doesn’t have anything like this for your players to express themselves through, you should still talk to the players about their internal psychology and their play experience. You can do this directly, with strategy guides or discussions of playstyle, or through mechanics and choices that show how and why the mechanics operate and the strategies that are available. Don’t be afraid to come out and explicitly recommend some tactical choices or steer players away from mistakes. Sometimes game designers include “traps” in games: choices that exist to be discovered as suboptimal, so players learn how to play better; this is not always a bad idea but it requires a lot of care. We all remember a teacher who mocked us once and how much that discouraged us from learning. Games are a challenge, and as such they do not need to be totally transparent: part of the fun is that things are waiting to be found or learnt! At the same time, the puzzle is designed to be solved, and the lessons designed to be learned: there is no actual antagonism between the setter and the solver. You are a teacher, and that’s a serious undertaking. It is wonderful that players discover things on their own, but you are in charge of making sure they do.

Another way to think about this is that you are also a tour guide. The players are here to learn about your world but not as scholars or archaeologists. The participatory nature of games means they have stepped inside your world as if they were there. As tourists, they want to see all the cool sights and learn the kind of facts they can write home about, not sit in a lecture hall or read an encyclopaedia. They want to have fantastic experiences and meet amazing characters; they want to try on the fancy costumes and hold the exotic weapons and learn the delightful folk dance and be having so much fun doing so they forget they’re learning. As much as you need to teach, fundamentally you need to entertain first, and you should always think of this first and foremost, and curate people’s encounter with the game and the examples you show so that at every step they are having a lovely tourist trip and also being able to select the tourist experience that best suits their personal needs.⁵

I have worked extensively in the tourism business, which has sharpened my skills in this area and taught me also that teaching and tour guiding aren’t very far apart, nor are either far apart from game design. All of them involve curating an experience for an audience, towards a desired outcome, and the experience is one where you want to use participation as much as possible. Perhaps the most important lesson I learned in tourism is that people really like to be offered direction about what is available and what they might enjoy. This is also the foundation of so much of the modern internet commerce: if you liked X, then you’ll probably like Y. Good examples and good iconic concepts act like these signposts, allowing people to make those important first choices by knowing what they’re in for and learn those first important rules by having something concrete to stand on, so they understand the stakes and what they’re in for. All art to some extent is non-consensual: we cannot know what we are about to encounter in every detail, and that is part of what makes art good and important. At the same time, communicating assumptions to your audience is key.

This is doubly important because games aren’t like other artforms. They are participatory, and this means they are tools. When the players play the game they are in fact building the world too or at least one version of it. They are not just embodying examples of it but they become creators of it. A tool must not just be functional: it must also consider the user experience and suggest in its form how it is to be used. To return to the tourism metaphor, Disneyland doesn’t just have signs indicating which rides are where: it is designed so that, almost subconsciously, you are drawn to places, as your eyeline catches things in the distance and the pathways seem to guide your feet, and at the very moment you start to wonder if you are going the right way, you see a sign that reassures you that you are.

This art of curating the experience and signposting content is a really important part of testing your game, and we’ll talk about that in Chapter 34. First though I want to look at the problematic end of being a tourist: you can feel like you’re not part of the action.

On A Quest

In the previous exercise you drew maps of your world. Now take on the role of tour guide. Imagine how you would guide people to understanding the map and where they should go if they want certain things or wish to avoid others. What would it be like to encounter the world in three dimensions, and how would you guide people to experience that?

Stopping By

Imagine your world and game become as popular as Star Wars. What would your theme park look like? What would be the rides? What would be the popular toys? What would be the iconic items in the gift shop? This isn’t just a frivolous daydream: if you think of these ideas you can build the kind of worlds that want to be lived in so much they might just be this successful.

Notes

See Chapter 24 for the other seven kinds of fun.

As discussed in Chapter 2, we might house rule this or play it with these rules but establish that it represents some alternative setting idea because we “know” we can’t change how Batman works.

One of my favourite rules I’ve encountered read simply “Dead characters can perform no actions”.

A clever trick you can do here of course is pretend the other media exists. For example, in the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game, quotes from the superheroes and villains are sourced to issues of comics that never existed.

Tourism of course can be exploitative and we’ll talk more about that in Chapter 35.

CHAPTER 33 The Jimmy Olsen Blues

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-36

WORLDBUILDING FOR GAMES HAS an inherent conflict within it. The world is designed by a centralised, controlled voice, which sits apart from the audience, on a stage, often that the audience must pay to see. Unlike other media, however, there is an explicit invitation in a game to participate.¹ The game and the world with it are tools like a tennis racquet and ball. You can just read about a game just as you can look at a tennis racquet; the experience of the work lies primarily in the audience taking action.

When a world has narrative or narrative elements, though, some of that action is controlled or withheld from the player. When storytelling collides with gaming, the unidirectional nature of the former is set in conflict with the participatory nature of games. So some of the world has to be “fenced off” from full participation. Sometimes this is done through time: players can affect this moment of history, but not the past that led up to it (and sometimes not even the future). Sometimes this is done through “reality”: the players are creating an alternative history, with the implication that it is by definition lesser than the “true” one.² Sometimes the barrier is created by focus: players can take on a much wider or larger scale of the story or a much more zoomed-in or personal one. Another option is a change of point of view: we know that Over There the stand-in for Napoleon is fighting the stand-in for Wellington, but we want to tell a story about what we hope is an equally important fight Not Yet Shown In This Book. It may be that you have some unseen role to play in what is happening Over There, but assurances to that fact have to happen at the player side of the experience.

The latter two have been the most popular choices in roleplaying games that have used what became known as “meta-plot”. Popularised in the 1990s by the World of Darkness and Trinity games from White Wolf Publishing, these settings had stories with massively powerful characters pursuing their own, often necessarily hidden or as yet unwritten agendas, while also promising that the players would be able to tell meaningful stories. In the end, a lot of these works led players to great frustration. They were left feeling they were not so much playing the game to tell their own stories but to watch on the sidelines as their game master or the product writers showed them things they could never control, affect or even participate in. There was an attempt to wring drama out of facing things beyond your control, but they violated the whole promise of playing a game.

The lessons of those mistakes have now been mostly learned and can be avoided but there is a larger issue beyond just not being Wellington or Napoleon: the war or rather the world itself can tower over events and actions. The world becomes the central character and at the same time becomes immovable and inviolable. Since the world is the product and must endure (and keep selling), nothing the players can do can change it, and since the world is the product and it is that that takes centre stage in marketing, the roles the players take on and the actions they do can seem small and insignificant by comparison. This can happen even when worlds are designed to purpose, for participation, and even if the players are allowed to be Napoleon and Wellington, or Superman and Lex Luthor. However, both of those examples hold the key to this problem: you have to focus on characters.

No matter how much DC Comics likes to talk about the “world” of DC comics and how much they want to connect those worlds, their product is their heroes. Arguably this is what the Marvel films have ended up forgetting and failing because they forgot: as interesting as the Eternals are (as seen in Eternals (Chloe Zhao, 2021), they are by their nature more of an idea in the world than known comic heroes. None of them have ever led their own comics. Even though the Avengers team-up films were box-office smashes, that was mostly because people were heavily invested in Iron Man, Thor and Captain America already.

Since games are all about embodiment, they need something to embody, and that has to be put centre stage. Games are about who you, the player, get to be, and your world needs to hit that hard. That doesn’t necessarily mean you have to be as important as Napoleon and Wellington, but you have to be as cool as they are. You need to be the things that the setting is built around. As the old Choose Your Own Adventure books said on the cover: “You are the star of the story!” The Sharpe novels by Bernard Cornwell, for example, and the Flashman books by George McDonald Fraser not only ensure that their titular character is at every major battle in the histories they cover, looking just over the shoulders of the key historical figures, but they also take care to make their heroes the most exciting parts of those worlds and the key figure of interest. It’s Flashman at the Charge and Sharpe’s Waterloo – it is their battles, their world, their heroism that are right in the spotlight. Games are a story about you, the player. That’s the promise, and that promise needs to be baked into the world.

In a few cases, settings don’t really allow this, and there is an alternative. The Cthulhu mythos, for example, has few key heroes that define it. Instead, however, fans remember other characters: the villains. It is Cthulhu, Azathoth and Hastur who get plushies and t-shirts and other merchandise, and it is their identities that are brought out to sell games. Games do let you embody the villain to some extent because the rules that drive them are acted out by systems that affect the players, and in tabletop somebody has to make all the rolls and rules interactions that drive these AI systems. So embodiment and identity remain, and a sense of a heroes’ roster to collect is easily moved to a rogue’s gallery. Cthulhu doesn’t have to be this way, of course: the Arkham Horror (Launius, 1987) games from Fantasy Flight Games made heroes out of characters like Jenny Barnes, the two-gun dilettante, and Monterey Jack, the archaeologist. Cthulhu: Death May Die (Lang et al, 2018) not only sells endless collectible villains but also lets you play a team-up of Rasputin, Lizzy Borden and Sigmund Freud.

There is still conflict here though: if one is only able to play as Superman or Batman, there is a risk of the interaction not allowing enough personalisation. The rules of Superman can overshadow the freedom of play. This is why most roleplaying games, tabletop and digital, allow the player to create their own hero in the universe. However there is also a danger going too far in the other direction. Character space left for a player to inhabit can feel faceless and amorphous to the point of being bland. If a non-player character (NPC) will say the same things to me whether I am Superman or Batman then I might as well be nobody.

The solution the most successful games have found is to sit between the two extremes. Players in Mass Effect (Hudson, 2007) are always Commander Shepherd, but can direct her towards paragon or renegade moral poles, and choose who to romance and befriend. Players in D&D can be a barbarian like Conan, a ranger like Aragorn, a wizard like Rhialto the Marvellous, but not exactly those characters. Players in Gloomhaven (Childres, 2017) can choose a class and species that suit their playstyle, and there are systems designed to react around the related keywords.

This is why identity matters so much to the world you build. Sometimes the biggest choice players make and certainly the first one they make is who they are going to be. If the world doesn’t care if you’re Batman or Superman, then the choice won’t be interesting. So the world should make identity extremely important. To return to history, a Napoleonic game might place enormous emphasis on which nationality a player chooses. The reason that elves and dwarves have a deep historical animosity in most fantasy games is so that choosing to be one or other creates a different play experience, so the world elevates your player choices to being the most important choices one can make.

That is what matters: that everything players do feels important. Nothing poor Jimmy Olsen can ever say or do can get Lois Lane to notice him or affect the story in any way, because she and the writers only have eyes for Superman. The promise of a game is that players get to do things that affect the board state and those things in turn affect how they play. It’s not a matter of ego, of being the most important people in the room or in all history; it is a matter of player choices changing things and mattering. The general distaste players have of kingmaking in games is they know that their decisions no longer matter to their outcome of play, and they can only choose outcomes for others. They have lost the feeling of being the protagonist. Games should avoid this; game worlds doubly so.

If players cannot be the actual Napoleon and Wellington and you’re having trouble bending a world around a few individuals, at the very least you must make them cool. And by extension, that means nobody else in the setting can be cooler than they are. Non-participatory artforms can give us figures to aspire to, but players instinctively hate feeling like also-rans. They are not playing to admire the actions of someone the author thinks is cool. Games are already judging players constantly for failure! The world shouldn’t do that. The world should point a finger at the player and tell them the world thinks they’re cool. And awesome. The game designer cannot be Lois Lane, with eyes only for their Superman, leaving the players to be Jimmy Olsen.

In essence this is an act of empathy. All artists should care about their audience but the game designer must care the most because the game is something to be used by others. The worst sin is to make a game about how cool you are. You need to reach out and give that coolness to others. We will talk more about how important this empathy is to design in the next chapter.

On a Quest/Stopping By

The exercise is the same here because it never stops being important and something worth doing over and over: let other players drive. A key part of playtesting is asking players to not just experience the world but take control of its design. Ask them what characters, factions or identities they think are missing or what they would build to add on if they could. Look at the things they build and make sure the game not just allows them to do so but also encourages them to do so and commends them for having done it. Ask your players if their creations can go into your final work, and give them pride of place. Practise handing the reins to others and appreciating their craft.

Notes

It is true that the nature of copyright and commerce have entrenched in us a greater sense of non-participation in the arts but, regardless, most artforms are one-way activities.

This can be a feature as well as a bug in historical wargaming. Players can get a lot of enjoyment from “proving” that if a certain leader had made their tactical choices, history would have been very different. This is harder to enjoy with fictional worlds however – but the equivalent is in long discussions about which hero or villain would win in a given fight, which is won by proving you know your world better than others.

CHAPTER 34 The Ray Arnold Principle

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-37

IF YOU’RE OVER FORTY, you probably know who Ray Arnold is, even if you don’t know you know. Ray Arnold is the character played by Samuel L. Jackson in Jurassic Park (Spielberg, 1993). In the film, the park’s entire computer system, which controls every single aspect of the park – from powering the lights and the electric fences, to moving the vehicles along tracks, to controlling the locks on the doors – is run by the state-of-the-art computer system, which is installed and operated by the head of IT, Dennis Nedry. When Nedry decides to steal dinosaur DNA for a rival company, he cripples the computer system to cover his exit, leaving his poor assistant Ray Arnold to clean up. Arnold is hampered not just by Nedry’s sabotage but by the fact that Nedry’s approach to the computer system was extremely controlling: only Nedry understood it and only Nedry ran it, and it wasn’t set up for anyone else to use it. This wasn’t an entire flight of fancy for the writer Michael Crichton: early computer system designers made this mistake often. By the 1990s, the importance of “commenting” in code was being drilled into students because every piece of code should be written with the assumption that it will be used by someone else.

Your world and your game obviously come with this assumption. The whole intent is to give it away to others to use. Although a few games have an in-built curator player who can help make sure everyone understands what’s going on and is having fun (like the GM role in roleplaying games), they are the rare exception. Even the simplest games have endless opportunities for misunderstanding. You should always assume errors will occur. The Ray Arnold Principle means always keeping poor old Ray in mind at every stage of the design. He will encounter some broken wreck of the game, possibly because somebody already taught it to him incorrectly, and he has to find his way back to turning the electric fences back on and getting the velociraptors back in their pens. Ray needs help.

Game designers of course know this and much has been written on how important it is to provide signposts to direct the user experience. Worlds also have techniques to do this, but like games nothing works so well as testing, and no testing is as good as blind testing. As we talked about way back in Chapter 10, you need to be presenting your world over and over to people, at varying levels of detail and focus, and seeing what they say about it. Eventually though you’ll want to take whatever elements you’ve decided to write down in your game and hand them all over to other people to encounter without you being present to guide the experience (that’s the blind part).¹ I often also like to get people to explain things back to me, which is just a great teaching tip for anything. Hearing someone else trying to teach something is the best way to see how they have made sense of it in their own mind.

People tend to think the point of testing is to find the things that aren’t clear or don’t work, but it’s equally important to find the opposite: you’re looking for the things that are instantly crystal clear and which the players find the most exciting. (You may want to point your focus more in that direction,² rather than fixing or clarifying the other parts.) You also want to look for the things that players expect to be there or want to be there, but aren’t, or the questions they ask that you didn’t think to answer. Gaming habits can be hard to break, and the same is true of worldbuilding. We tend to often put our most conservative aspects in the things we do that are the most outlandish, fantastical or recreational, and you need to know the assumptions players have along with the assumptions you’ve made yourself.³

Testing can lead to fixing and clarifying but the other component is signposting: the fine art of making sure the audience knows what to expect and finds their way to the things they need to know. Games are models so they already begin from a place of summarisation and then must swiftly communicate the intent and meaning and value behind every single element, so signposting is always part of game design, so this is familiar territory when it comes to worlds, and again, mechanics can help establish the world as well. This need for such instant, clear communication is why so many games end up using very simple, familiar settings with well-established tropes and cliches. If your game has characters that can be removed from play it makes sense to think of that as them dying, and therefore if there is an interesting power in bringing those cards back into play that just makes sense to link that power to medical interventions or raising the dead. It’s not always worth it to be original if it only serves to confuse or obfuscate function or intent!⁴ You have to work with the hardware you’re given, and that’s the human brain and its broad presumptions and beliefs of how things work (and it’s also trying to do maths at the same time). You can even run into difficulty trying to reflect reality if people think reality works differently.

You can go against the flow of tradition and trope, but if you do, you need to signpost it more aggressively, just as if in a game you change a common mechanic you have to take extra care with the rules and graphic design to indicate this change. If cards are supposed to be handed to the player on your left when played instead of discarded, you might have to have a signal on the board or a player aid showing this step, perhaps outlined or highlighted to make sure it isn’t forgotten. How do we do the same thing for settings?

If the blurb is the summary of your world or part of it, then the signpost is basically one step above that. Before the audience is going to devote their precious eyeball-moisture to a sentence or two, we want to give them a sense of what they might be looking at, and why they would want to. Walt Disney famously laid out Disneyland with a focus on the child’s eye view: he would crouch down to get his head a few feet off the ground to see what they would see. With your world the same approach applies: what matters is what the audience sees. Every experience with a world begins with a first encounter. Disney could ensure this began at the gate of the park but with games and worlds you might have multiple entry points. Usually though your audience begins with the cover which means the most important part of your whole world and game design is the name and the cover image. Then maybe a subtitle. Then we might see more art. If we’re still intrigued, we might look to the back of the box or a product description to see the kind of game and world it is. Here you have a single sentence, two at best, to set the stage and find your market.

We often think of marketing as trying to sell your idea to everyone but that’s a mistake: good marketing is about finding the person who best fits your product and making sure the people who don’t fit move on. You should assume your audience could be anyone but you shouldn’t assume it is everyone. If you present a false image you only create angry customers. What this means is the specific and the concrete are better selling points than the general or the abstract. Superlatives or guarantees that the experience will be fun or exciting are meaningless; likewise your world deserves more than being described as rich or detailed or immersive or captivating. Let the audience decide that, for the most part.

Your art and title too should strive not to be generic. This is tough for board games: there is an ongoing joke on boardgamegeek.com about the trend in the 1990s and 2000s for covers showing a white man in front of a building or monument, usually with a scroll or blueprint. Trade and construction in the medieval or ancient worlds are common themes even today, and you may not be able to add much zest without looking like you’re putting lipstick on a pig as the saying goes. The Castles of Burgundy (Felt, 2011) would not likely have sold better if it had been called DEATHKEEPS OF DORGON and had a scantily clad Henry Cavill lookalike on the cover (although I could be wrong there – markets are impossible to predict, especially gamer markets!). The name was however specific – the game was not medieval castles, not French castles but specifically Burgundy – which helped a lot.⁵

Since so much rests on the first impressions of cover and title (and font and logo) it’s important to spend time and money getting them right. Games have been sunk by terrible or forgettable names or uninspired cover art. Once inside you can relax a little but the marketing attitude and focus on user experience remain key. Often a rulebook opens with another grand image and few more sentences, equally key for setting tone, building excitement and signposting the experience.

In setting communication always start with what the players need to know first (which, remember, is who they are being, what they want and why can’t they get it). Resist the urge to zoom out in history and geography. Set tone and feel before facts and figures. Invoke the emotions and imaginations of the reader. Put your best foot forwards: choose the most interesting people and places and also the most emblematic and iconic. Go back to your keynotes and design whatever your audience sees first so that thing is rich with those elements. You also want to pick your first elements to be the best for teaching the game. One classic mistake is designing the starting or simplest character or faction to be less characterful. That is solid thinking: if players should perhaps learn to play with a basic mode before making a more individual choice of avatar; it makes sense to make the first choice have wide appeal. But wide appeal should never mean generic. You can signpost “this is the everyman” without making them nobody. Slay the Spire (Megacrit, 2017) starts players off with a high health, high damage character that permits straightforward play but calls him the Ironclad, hides his face and gives him a tragic backstory. It’s still a bit generic but a little flair goes a long way.

(If you’re ever worried that you’ve added too much flavour, you can drop out of flavour text and explain things directly about player options or whatever rules context you need. Setting information enhances and supports game mechanics but should seldom need to act alone.)

Although games are things we often explore at our own pace and direction we can also control the experience too like a theme park – the Ironclad is the only character you can choose at the start of playing Slay the Spire. It’s a bit harder with tabletop but there are still options to store things in expansions, modules and difficulty settings. Similarly with setting: you should hint that there are other, larger variances and contexts, but without undercutting just how important and exciting the first step is. Mystery is your friend here! Hide the answers to questions wherever possible. This removes extraneous information while providing intrigue and interest. Who owns the spire and why are we trying to slay its inhabitants? We don’t need to know but it is fun to wonder, and have things hint at ways we might find out.

If your setting feels too complicated to sum up or embody simply, then you may need to go back and rebuild it. Or think of an in-setting reason to narrow the focus. If the setting is a vast alien landscape, focus on a new arrival. If the setting is complex, start with children in a school. This can feel very cliché but there are always ways to add new style to old ideas. Just like rules, names and symbols matter in providing simple clarity. If the characters are fighters, show them fighting in the art and give them a name that suggests they fight. Don’t have the character art show them when they’ve just woken up, or use an in-world term we don’t understand yet. If they’re supposed to be up front in a battle, call them “the Brave” or a member of “the Vanguard”.⁶ Don’t be afraid to be too on the nose: again, it is better than being misunderstood, and remember you are hinting that there’s more over the horizon. Leave subtlety and subtext for the novels or advanced players. A good name, like a good title, can be the key between a confusing or uninspiring character piece, or a beloved one. Take time to get names right. And test them over and over again, to make sure they give the right feeling!

None of this means, however, to be simplistic. You can trust that your audience won’t mind waiting to find out answers and doesn’t need the world served on a platter. If the game is about exploring a strange new world or solving a complicated puzzle, your audience may indeed be in the mood to be overwhelmed and confused – that may be a bug, not a feature. But even a simple story delivered bit by bit can be a subtle and deep and complex narrative. The storytelling in both Portal video games⁷ are excellent examples: both start with a character new to the world, make use of helpful sidekicks who explain everything and deliver small chunks of plot as soon as you unlock each new area, but the story is compelling and the writing is world-class.

You can write your magnum opus as long as you don’t forget about Ray. A novel can get away with being as impenetrable as Joyce’s Ulysses, because the interface of a novel is simple and never changes. A game has to be simpler, but you can make it literary and meaningful and delve deep and paint as big a canvas as you can imagine. Indeed, there is no canvas as big as in worldbuilding, and that can be a little intimidating. We’ll talk about that in the next chapter.

On a Quest

It’s time to hand things to someone else. Whatever blurbs you have written you need to have someone read and see how they explain them to a third person. Don’t correct them if they make any mistakes as they do so, although you might after they finish. And remember that all the mistakes they make are your fault for not making things clear enough!

Stopping By

It’s hard to get honest opinions of your work from friends but other points of view are so crucial. Pick something else like your work – something that touches on similar content or themes or excites you in a similar way – and ask a friend for their deep thoughts on the issue. This is especially good if you liked the work but they didn’t, or vice versa.

Notes

You can be in the room but I recommend being as far away from the table as possible. A recording of it with you not there is better.

See Chapter 11 on how to direct attention.

Once, when developing a fantasy setting I received angry emails because the god of death I created was not a sombre, Grim Reaper figure as in Bergman’s The Seventh Seal or Pratchett’s Discworld. They were vastly outnumbered by those who enjoyed my depiction, but it was a good reminder of how deeply people rely on familiar archetypes.

See the example of the Akroan Lion in Chapter 2.

The original German name was Die Burgen Von Burgund, a lovely bit of wordplay. We’ll talk a bit more about how word play can be important in Chapter 36.

The technical term for a fitting name is an aptronym.

7 Portal was designed by Kim Swift and Portal 2 by Joshau Weier, with writing by Erik Wolpaw, Jay Pinkerton and Chet Faliszek, and both were published by Valve.

CHAPTER 35 Filling the Fractal

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-38

OUR REAL WORLD IS a fractal one. It has an infinite amount of detail: the more you zoom down, the more you find the same level of complexity as you started with, equally able to be zoomed down into. And that’s just in terms of space – we can also do the same with time! The same is true of the worlds we build. So how do we deal with something that is infinite? How much world do we build? How much is enough? How do we start on an infinite canvas? When do we stop?

Since it is an infinite project, you definitely shouldn’t try to design everything about your world before you begin writing it down or designing the game or publishing things. There is no amount of world that will ever be complete. But this is also a feature of worldbuilding: you can always come back to it, feeling like there is more to add. How much is enough for an audience is a different question, but just as with realism and believability,¹ every person has their own answer. Different audiences have different ideas of what makes a setting complete or sufficiently expounded upon for their needs. Someone who really cares about the phases of the moon will always want to know about the phases of the moon, and for the most part, that is their problem, not yours.² You can only signpost the things your setting is likely to care about and accept that not everyone will be satisfied.

As we said in Chapters 26 and 27, before you start publishing you want to have some idea of where you’re going and how you might get there, so you can hint at those things. But you only need a rough idea: remember you have your keynotes so you have guidelines and lodestones and you’ve established your gods and monsters and your areas of doubt and uncertainty so you have guard rails and boundaries. Also, there’s a key rule that applies to any creative work: never let the customer see how the sausage is made. Or if you prefer a flashier metaphor, you should never show your whole hand, and keep some cards hidden up your sleeve. Just as you should not put everything in your ideas file into your bible, and then purify your bible into your blurbs, not everything in your blurbs is going to go into whatever is “customer facing”. Or at least not right away. This allows you to do the magic trick where – hey presto – material that comes out later is magically tied into the things that came before. The audience really can’t quite see how this was done because our brains trick us into thinking that what is on the market must reflect what exists.³ It may kill you to have secrets you can’t reveal, but just as with magic the audience doesn’t really want to know.

What they love the most is not knowing but knowing there is something they don’t know. This brings us to the second trick, which is drawing attention to this fact. When a magician points with their finger or their wand, we can’t help but look where they are pointing, expecting to see something. This builds expectation and makes the appearance of something in that space all the more exciting. This is also a classic technique used in many theatre traditions: you point offstage whenever someone is about to enter and tell the audience that someone is coming. This not only builds expectations but also creates the illusion that your small stage contains a much larger world. You want to keep cards up your sleeve, but you also want to give a sense that there are cards that could appear. This doesn’t mean ending every film with “James Bond Will Return dot dot dot”: there are much subtler ways to do this as well, by just always situating things in a larger context. If you write as if you have secrets, secrets will be implied.

The Marvel Cinematic Universe films were brilliant at this. It became tired through repetition, but in the first Iron Man (Favreau, 2008), Agent Coulson mentioned something happening in Arizona, which turned out to be the set-up for Thor. If we’d seen the shorts beforehand, we had a thrill of being privy to secret information, or we had a thrill of connection seeking those shorts out afterwards. Thor gave us our first look at Hawkeye, without mentioning him by name, again letting us “play detective”. The first Avengers was already huge and then showed us Thanos. Each time they didn’t just deliver on the previous promise but pointed to the next stage. It’s a one-two punch. Point offstage, then swing the camera around to reveal the new elements, then repeat. Point, swivel, point, swivel. This wears out if you keep relying on novelty because surprise runs on diminishing returns, but “more” takes far longer to wear down than “new”, and early on they felt like the world was ever-expanding from tiny individuals to a much larger fabric. It didn’t feel like “new” so much as “wider”. The fractal is intimidating to fill but is also your friend, because your audience is always ready to see more in some other aspect, to zoom out and see it is all connected, and to zoom in somewhere else, deeper and deeper, but all connecting to a larger whole.

Your initial landscape then can be like the first Iron Man film – totally self-contained, but with tiny hints of more to come, embedded just below the surface, or extending off at the edges of the map. But how much do you need to include in that first landscape? Here we return to our very first lesson: the world must be built to purpose. Game design is fundamentally iterative: we do not bring forth a work complete in form, we build the smallest possible prototype, we test it, we modify it, we test again. Our worlds can be the same way. We begin with all we need for a working prototype. Usually, that’s just a hero and a village and some orcs, as we said in Chapter 14. Or your version thereof. Similarly, when it comes to publishing, we only need to build enough so that we have more than what we need to attach to the game.

A world that is attached to a game needs to do five things: make people want to play the game, teach people how to play the game, teach people how to win the game, give them some place to get started and, finally, make sure they are having fun while all this learning is going on. The first and last of those are as much about the technical skills of the writers and artists as they are the skill of the worldbuilder, and it’s a good reminder that no amount of the latter can compensate for lack of the former. No one who is known as a good worldbuilder is known for that in spite of their presentation skills (it’s much more common for mediocre worlds to be carried by good writing). Investing in learning those crafts or paying the best to do them will always serve you well.

Once we leave aside the first and the last of that list, we’re back to the list we developed right back in Chapter 12: Identity, Motivation and Law. Identity is held in the starting handholds, Law in how to play and Motivation links to how to win. As discussed in the last chapter, resist the urge to explain much more than this, especially in heavy detail. You know your world has so much more to it but you’ll lose your audience if you try to explain too much, and you’ll gain so much more by hinting at more beyond.

Always be guided by that first principle of Chapter 1: everything you do include must have a purpose and a clear purpose, one the audience can see. If they really honestly need to read a history lesson, then you need to justify that to them. It needs to significantly affect how they play and what they will do in the game, and you need to show how it does so. Lore, for the most part, is seen as a negative, something that players have to suffer through to get to being able to interact with things. Keep that in mind at all times! This is especially true in this modern day when worlds are a dime a dozen and we see them everywhere. Worldbuilding is a crowded marketplace and your world is not special or unique, no matter what you think of it. If you’re lucky you can hold their attention but only if you’re showing purpose. Or the worldbuilding is hidden behind or alongside the things they need to know to play. People are most eager to learn when it doesn’t feel like learning or when they seek it out on their own. When they come to you eager to know more, that is when you can expound at length on history and geography.

Note that being mysterious is not the same as being vague. Players want some clear context for what they are doing, for why they want to win and why there are forces set against them and some easily spotted breadcrumbs leading off into the shadows. Be specific, not generic, and clear with what you do show. It’s a glimpse, but a striking and meaningful one, not a blurry, confusing one. It’s also important that you don’t reveal all the answers that you actually do have. Being mysterious is not the same as not knowing.

One of the worst habits of worldbuilders is just that: habit. Things exist because that seems to be how things are, in this world, or in the genre you’re operating within. Fantasy undead creatures because it’s supposed to. Or worse, because of circular logic: the bad guys are evil because they use dark magic, which is called dark magic because it’s used by bad guys. This kind of unjustified genre-trope laziness is so common that taking the slightest effort to justify a trope (or to invert or subvert it) can feel revolutionary.

This isn’t always easy: assumptions are the things we forget we’re making, and they can creep up on us in regard to genre tropes just as much as with our beliefs about how worlds work. A worldbuilder’s work requires some level of fastidiousness to intent. Though with a sweeping sentence we might suggest a billion lifetimes and endless other assumptions of how those lives play out, we also want to strive to give everything a reason. Everything in your world should be there for a conscious reason, because otherwise it will be there for an unconscious one. This is doubly true for anything supernatural or fantastical, which are often added without fully understanding the consequences.

You can test for this of course, as discussed in the last chapter, but you can also take time to ponder the cause of everything you add – and the effect, as well. Our world is iterative too and so should invented ones be: nothing just popped out of nowhere. The promise of the fractal is there is always more to find; the curse of the fractal is you have to always follow things back and forwards, up and down. The curse is that cause and effect never end; that is the blessing as well. You can always ask “but why?” and “and then?”, and the more you do, the better your world gets. Riding the fractal can be like a downhill snowball once you get in practice: every idea you have tumbles to another and another and another. Again, you don’t put all these in the blurbs or to the customer, but the more your roll forwards and fill in the fractal behind the scenes the better.

Learning this skill takes practice. That’s why, as I said in Chapter 14, you want to make as many worlds as you can. Get the ten bad ones out of your system before you start on your big project. You can also read history, geography and science and learn how that snowball works and how things are connected. One of my favourite examples is how the Third Council of the Lateran in 1179 led directly to one of the most common reasons contemporary Americans must visit the emergency room. The Peace of Vienna saw the end of the three-sided war between Frederick Barbarossa, Emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the Lombard city states of northern Italy and the Catholic Church, with the Lombards coming out on top and demanding concessions to church power, specifically wanting the church to get out of the banking and moneylending trade so the Lombards were unopposed in such things. The council added new canons which established a total ban on the church charging interest on loans and stating that Jews and Muslims could not live together in cities or do business with each other, so Christian merchants would find it harder and harder to get loans from members of those faiths. This led directly to the creation of the very first ghetto of Jews in Venice and caused millions of Jews to move to Poland, which for the next 500 years was a Jewish haven and the most tolerant country in Europe. However in the 18th century the Hapsburg, Prussian and Russian empires destroyed and occupied Poland, causing Jews to face harsh new oppression. Jews found that the arriving Prussians had a great demand for baked goods but Jews had been banned from many professions including baking, so they began boiling bread instead. This leads to the invention of the bagel.

As antisemitism turned to annihilation throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, millions of Polish Jews emigrated to America, particularly New York City. In 1927 the Lender family began selling their bagels and – finding themselves surrounded by Catholic immigrants – were supplying something that is very novel and also available on Christian holy days. Lender courts more customers by pre-slicing their bagels and they become a classic American success story. Their business grows until they become the largest bagel manufacturers in the world, and the bagel becomes an American breakfast staple, especially when it hits the western coast. When supermarkets and refrigeration introduce the idea of shopping in bulk, Lender introduces the frozen bagel, and with the arrival of the microwave oven bagels could be frozen solid in a deep freeze and then swiftly thawed out or toasted straight from frozen. This means sliding a knife between the pre-cut slice, which would often yield unexpectedly. By the 1990s the injuries from this were so common, and emergency rooms across America dubbed them BRIs – bagel-related injuries.

It’s not the specifics of the story of the bagel that matter, of course, just the understanding that you can pick some important object, such as the bagel, and work back to medieval antisemitism and work forwards to the BRI. This is just an evolution of the asking questions technique we discussed in Chapter 7, but with a more historic twist. Like that method, as you do these things you start to find more and more things along the way that suggest more questions and more answers. The fractal gets larger and also more detailed with every step. It’s easy to see how it becomes something that is never, ever finished!

So you must draw your lines out as to what your game needs: you take all your ideas and your bible and use them to fill out the key elements of identity, motivation and law. When you have enough in your bible to write the blurbs of those things, and a little more for the future, you have enough for that game, and you can stop – at least for the moment. An infinite well is a wonderful thing and you should enjoy it, without killing yourself trying to draw all the water out of it.

To fill in all these infinite recesses, you will reach – sometimes more times than others – for things from history and fiction to borrow, steal or appropriate. That’s part of the creative exercise at every level, but much more so when we have so much space to fill and so little time to communicate ideas to our audience and are building facsimiles of nations and cultures, which often raises the question: what are we allowed to borrow? When does it become theft or cultural appropriation? That’s our topic for the penultimate chapter.

On a Quest

Take a look at your game and determine the minimum world information that players need to establish identity, motivation and law. Gather your blurbs for each key element (finish them if you haven’t already). How many words is it? If you can’t fit it all in one standard (A4/letter) page, it’s probably too much. On the other hand, make sure it’s sufficient. It’s time to put it all together and start testing your game and world together and asking players questions about their experience with the world, separate from the game. And listening to their questions they have about the world!

Stopping By

Pick a person, place or thing that is significant or prominent in your world and write a history of just that element: how it came to be and all the things it has caused to come about, like the history of the bagel above. If you’ve designed your world well, such a history should also be a history of most of the world and the peoples in it. If not, your choice might not be as significant as you think it is or not wired in enough to causes or effects.

Notes

See Chapter 6.

I do not remember which fantasy author told me this, but they said whenever anyone asked them “how does (blank) work” he would respond enigmatically “In the usual way”. In a similar fashion, when Star Trek writer Michael Piller was asked how Heisenberg Compensators worked he replied “they work very well, thank you for asking.”

In contrast, audiences can often tell when things don’t feel planned. One of the reasons the original Star Wars series worked so well is that it had a plan and rises to a natural conclusion, whereas most Hollywood sequels are add-ons after the fact. Audiences were quick to notice that the three sequel films (The Force Awakens, The Last Jedi, The Rise of Skywalker) lacked any plan or cohesive thread.

CHAPTER 36 Borrowing, Stealing and Appropriating

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-39

IRONICALLY, THE BEST BUILDERS of fictional worlds are those who love the world we are in. We explore history, geography and biology with wonder and remain endlessly curious, seeking to understand how we already live on a planet of the strange and the terrifying. The best way to create believable and interesting fictional worlds is to assemble them from the many worlds we have around us – and indeed, we have little choice in this matter! No idea springs forth without some point of origin, though we might try to disguise it or even not recognise the origin ourselves. But as we borrow and steal from the world around us, we need to ask the question of if we are permitted to do so.

In the legal case, of course, there are rules of copyright and fair use, which we will talk more about in the next chapter. For the most part, Western art tends to view artistic appropriation as having no other consideration beyond the legal and often conflates the legal with the moral. As discussed in Chapter 12, Western culture is (we hope) in a stage of interrogating its racist structures, including how representation in arts and culture communicate and entrench deep but hidden prejudices. Thus the question of cultural appropriation has moved beyond only anthropological or artistic analysis and become a political battleground. Since the dominant Western European cultures have entwined their colonial theft of land and peoples with the same careless acts of cultural acquisition, the term cultural appropriation has become pejorative, indicating a transgression that must be addressed. In other contexts however the term is neutral and is a phenomenon observed without necessarily demanding judgement.

Appropriation or artistic appropriation is the name given to the process of using pre-existing objects or images with little or no transformation applied to those originals. Cultural appropriation is what occurs when whole styles, modes or aspects are reproduced. When Albrecht Durer modelled his etchings on the statues of Ancient Greece and Rome he was not simply copying individual statues but a way of viewing and depicting the human body that referenced classical culture, with the deliberate intent to evoke said culture. The Renaissance was an appropriative movement, seeking to take the power and esteem that was given to the classics and rebirth it into the current day, transferring that esteem onto current works. Similarly, the Dadaist and Ready-Made movements used appropriation in moving everyday regular items into art galleries so as to change their context and draw attention to said context.

These are illustrative examples because they show that the intent of appropriation is typically to borrow meaning, and that is where worldbuilding so often works. We want to evoke in something a sense of it being, for example, like the culture of medieval Europe, so we borrow the trappings (typically the material ones by default)¹ of medieval Europe. Sometimes this is done to evoke a whole society that we want to operate like the society we are referencing. There is nothing inherently wrong with this process, but it does have to be done with care. Often we appropriate some elements and change others not understanding the things are more connected than they appear, leaving behind key elements or forgetting what other things we might be unintentionally bringing along with it. Disney’s Beauty and the Beast (1994) is set in a fantasy land but the architecture, interiors and costumes draw on provincial styles of Alsace, France, in 1740 as that was when the story was written. This has caused fan speculation that the two titular lovers will see their grandchildren guillotined fifty years later. This is not of course an actual weakness in the setting! Compare this to the remake in 2017, which shows Belle as a child in Paris with the Eiffel Tower in view, making it clearly after 1899, and thus the film taking place around 1912, leaving the lovers only a few years before the town is destroyed by trench warfare. We might imagine a different fate for them but by having so many real-world elements, it makes us believe the real-world timeline will assert itself. By contrast the animated film is careful to never mention any specifics. It is smart enough to borrow touches of the 18th century without taking too much.

An example of taking too little is when the Warhammer Fantasy world has its European-style knights go on crusades against the stand-in for the Arabian Empire. The problem being that the word crusade comes from the word for cross, and there is no Jesus or crucifix in Warhammer. The writers wanted to borrow the idea and meaning of the crusades, but by pulling them out of context and trying to arrange them neatly in a different context, they are full of disconnections.

A friend of mine put it very aptly: history can be a great spice to enhance or bring forth flavour, but we do not simply eat the spice and expect the same effect. Nor can we think if we simply add a spice that we create an authentic cuisine!

Bigger problems occur when cultural appropriation mistranslates elements because they are not well understood or are being represented inaccurately through the lens of Western culture. Demonisation can occur, where certain cultural aspects are associated inherently with negative concepts. The classic example of this is how orcs and other violent, evil enemies are often shown wearing tribal war paint, a shortcut of borrowed meaning from Native Americans to show that the orcs are primitive and brutal. Tokenism can occur, where only a symbolic effort is made towards representing some aspect of a culture, without actually showing proper respect or full context. An example of this is a representative from the given culture who demonstrates the existence or value of the culture but the character is barely visible, has little agency or is a figure of fun, or is simply a series of cliches. Exoticism is also a risk, where things are given more value or interest or mystery because they come from a very distant or removed culture.² This happens particularly when Western authors want to borrow the sense of alienness they feel looking at different world cultures and apply it to their fantastic creations so those creations also feel alien or otherworldly. In a world where audiences are international and heterogenous, it can easily strike those from that culture as laughable at best, offensive at worst. Then there is also erasure, where due to a surface examination of what you borrow you leave out whole cultures or subcultures. Or you leave out some bad things and sanitise the situation; do the reverse and create positive prejudice, with the sense that the person or culture you’re representing can do no wrong and is somehow sacred by just being exotic.

The list of pitfalls is long (and this is not intended to be complete) and it can feel exhausting and defeating. It is not surprising then that a lot of us don’t want to depict real cultures at all nor borrow closely. We sometimes also conclude that featuring other cultures is inherently untrue or exploitative. The concern is good but the conclusion is not what we want. It is true that if you are directly spotlighting and trading on a marginalised culture in order to make money, and that culture is not in a position to speak back to your work on a level playing field, then you should rethink. The phrase “nothing about us, without us” is a good line when it comes to profit. Another good rule I think about is one I borrowed from the law, where there is a principle that evidence must be as probative as it is prejudicial. In other words, if something makes someone look bad, it can only be introduced if it is equally likely to establish truth. In art, we can think of this as what we want to accomplish with the work versus the content we want to use. Does the risk of harmful or exploitative material meet the return you will get? Is it worth risking sidelining a whole culture just because you want to have pirate ninjas?

The solution to the pitfalls is just a matter of research and testing, as with all creative work. You don’t have to be part of a culture to know it well, but you do have to do some work. Luckily research is often quite straightforward in this modern world. Wikipedia, despite what people think, is a good starting point and it’s free, and so is your local library and so are your friends (remember to keep asking people, as we said in Chapter 10.) The lighter the amount you borrow for spice, the less research you have to do, and a little goes a long way. There is no magical clear line where everything you do is okay because you did “enough” research, though. Exploring ancient Egyptian pyramids is a kind of exoticism and lets a white audience play at pseudo-colonial activities. Making them space-Egyptians is not necessarily removed enough to “not count” either. But games need worlds to take place in, and borrowing from our lives and the things we see around us is the essence of artistic practice. It is difficult for those of us living in a culture so founded on colonialism to imagine different things. But the first step – and it is a key one – is to see the culture you yourself come from and how that creates a lens to look at others. Once you know that and research what you borrow, you can approach the process with clear intent, sharing with respect and correctly weighing up your options.

Knowing your intent is not always simple or easy! So often we simply reach into the back of our minds and grab things that sound cool. We might not even remember where we found them. Intention can be like assumptions: invisible to the creator. You will need someone else’s eyes on your world at some point, before it goes to the public, because only through those eyes can you really see how things look. You can’t see your own work clearly yourself, because you’re seeing it through the process of creating it. Finding a good playtester, beta reader, sensitivity expert, editor or sounding board is a vital part of every creative process.

You also should try to communicate your intent to the players in the way they play and use the game. Remember that playing is much more active than simply reading about or watching; when players step into a world they are worldbuilders as well. Your job is to make sure they follow your example and act with the same respect. That means interrogating what the game is having the players do, too. Are they making war in a setting about peace? Building trains across America while pretending to also care about the fate of railway workers? The suggestion that the abstraction removes the context or impact is an insufficient argument – but again, there is no clear line where sufficient detail makes things okay. It is again, only something to try to do as honestly as you can,³ with testing and feedback.

You’re also allowed, of course, to borrow not from fictional worlds too and works of fiction in general. This isn’t entirely free of pitfalls, since those works are also mirrors of the real world and culture: doing an obvious tribute to Star Trek but removing all the women or all the queer people would be a very clear choice, for example. But you do have a lot more freedom to borrow, bend and manipulate here, and the artists who inspire you know and welcome this. After all, that is what they did too.⁴ William Faulkner said it best: “immature artists copy; great artists steal”. There are only so many ideas in the world and the art of creation is knowing how to combine them and spice them and make them feel new. You have a head start here because you see the world in a unique way and have a completely individual collection of inspirations. Sometimes, a cultural juggernaut makes it hard to find new ideas – good luck writing a socialist liberal space-exploring human empire that doesn’t feel like Star Trek – and the perpetual nature of these billion-dollar franchises is worrying in that regard, since a franchise that doesn’t die can never let new ideas bloom. On the other hand, Babylon 5 was nothing like Deep Space 9 though they both were set on space stations, and the hunger for more universes rises up to meet the vast waves of content being produced. Audiences are easily bored and ready for new horizons. Now might be the best time ever to boldly go somewhere new. You are allowed to do that and you’re allowed to use the shoulders of giants to launch from, just as Star Trek borrowed from Horatio Hornblower and Wagon Train.

The final rule is that amongst all this stealing you must cover your tracks – but only a little. Humans are bad at pattern recognition and are easily distracted by small changes. You can, as George Lucas did, simply put The Hidden Fortress (Kurosawa, 1958) in a space setting and call it Star Wars and nobody will be the wiser. The space part throws everyone off the scent, even though that was all stolen from the Flash Gordon serials from the 1930s. Indeed, this is the best way to cover your tracks: if you steal from everyone, all the time, each thing overlaps the other and it looks entirely original. You can even pull this off with just two ideas if you combine them right. A classic example is the Valrath in the boardgame Gloomhaven. These people have a kind of demon-blood in them, which drives them to be lusty and bloodthirsty, so their culture values emotional control and discipline, harnessing those emotions only when appropriate. It is a lovely and rich idea, but it’s also the Vulcans of Star Trek glued to the tieflings of Dungeons and Dragons. And the Vulcans were just the Japanese dressed as a 19th-century Satan, and tieflings borrow from the myths of fey-touched mortals and Greek satyrs…it’s theft, like turtles, all the way down.

On a Quest

By now you’ve prepared much of your world (and likely a lot of your game as well) and shown it to some folks. If they seemed to be interested or having fun, now you want to go a step further and ask for all their feedback. You may want to find different people for this than those who did your earlier playtests – those were asking “does this work?”, which is about “what’s not working?”. Remind them they can be as harsh as they like, and make sure you’ve chosen people who will be! Be ready to admit your world isn’t perfect. You don’t have to make all the changes they want but you should know why if you’re not doing so. If possible, choose people with different genders and ethnicities. (If they’re experts, pay them.)

Stopping By

Get a new idea for your world by thinking of two or three things you like in other media and jamming them together. Then try to pitch or summarise your world or part of it by seeing if you can break it into two or three things from other things. “It’s like X, but with Y, and also Z” is a great blueprint for you and your audience.

Notes

Western culture, being extremely materialistic and consumerist, tends to put primacy on material aspects. The original painting of the Mona Lisa is priceless, but a postcard of the same image is worthless.

Exoticism is perhaps the oldest and deepest trend in board gaming. When the Germans rebranded the old Norse game Halma for the popular market, they made it more exotic by calling it Chinese Checkers, a name which stuck forever more.

There is more beginning to be written (and I hope soon to be much more) on themes and meaning in games, reading games as texts and if games can be decolonised. One place to start is Playing Oppression (Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023).

Which isn’t the same thing at all as feeding things into a Large Language Model.

CHAPTER 37 Lawyers, Puns and Money

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914-40

NOT EVERY WORKING GAME will be a good game. Not every good game will be a publishable game either or a game that’s likely to find an audience. And only some of those games will be a product that can make money. The art of productisation is turning a game (or any work) into something people will want to buy, and that can be produced for less than it will sell for. Whether your game is able to be a successful product is a question that is hard to know and difficult to predict, but it is worth imagining it will be as early as possible so you can begin to think about it as a product.

This is another level of rarifying. We began with an ideas file, then strained the best ideas to make a bible, from that we lifted the blurbs, and then chose from those the audience-facing elements and from those picked out the first few elements to peek through the curtains and show off as our first release. The final step is to look at those elements and sharpen them up one more time. Focus them in and polish them up so they leap off the shelf, demanding to be bought and played. The good news is that since game design and worldbuilding so often come down to the skills of summarising, communication and teaching, you’ve had a crash course in marketing. The skill of making a world, faction or character option worth taking is the art of selling. It’s getting people excited to go on the tour ride.

Marketing is a lot harder though as you may only have a handful of words to get your point across. A good title is critical,¹ as we mentioned in Chapters 32 and 33. Like games, marketing also depends on the software in people’s heads, but again, even more so. Popular meanings can change on a dime or have new meanings attached to them. Be careful getting too attached to any names of your world or its components lest a sudden shift leave you scrabbling for alternatives. The same can go for certain looks or images, but words are particularly sneaky and capricious. This can also happen at the last possible moment too, because development cycles can be long. Luckily marketing also works like game design: you can test it, and you should, over and over again, iterate and refine, but names are always worth rechecking at the last minute.²

As the title of this chapter indicates, word play will take you far in the game publishing industry. Most gamers are word nerds and love puns and it can do a lot to help you stand out and be remembered in an increasingly crowded marketplace (the number of tabletop games hitting the market each year is now nearly five times what it was in 2004). Any other rules of thumb for titles or branding will be likely obsolete by the time you read this and twice so by the time you design something ready to pitch. Gamers tend to be big fans of novelty and variety and cycle through things fast, which makes industry trends much harder to predict or control than most other creative industries. Following trends is rarely worth it.

That said, you can pretend your game is about to come out when you produce mock-covers and design dress. This is worth doing even if these things will change because it will help you see the game as a product. That’s inspiring as a goal and helps you step into the mindset of the customer. Just as with Ray Arnold, empathy for the customer is key. They have no time or energy to work hard to find your game or to decipher what kind of game it is. You should think of them as always in a hurry: don’t talk down to them but cut to the chase. What’s the game about, how many players does it need, how long does it take, how much does it (likely) cost, how much stuff is in the box, people need to know these things because that’s how they decide whether to buy and whether to play. Your game is being considered the moment the owner thinks “let’s play a game” and every part of your design and presentation needs to engage with that thought process. Is your game heavy to pick up? Long to unpack? Difficult to teach? Hard to learn? Restrictive in player count or length? If any of these pinch points occur, how are you making these costs a good deal? As the great Gabe Barrett (host of the Board Game Design Lab podcast) says, “Is the juice worth the squeeze?” We know you think so, but have you convinced your audience? You have to convince them every single time they think about it. Your box, your title, your art, your subtitle – they need to be pulling their weight in making this argument. Your world better be doing its part as well or be mostly tucked away so as not to distract much if it isn’t helping.

Often the tucking away is necessary regardless. Customers are making swift decisions in the aforementioned very crowded marketplace. Depth and subtleties in worldbuilding are hard to put on a cover. Those things are wonderful Easter eggs for customers to find or reviewers to mention, though, so they are not wasted; they just can be hard to put on the front of a box.

There are two basic ways to publish games: self-publishing and pitching to existing publishers. Choosing which avenue to take depends on lots of factors but if you’re wanting to build your own world chances are you’ll want to self-publish. Exiting companies usually produce settings “in house”. In either case though, you will need a lawyer at some point. Most of the countries of the world are signatories of the Berne Convention, which means that artistic works are automatically covered by some broad legal protections, which cannot be withheld solely because a specific process wasn’t followed. In other words, just publishing a game and selling it to people give you substantial legal protection against your work being copied – theoretically. Game mechanics are not so protected. Nor is legal restitution always worth fighting for: the small returns in game design likely vastly outweigh the legal costs likely to be incurred. Scammers and hucksters are very aware of that last fact, which means contracts are often worth very little. The game industry is also, as mentioned, volatile. Every freelance designer has a story about not getting paid. Most of those have nothing to do with malice. Your best guide here is your fellow designers: they will tell you (privately, if you ask nicely) who is reliable and who is not.

You should be reliable, though, and always pay your staff, and you should use lawyers. Especially among friends. Popular media has given lawyers and contracts a bad name but a contract is a device designed to make everything clear about precisely who owes whom, what and when. Some people react to bringing in contracts and lawyers as a sign they aren’t trusted but they are a sign of professionalism. Likewise a professional shiny box (with no stock art or AI art) makes a proposition to your audience regarding your serious approach to providing a quality game. A lawyer and a contract make that same proposition to your codesigners and collaborators. This is both about the work done and any money coming in. Again, especially among friends as that’s where the most assumptions are made and the most bitter fights ensue.

Owning a world is a trickier thing, legally. Laws tend to protect artistic expressions, names and trade dress, not ideas. Talk to an actual lawyer about that. You’ll also want to check you’re not infringing on other people’s property. If you’ve codesigned the world you may want to set up a company to own the world rather than an individual, because the law does not readily recognise “halfsies”. You don’t want to have an amazing piece of your world cut out later because it doesn’t belong to you. On that note you’ll also want any freelancers you hire to sign over the rights of whatever they create so it belongs to the universe and other writers can freely use those ideas. Large sections of the original design of the Warhammer world were lost because of these kinds of disputes.

It may be, of course, that you are building only for fun. It’s still a good idea to think about all these things as a thought experiment. It helps you conceive of the game in a different light, which is always useful creatively. It’s easy to believe, at the back of our minds, that we can’t or won’t succeed or don’t deserve to. Sometimes a beautiful cover image or a financial plan is a way of betting on yourself and training that part of your brain to accept the possibility of fame and fortune, or at least recognition and accomplishment (the gaming industry is very low on fame and not at all providing of fortune). Brains like habits and success can be very new. Much like an audience learning to love your world, you have to sell your brain on the idea of your success.

Thinking ahead also reminds you to get the lawyers in when you need them, i.e. as early as possible. That does mean laying out a lot of money. The good news is if you’re building a world, your expenses can be used in lots of different ways. Art and design for your world work as a resource for any and all games set there or any subsidiary or related products. Your contracts only need to be drawn up once, then tweaked for repurpose. Your website can host everything you make. This doesn’t mean you’ll make more money, of course. But a world is a deep resource that is efficient and never-ending, so it can be a great investment. If fans are interested in a world, there is always more to find out about it, and they’ll also want to try new products that use it. The fractal is your financial friend.

Just like financial matters though, you’ll need to keep track of it well, and there too you want to start before it gets too big. Dream big but also be detail-driven and track your data well. Build a bible that is clear and well-connected and up to date. That is the wonder and the burden of being a worldbuilder: much like the gods, you measure every moment and know every grain of sand. Or to quote William Blake, you hold infinity in the palm of your hand. Look after it.

On a Quest

Use desktop publishing software or something similar to make a mock-up cover of your game. Show off the title and subtitle (or catchy summary phrase), as well as time to play, number of players, age range. On the back describe the play experience and the components. Don’t forget to estimate the price. What size box will it likely be? What kind of image best suits that and will look strong on a shelf in a store and a shelf at home? Print it out. Put it on a shelf and walk back a few feet and take a look, and get the opinions of others on your choices. Stock art or something from online is fine to use for this, but also consider what your art notes would be to an artist. Get quotes, to help you practise being a business.

Stopping By

Likely your world is tied to only one or two games. What else could it be tied to? What would it look like in a very different kind of game, in a totally different genre? What would it look like as an introductory, family or children’s version or a much more complicated or expanded version? Make covers for all of those as with the tasks above. How does your expanded library look? Does it give you new ideas for your world?

Notes

Resist the urge to name your game the same as your world or even put it in the title of the game. Your world will likely have a name that doesn’t mean anything, taking up valuable space in communicating what your game is about. Catan (Teuber, 1995) was only able to be called that after it became a household name; it was originally The Settlers of Catan, a name that would likely be already a bit too oblique for the modern market.

It may be that your game is beaten to the punch with something that sweeps away popular attention with a similar name, look or style. The game industry is extremely crowded, so this is rare: customers are perfectly happy to pick out the game they like from among several that are about one particular theme, but there’s also prudence sometimes in waiting a year or two until your idea has less competition.

Afterword

THE ROLEPLAYING GAME (RPG) Empire of the Petal Throne, which is mentioned in the early part of this book, was the first published game world in history. At the time Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) came with no setting beyond a mishmash of fantasy influences, and although Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson had each developed their campaign worlds Greyhawk and Blackmoor, the 1975 D&D supplements bearing those names have almost no world information, apart from what one might intuit from the rules. By contrast, the contents of Empire of the Petal Throne’s 1975 box describe history, geography, social classes, languages, relationships, even taxes and bequests, to say nothing of the Hirilákte arenas, where characters may earn money, reputation or death. Plus spectacular maps of the world of Tékumel and, of course, a set of RPG rules heavily indebted to D&D.

Even today it’s a lot of information to take on and would have been even more to the novice gamer of the time. But Professor M. A. R. Barker, the game’s designer, provided an easy-in to teach the world (a crucial part of the art, as Steve discusses throughout this book). New player characters are not full-fledged citizens of the Tsolyáni empire, implicitly knowing its elaborate social protocols, clans, temples and legions. Instead one begins as a foreigner, often from the barbarous lands of Háida Pakála to the far south, and the game starts as you sail into the harbour of the great Tsolyáni port city of Jakálla. Thus the character and the player encounter the elements of this bizarre, beguiling culture at the same time and begin their journey to understand it, exploring it and letting it unfold before them, layer by intricate layer, like the petals of the emperor’s eponymous throne.

This is an old and understood technique these days, but it was pretty advanced thinking for the first work of its kind. And Tékumel is one man’s masterwork, with a depth and richness that leaves most modern game worlds gasping for air. I have many fond game memories of it, but one of the few that I can still picture in my mind’s eye is standing on the deck of that trade-ship as the mighty towers of Jakálla rose before me, a young merchant ready to take the city and make it my own. We landed, and almost immediately my character was robbed of everything they owned and sold as a slave, at an insultingly low price.

Unfortunately Tékumel has been tainted by the discovery after his death that Professor Barker held some extreme political opinions and had even authored a neo-Nazi novel under a pseudonym. Arguments about separating the creator and the work are as old as art: it’s hard not to have one’s thoughts informed by that knowledge when considering the Tsolyáni attitudes to foreigners or human sacrifice. But at the same time, the worlds we create as games designers do not exist simply to be witnessed through a third person’s eyes, like films or books. Games are the first and greatest interactive artform, and game worlds are to be experienced, lived in and remembered. My experiences in Tékumel are mine, not Barker’s. I did not watch them on a screen or read them from a page, I made them together with friends, talking over each other in a crowded, smoky room, playing and laughing late into the night. Barker may have provided the foundation and the guidebook, but we created the memories.

That, for me, is the most important thing about the game worlds that have meant a lot to me. Of course they have to be believable and coherent and easy to comprehend, and all of the many other things that Steve has described. But if they don’t have that core element of sticking in the mind, of living in a special place in our brain, they’re dust. Games have been dismissed throughout history as ephemera, and it’s why we lack complete rules for many of them because nobody ever bothered to write them down, but they and the emotions they stir up in us are as real and as important as those created by any other artform, and possibly more.

I played a lot of World of Warcraft back in the day, and then I ragequit for reasons too tedious to explain and never went back. But a few years later I saw a fan-made tourist poster that someone had mocked up for Thunder Bluff, the home city of the Taurens, the cow-people I’d mostly played. And staring at this image, I was overwhelmed with a memory almost Proustian in intensity, not simply nostalgia or longing for a game I’d enjoyed or the good times I’d had with my guild-mates, but a very specific feeling, a sense that I used to live there.

We live in games. Sometimes only for a few hours, sometimes for literal years. The places we visit and the areas we return to are important to us, partly because of what we’ve done and what has happened to us in those places, but these things happen in those environments because the worlds have been designed to allow those kinds of marvellous moments to take place and the game’s elements to bounce off each other in a way that sparks pleasure and memories, because they have been crafted with care, understanding, attention to detail and art and love.

James Wallis

London, December 2024

Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes.

achievers 94, 167

Adams, D. 57

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The 46, 74

Advanced Squad Leader (Greenwood) 99

Alice in Wonderland (Carroll) 44, 119

Alien 66

Amazing Stories (short story magazine) 32–33

Angel (Whedon, Greenwalt) 77

Animal Farm (Orwell) 203

annihilation 248

Annihilation (Garland) 65

anthropology 59, 82, 84–86

antisemitism 248

appropriation

artistic see artistic appropriation

cultural see cultural appropriation

archetypes 159–161

Aristophanes (Birds, The) 175

Aristotle 16, 17, 27, 191

drama elements 16–17

Arkham Horror (Launius) 44, 233

Arneson, D. 4, 6

art 94, 201

described 131

signs and signifiers 204

artistic appropriation 250–251

Asimov, I. 3, 104

assumptions 57–60

Avatar (Cameron) 39

Avengers (Whedon) 244

Baader-Meinhof Phenomenon 134n1

Babylon 5 (Straczynki) 255

Back to the Future (Zemeckis) 203

Barker, M. A. R. 6, 264

Barrett, G. 258

Bartle, R. 94, 167, 170

Batman 20, 27, 175, 210, 226, 233

Beauty and the Beast (Trousdale, Wise) 251

believability see realism and believability

Ben Hur (Wyler) 4

Best Word Book Ever, The (Scarry) 111

BioShock (Levine) 120, 126

Birds, The (Aristophanes) 175

black box idea 76, 77

Black Like Me (Griffin) 85

Blackmoor 4

Blake, W. 18, 261

blurbs 132, 146–147, 150, 193, 199–201, 215–216, 238, 244, 247–249, 257

BoardGameGeek.com 213

Boas, F. 84

bottom-up of setting design 143–148

Boys, The (Ennis) 78

Branagh, K. 40

Bright (Ayer) 42

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Whedon) 77, 104, 106

Burgess, A. 34

Busy Busy Town (Scarry) 111

Busy Busy World (Scarry) 111

Call of Cthulhu 105, 107, 108, 114

Camelot (Lerner and Loewe) 4

Cameron, J.: Avatar 39

Campbell, J. 27

Canon 8, 21, 74, 117, 170–172, 176, 185, 247

Castles of Burgundy, The (Felt) 239

Catan (Teuber) 261n1

Chainmail 4

Chaplin, C. 203–205

characters 23–31, 91

Charge of the Light Brigade, The (Tennyson) 218

Chrysanthemum and the Sword, The (Benedict) 85

Clancy, T. 34

Clare, T. 81

classism 85

Clockwork Orange, A (Burgess) 34

closing doors 183–187

Colville, M. 98

Cornwell, B. 233

Crichton, M. 236

crunch 10

Cthulhu: Death May Die (Lang et al) 233

Cthulhu Mythos 18, 26, 105, 206, 233

cultural appropriation 250–251

cultural relativism 84–85

culture 84

curiosity 26, 66–68

Dadaist movement 251

dark magic 246

DC comics 232

Deep Space 9 (Berman et al) 255

demonisation 252

Diablo (Brevik) 160

Dickens, C. 116

Hard Times 72

Oliver Twist 116

diegesis 17

Disneyland 238

Disney, W. 238

Doctorow, C. 184

Donaldson, S. 104, 105

Door Problem 62n1, 183

Doyle, C. 171

Dracula 118

drama elements (Aristotle) 16–17

Dune 46–47, 118, 153

Dune (Herbert) 33, 86, 106

Dungeons & Dragons (1974) (Gygax and Arneson) 4–6, 30, 36, 83, 86–87, 98–101, 104, 112, 118, 119, 135, 160, 197, 227, 255

murder hobos 111

Durer, A. 251

Dying Earth (Vance) 100

Eliot, T. S. 123

Elkins, J. 219

Ellison, H. 69

embodiment

anthropology and 84–88

game concepts by default 81–82

genre fiction 85

identity, motivation and law concepts 83

meaning 81

umwelt theory 82

empathy engines 157

Ennis, G.: Boys, The 78

Escher, M. C. 18

ethnographic work 84

evolutionary psychology 84

exegesis 17

exoticism 252, 253, 256n2

Explorers 167

Extra Credit 91

extrinsic setting, defined 93

fan fiction 184

Fantasy Flight Games 166

Feng Shui (Laws) 21

feral segmentation 165

fiction 41

Fiest, R. E. 205

Final Fantasy (various) 92

Flash Gordon (serials) 255

flavour text 10

Flintstones, The (John Hannah et al) 152

fluff 10–14

“fluff ain’t so fluffy” 11

fractal, real world as 243–249

Fraser, G. M. 233

Frequency Illusion 134n1

Freud, S. 159

Fry, S. 169

Fyre Festival scandal 64

Gamespot (website) 122

genre fiction 85, 204

Gilligan’s Island (Schwartz) 188, 190

Glass Town 6

Gloomhaven 234, 255

Glorantha 6

Gone Home (Gaynor) 92

Great Gatsby, The (Fitzgerald) 113

Greenwalt, D.: Angel 77

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 77

Greyhawk 4

Grizzled, The (Riffaud and Rodriguez) 157

Guin, U. L. 158

Wizard of Earthsea, A 145

Gygax, G. 3, 4, 116

Hades (Rao et al) 109n7

Hamlet (Shakespeare) 40

handwavium 77

Hard Times (Charles Dickens) 72

Harryhausen, R. 100

Harry Potter 20, 40

Herbert, F. 33, 106

Herron, M. 152

Hidden Fortress, The (Kurosawa) 255

historical fiction 5

Hitchcock, A. 79

Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, The (Adams) 46, 74

Hobbit, The (Tolkien) 3, 66

Homo Ludens (Huizinga) 88n2

Horatio Hornblower 104

horror 26

Huizinga, J. 88n2, 157, 166

“hyper-real” 204

identity 245

Independence Day (Emmerich) 40

In Nomine (Pearcy) 74, 189

intention 254

Interstellar (Nolan) 40

intrinsic and extrinsic expression 91–96

Iron Man (Favreau) 244, 245

Jackson, S. L. 236 see also Ray Arnold Principle

James Bond 168

Johnson, R. 186

Jordan, R. 5

Joyce (Ulysses) 241

Julius Caesar (Shakespeare) 210

Jung, C. 159

Jurassic Park (Spielberg) 236 see also Ray Arnold Principle

“just work” 76, 77, 79

Kant, I. 82

keynotes 72, 130–132, 239

Kick-Ass (Millar) 78

King, S. 24

Knight’s Tale, A (Helgeland) 44

language

characters 29

games 160, 211–212

metonymy 210–211 see also signs and signifiers; synecdoche and metonymy

Last Jedi, The (Johnson) 39, 186

Laws, R. 11

lawyers, and contracts 259–260

laying pipe 191–196

audiences 194–195

lay pipe phrase described 192

retcon or retroactive continuity 194

Lazzaro, N. 167

learning 247

Lee, S. 3

Lewis, C. S.

Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The 203

Narnia books 66–67

Leyendecker, J. D. 132

Life of Brian, The (Jones) 217

Lindelof, D. 32

Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The (Lewis.) 203

Lord of the Rings, The (Tolkien) 3, 40, 217, 221

Lovecraft (Outsider, The) 145

Lucas, G. 3, 106

Lucas, M. 5

Lucian (True History, The) 175

Ludeme, defined 15n1

Macdonald, J. D. 41

MacGuffin 79

Magic Circle concept 88n2

Magic: The Gathering (Garfield) 13, 93, 159–160, 166, 178, 227

Maltese Falcon, The (Huston) 79

maps

books and games 220–221

encyclopaedia 123

of fictional worlds 220

Jerusalem 219

notations 219, 221

Platonic Forms 124

rulebooks 222

rules 221–222

two-dimensional 223n8

marketing 238–239, 257–258

Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) 25, 43, 244

Marvel comics 78

Marvel Snap (mobile game) 12–13

Marvel wargames 21

Mass Effect (Hudson) 92–94, 233

Mead, M. 84

mechanics, game 168–169, 208

media 42–43, 47n4

Mediawiki 141

MetaCritic (website) 122

metaphor 210

meta-plot 232

metonymy 210

Millar, M.: Kick-Ass 78

Miller, J. S. 60

Minecraft 122–123

Modern Times (Chaplin) 203, 204

money in gameplay 208, 257–261

Monopoly (Magie) 83, 224

Moorcock, M. 100

Moore, A.: Watchmen 78

motivation 245

multiplayer games 158

mythos 17

Narnia (Lewis) 3, 66–67

narrative gaming 207

narratives 16–22, 81, 207

defined 16

described 17

drama elements (Aristotle) 16–17

games 17–21

plot (drama element) 17

roleplaying game 21

Netrunner CCG (Garfield, Litzinger) 208

Never-Never Land 3

New Hope, A (Lucas) 185, 187, 193

Nin, A. 40

non-player character (NPC) 177, 233

nonsense 60–61

Oedipus Rex (Sophocles) 17, 191

Oliver Twist (Dickens) 116

On Writing (King) 39

open doors 187–188

open secrets 132–133

open-world video games, characters 110

Orientalism (Said) 85

original characters (OCs) 170

Ortelius, A. 219

Orwell, G. 217

Animal Farm 203

Outsider, The (Lovecraft) 145

Over the Edge (Laws) 207

Pacman (Iwatani) 83

Paco Sako (Albers) 163n3

paidic gaming 163n2

“pain points” 43

Pandemic (Leacock) 157

paracosm 9n3

Parker Brothers 224

Parker, G. S. 224

Peel, J. 129

phlebotinum 77–79

Photosynthesis (Hach) 157

“pinch points” 43

Planescape setting 121n2

Plato 124

Platonic Forms 124

players 100, 208, 234, 235n2, 246

categories 167

playtesting 70

plot armour 175–180

poetry 218

“point source” setting 80n2

Portal (Swift) 126, 242n7

Portnow, J. 92

Extra Credit (YouTube series) 91

Pramas, C.: Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 197

praxis 17

prime narrative 18

productisation 257

Prometheus (Scott) 32

psychodrama see psychographics and psychodrama

psychographics and psychodrama 160

described 165

feral segmentation 165

play and players, types of 167

roleplaying games 168–169

rules and mechanics of games 168–169

switches of setting engagement 170–172

railroading 177–178

Ray Arnold Principle 236–242

Ready-Made movement 251

realism and believability 39–47, 64, 69

reality 63–68

Renaissance 251

retcon or retroactive continuity 194

Return of the Jedi (Marquand) 17

Richard Scarry Interrogative 110–115, 137, 199

Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty 126

black box idea 76, 77

canon 74–75

phlebotinum 77–79

wikibuilding 74

Rise of Skywalker Visual Dictionary, The (Hidalgo) 185

Robin Hood 168

Roddenberry, G. 3, 85, 106

Rogers, K. 129

Rogue One (Edwards) 185

roleplaying games (RPGs) 4, 96n4, 106–107, 168

Apocalypse World 113

Call of Cthulhu 105

characters 110

fantasy 98–99, 106

Feng Shui (Robin Laws) 21

matching pace 199–200

SF 106

synecdoche and metonymy 213

tabletop 184

Romero, B. 12

Rosewater, M. 166

Rothfus, P. 40

rubber ducking 129

rulebooks 222

Rules Cyclopedia (Allston et al) 102n3

Ryan, A. 120

Said, E.: Orientalism 85

Saussure, F. D. 204

Saussure’s theory 204

scammers 259

Scarlet Pimpernel, The (Orczy) 114

Scarry, R.: Best Word Book Ever, The in 1961 111

Busy Busy Town 111

Busy Busy World 111

Schmuck Bait 188

scholars 170

science fiction (SF) 3, 32, 104

Amazing Stories (short story magazine) 32–33

“hard” 33

RPG 106

“soft” 33

“Secondary Belief” idea 168

self-publishing games 259

selling 43

Sentinels of the Multiverse (Badell et al) 230n4

setting bible 130

setting engagement, switches of

Doylist vs. Watsonian 171–172

engager vs. observer 170–171

scholar vs. creator 170

tourist vs. local 171

sexism 85

Shadowfist (Laws and Garcia) 21

Shadow of the Sith (Christopher) 185

signposting 237–238

signs and signifiers 203–209

Silmarillion, The (Tolkien) 217

Silvey, R. 9n3

Slay the Spire (Megacrit) 240

Slimwiki 141

Slow Horses (Smith) 152

Smith, W. 152

Socialisers 167

Space Invaders (Nishikado) 112

Space Quest 4 (Murphy and Crowe) 218

Spider-Man 114–115

Spiderman: Turn Off The Dark (Taymor and Bono) 5

Spire (Howitt and Taylor) 134n4

spoilers 180n3

Spongebob Squarepants technique 149–155

Stafford, G. 6

Star Trek 28, 29, 40, 41, 75–77, 85, 86, 104, 107, 117, 118, 136, 158, 171, 188, 218

Prime Directive 88n5

Star Wars 5, 17, 18, 35, 86, 104, 106, 107, 111, 112, 117, 153, 186, 187, 255

Andor 28–29

cantina (pipe-laying) 193

fans 185–186

finances 76

games 19

narratives 19

New Hope, A 32 see also laying pipe

statistics, world of

blurbs 215–216

mean, median and mode 214

over-generalisation and stereotype 215

prejudice or myopia 215

spread of data 215

stereotype 160–162

Steve Jackson Games 74

storytelling 206, 231, 241

structuralism 85

superheroes 143–144

Superman 233

surrealism 67

synecdoche and metonymy 210–216

technical discourse 33–34

Tedlow, R. 165

Tekumel (Barker) 6

Tennyson (Charge of the Light Brigade, The) 218

Terraforming Mars (Fryxelius) 197

testing 237, 247

Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The (Hooper) 114

theory of mind and perspective-taking 223n6

Thieves’ World (Asprin) 100

“Three Voices” of a game 18

Tokaido (Bauza) 157

To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee) 85

Tolkien, J. R. R. 3, 5, 9n1, 27, 37, 71, 86, 87, 105, 106, 116, 130, 151, 168, 175, 204–206, 217, 218

Hobbit, The 66

top-down approach of setting design 135–136

tourism 229, 230n5

tragedies 26–27

Train (Romero) 12

Trinity (Bates et al) 232

True History, The (Lucian) 175

Trump, D. 203

Trust (Hartley) 135

“tutoring” 94

TV Guide 122

TV Tropes 156n5

Twilight Imperium (Petersen) 82, 159, 160, 176

two-dimensional maps 223n8

Ulysses (Joyce) 241

umwelt theory 82

uncertainty see Rigidly Defined Areas of Doubt and Uncertainty

Unknown Armies (Tynes and Stolze) 164n4

Vampire: The Masquerade (Rein-Hagen et al) 30, 112

Vance (Dying Earth) 100

video games 94, 126

players, types of 167

Vikings, The (Fleischer) 4

Vincent, B. 9n3

Warhammer 40,000 10, 11, 123

Warhammer Fantasy 19–20, 26, 64, 113, 119, 252

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (Pramas) 197

Watchmen (Moore) 78

Western culture 211, 252, 256n1

Whedon, J. 106

Buffy the Vampire Slayer 196n4

White Bear and Red Moon (Stafford) 6

Wick, J. 3, 5, 9n2

Wikidot 141

Wizard of Earthsea, A (Le Guin) 145

worldbuilding 5, 7, 83, 103, 205–206

encyclopaedia-style 206

world communication 7, 98, 103

World of Darkness, The 112, 113, 232

worldtesting 70–71

World War II 85, 105

X-Men 114

Zelda 122–123