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 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.
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 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?
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Worldbuilding for Game Designers

Steve Dee

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Designed cover image: Shutterstock

First edition published 2025

by CRC Press
2385 NW Executive Center Drive, Suite 320, Boca Raton FL 33431

and by CRC Press

4 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

CRC Press is an imprint of Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

© 2025 Steve Dee

Reasonable efforts have been made to publish reliable data and information, but the author and
publisher cannot assume responsibility for the validity of all materials or the consequences of their
use. The authors and publishers have attempted to trace the copyright holders of all material
reproduced in this publication and apologize to copyright holders if permission to publish in this
form has not been obtained. If any copyright material has not been acknowledged please write and let
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Except as permitted under U.S. Copyright Law, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced,
transmitted, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying, microfilming, and recording, or in any information
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For permission to photocopy or use material electronically from this work, access
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Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks and are
used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.

ISBN: 9781032862293 (hbk)

ISBN: 9781032856810 (pbk)
ISBN: 9781003521914 (ebk)

DOI: 10.1201/9781003521914

Typeset in Minion Pro

by codeMantra

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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
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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
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Acknowledgements

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

1. 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.
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 I
General Principles

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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

1. 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.
2. 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”.
3. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. Again, see Chapters 18 and 31.
OceanofPDF.com
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
1. 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.
2. We will return to this metaphor in Chapter 34.
3. Sometimes beliefs about reality are so strong that they become
archetypes, which we’ll talk about in Chapter 23.
4. 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.
5. We’ll be talking about MacGuffins in setting in Chapters 11 and 17.
OceanofPDF.com
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

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

2. We will look at how to find your start point and not get overwhelmed
in Chapter 14.
3. We haven’t explained these concepts properly yet, but we will in
Chapter 12.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. You could even go one step back and go “does fishing exist, or do
people only think it does?”.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. The internet is becoming increasingly destroyed by AI slop, but those

two websites remain excellent.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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!
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.)
6. And also in his other works such as Culture and Imperialism.
7. We will talk more about literal metaphors in Chapter 30.
OceanofPDF.com
 II
Breaking Ground

OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. Often the term worldbuilding is used as a synonym for this definition
of Lore. We will talk more about this in later chapters.
3. We will also return to this point in Chapter 34.
4. 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!
5. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. For more on this, see Chapter 35.

2. 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!
3. 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.
4. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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
1. We will explain what a world bible is in Chapter 19.
2. 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.
3. Refer back to Chapter 7 for how finding a question you can’t answer is
important for creation.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

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

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

Phenomenon.
2. We will return to this some more in Chapter 33.
3. From his essay On Fairy Stories, published in 1947.
4. 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.
5. We’ll come back to this idea in Chapter 37.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. After all, geography comes from the Greek meaning literally to draw
the world.
3. We will go into this a lot more in Chapter 31.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. We will talk more about this art of slicing time in Chapter 28.
2. We will talk more about stress-testing our settings in Chapter 34.
3. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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
1. Refer back to Chapter 5 - Astrology not Astronomy - and Chapter 12
for the discussion of umwelt.
2. Answer the Richard Scarry Interrogative, as described in Chapter
3. 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?
4. Making sure you hit things that the audience cares about is why you
want your setting to Go Home, as discussed in Chapter 15.
5. 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.
6. I will return to the tour guide approach in Chapter 32.
7. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. Primarily by Elizabeth Sampat in her book Empathy Engines (2017),

which I recommend.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. The inherent sexism and narrowness of culture in the name choice are
worth noting.
3. 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).
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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.
8. In his essay On Fairy Stories (1947).
9. I will talk more about how games engage us into a “doll house”
imaginative state in Chapter 31.
10. “The Future’s in the Past”.
https://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2006/jul/09/featuresreview.r
eview, Accessed 8/12/2024.
11. Likewise, we tend to read modern genre fiction the way we read
historical fiction.
12. 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.
13. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. For more on the perpetual now, see Chapter 28.

2. For more on Jimmy Olsen, see Chapter 33.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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!
6. This can however also lead to the same false promise issue, as in
Endnote 4.
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 III
Developing Your World

OceanofPDF.com
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

1. Website: https://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2024/08/they-
dont-make-readers-like-th.html, accessed 10th of September 2024.
2. See Chapter 24.
3. This is an important jump forwards in time, bringing in the concerns
from Chapter 25.
4. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. You also can’t write that all at once, as discussed in Chapter 20.
2. But be careful with those implied closed doors, as discussed in the last
chapter.
3. See Chapter 11.
4. 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.
5. We will talk more about what to present and not present in Chapter 35.
OceanofPDF.com
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

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

2. See Chapter 16.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. This is the plot of “Let That Be Your Last Battlefield”, an episode of
Star Trek season 3 (1969) by Gene Coon.
4. 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.
5. Here we get into the interconnective matrices discussed in Chapter 20.
6. 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.
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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

1. 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.
2. However, see the discussion on the problems with ability scores in
Chapter 12.
3. See Chapter 24, and also more on this in the next chapter.
4. We talked about this in Chapter 23 too and will take a deeper look in
Chapter 36.
5. A related issue with representing norms is they also tend to erase
disability, another area where care in representation must be taken.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. As discussed in Chapter 18.

2. 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.
3. In his 2018 book The Domain of Images.
4. 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.
5. See Chapter 24 for more on this “belief play”.
6. 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”).
7. 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.
8. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. See Chapter 24 for the other seven kinds of fun.

2. 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.
3. One of my favourite rules I’ve encountered read simply “Dead
characters can perform no actions”.
4. 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.
5. Tourism of course can be exploitative and we’ll talk more about that in
Chapter 35.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. See Chapter 11 on how to direct attention.
3. 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.
4. See the example of the Akroan Lion in Chapter 2.
5. 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.
6. The technical term for a fitting name is an aptronym.
7. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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
1. See Chapter 6.
2. 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.”
3. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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).
4. Which isn’t the same thing at all as feeding things into a Large
Language Model.
OceanofPDF.com
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

1. 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.
2. 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.
OceanofPDF.com
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
OceanofPDF.com
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
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