Last week at Edge, I wrote a piece called “You Build Worlds.” It starts like this:
So I was trying to suss out the one thing that makes me love games – the quality that keeps me playing a title for fifty hours, instead of ditching it after five minutes. Was it the visual style? The story? The reload mechanic? Could I pin it down to something as simple as fun? I thought it over, and I figured it out: the thing I want most from a game is a really good world.
We know from our experiences with Tolkien, Star Wars and the rest that a good world can pull us in and keep us hooked. And while games can tell a great story, building a world is even more important and more natural: the world is the platform for all the stories that come out of the game, and the themes of that world guide us and help us decide what works in the game and what doesn’t.
Here’s the stake I’m sticking in the ground: in a modern videogame, building a believable world is just as important as delivering fun, challenging gameplay.
Now, a “believable world” can mean a lot of things. Lore-heavy RPG franchises build worlds, but so do tiny indie titles. Canabalt has a world, even though we just see a sliver of it. But either way, worldbuilding is important—and not many people are talking about it. How do you pull one off? What are the best practices and tricks of the trade? Should worlds obey a strict, error-free canon, or can they be mythical and malleable? How do we get our heads around this gigantic and nebulous and yet totally important undertaking?
So here’s my idea: I’m going to run a series of daily posts over the next couple of weeks, that dig into some of my favorite fictional worlds and dissect what works and doesn’t work about them. You, the reader, will use the comments box here to throw in ideas, argue with me, and shape how this turns out. (See Michael Abbott’s Fun Factor for a brilliant example.)
I’ll be looking at videogames, but I’ll also use comics, history, music, and real-life spaces—anything that gives us a useful example. The first post, going up tomorrow, will cover Crackdown 2. And all of them will be listed on the blog by the category Just Another World.
Other “brainysphere” bloggers are tackling this idea, and as I see them, I’ll link them. For now, check out J. P. Grant’s post at Infinite Lag, which explores Batman: Arkham Asylum and other examples; and give a listen to Scott Juster and Jorge Albor on the Experience Points podcast.
May I suggest Brutal Legend? If there was ever a game that had a great world, but not-so-great gameplay, that’d be the one. I know you liked it quite a bit despite its flaws. That game made so many mistakes but I just can’t stay mad a it due to its wonderful universe.
World building is so crucial to crafting a convincing fiction. Unfortunately, this tends to lead to game designers who think every little morsel of information that they know about the world must be told explicitly to the player. Rather, as a player you just know when a world has been properly built. Like your example of Canabalt, we don’t need to know the entire story of the world, but we need to know it exists. One example that often came up in my creative writing studies in regards to character development (a subset of world-building) was “Who would your character vote for and why?” Of course, the potential reader did not need to know this, but if I the writer knew it, I would be able to craft a rounder, more convincing character.
A great example of this in games, and one I would be really interested in seeing explored is the world of Half-Life (and, by extension, Half-Life 2). The world and its story and characters (again, both a subset of the world) are there, but rarely is the player ‘told’ about them. Yet, despite how much you don’t know, the world convinces you purely because the designer clearly knows.
I think the original Halo is another stellar example of this but I don’t want to give you too much work.
Jeffrey, you read my mind – I’m going to tackle Brutal Legend in the next couple posts.
Brendan, I like your example of “Who would your character vote for and why?” It’s a perfect example of something that you should be able to infer from what you’ve written, but that you would never actually put in the text. And Half-Life does this really well, by giving you a huge chunk of backstory in a single newspaper headline hanging off the wall (“ALIENS INVADE – HUMANS SURRENDER AFTER 5 HOURS” or however it went).
I’m actually starting to work under the assumption – and maybe this is because I’ve listened to Red Letter Media’s Phantom Menace review too many times – that the less you need to say about a world, the better. If the player/reader/consumer/bystander has to consume tons of lore just to get started, that seems like a crippling failure – whereas a world that makes perfect sense the first time you see it, and then gets richer and richer the more time you invest in it, seems like the ideal. But I’m looking for a counterexample, a world that I love because it’s so knotty and byzantine, but is actually worth getting over the learning curve.
When I read your column I was like, “YES!” This is something I have been thinking about for quite a while now; one of my first blog posts I had planned was to write about games and worldbuilding. I used to write fantasy stories a lot, and much of the online conversation between fantasy writers is about good worldbuilding practices. A LOT of this stuff can apply to games, and not just fantasy games. I never got around to writing that post, but this is just the reminder I need to do it. So, thanks, and I’m really looking forward to this series!
Chris,
A good counter-example might be Frank Herbert’s Dune – the series of novels, not any of the associated media. The world is incredibly byzantine, as you put it, weaving religion, politics, ecology, and sci-fi concepts like prescience into a massive & challenging tapestry. It’s quite overwhelming at first blush, but very rewarding the more you dig into Herbert’s vision.
I love the David Lynch film for all its style, but it’s pretty objectively bad. And that’s probably because Dune presents the kind of universe that’s nearly impossible to successfully translate to any other medium. The two SciFi Channel miniseries made an admirable effort, but even they fell short. Your point about “explaining” above applies perfectly to the absurd, awkward voice-over introduction scene of the 1984 film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vXmDWtwj2k0 (The extended edition is even worse! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FUAQ-dAh0g&feature=related)
I’ve played three games set in the Dune universe: the original DOS adventure game, simply titled “Dune”; the famous RTS Dune II/Dune 2000; and a pretty good follow-up RTS, Emperor: Battle for Dune. All had their charms, but none captured even a fraction of the richness of the text – simply by nature of these genres and the limitations of old tech.
It would be fascinating to see what a company like BioWare could do with the Dune universe, given the license. Of course, with Herbert’s son and that idiot Star Wars novel hack who ghostwrites for him having cannibalized the franchise for the last decade with their abysmal spinoff books, that scenario seems regretfully unlikely.