World-Building: Transporting Yourself into Your Home-Made World

World-Building as a Hobby

World-Building is a fairly old hobby. There's a form of make believe that as we come formalized over the last two centuries, and dovetails with a number of other hobbies such as fantasy role-playing games, computer games, creative writing, and Wargames.

Despite it being formalized, it doesn't generally have a community of its own. There are no great historians purely of World-Building. Few World-Building forums with large numbers of members exist. Instead, it tends to be a secondary or tertiary focus of other hobby communities. For example, creative writers often talk about taking notes as they designed the world in which their stories take place, role playing game forums discuss designing campaign worlds that support their narratives, and the Kriegspiel community where it focuses on playing a historical games, discusses how to set up a scenario with internal logic to help run the Kriegspiel.

We do know for a fact that collaborative World -Building in particular has been around a lot longer than either role-playing games for the modern Free Kriegspiel Revolution. The Brontë sisters, for example, spoke several times about a shared imaginary world they built together. They would sit around talking about a new place in that world as a part of a game they played. Then they would tell stories about the people places and things within that world in a way that presaged role-playing games pretty well. 

World-Building is Best When Collaborative or Shared

As a general rule, World-Building on its own is only satisfying if either a you are doing it as a collaborative exercise of imaginative description, or be using it to support some other hobby, such as writing fiction or playing a war game.

Part of the reason for this is that World-Building in your head is not a particularly satisfying exercise; it is essentially semi-structured daydreaming. World-Building becomes a more satisfying and more productive when it includes some kind of productivity.

This is in part because an imagined world is static. You can describe people, places, and things in it, but it only really comes to life if you are producing something that allows you to interact with that world

If for example, you imagine a haunted Old West town, you might have an idea of who the people are, you might know the name of the saloon and what drinks are behind the counter, you might know about the dastardly schemes of the over-ambitious general store owner, but until you actually start doing something other than building the world, it is just a snapshot. 

The moment you start sitting down and sketching a character, you have done more than giving them an identity, you have them pose in your mind's eye so that you can draw them. They become more real.

And this is where most people get their satisfaction out of World-Building: when that world comes alive in some kind of narrative fashion. For example:

• When you write a story about events in the world, that world changes, and becomes more dynamic. If you play a war game in it you and your opponents are deciding the fates of communities within the world, and developing tales of individual heroes within it. 
• If you are playing a role playing game you use your mind's eye to freely interact with characters within that world, talking to them, helping them with problems, for working their schemes, for generally changing their lives.
• If you are building a video game out of your world, you are creating a realistic space in which people can explore it.

Building a World vs. Build a Narrative Scaffold

This in and of itself means that there's an important distinction to be made: One can produce fantastical fiction set in a alternate reality without actually World-Building. Many Science Fiction and Fantasy authors, for example, only develop the world of their in so much as they need to for the narrative to exist. An alien species in worlds created this way doesn't have a culture or a language or even an appearance until it is important to support the protagonist in a narrative which isn't, in and of itself, about exploring the world, but rather about making a statement about our world in some way shape or form. 

I would say that in these cases World-Building is incidental and doesn't really fit the hobby mould. Is a difference akin to knowing how to use a needle and thread to patch a hole in your shirt versus someone who makes their own clothes for a hobby. When discussing World-Building this is a very useful distinction to make. Such projects don't need a well-built world, only a scaffold to support their narrative.

Getting Into Your World

Ultimately the process of World-Building demands that the Creator spend some time visiting the world. It is hard to have one in front of you and not have a chance to explore it especially when you put so much of yourself into it.

World-Building comes with an impulse to create a means of exploring that world.

I suspect this is the real driving force that has made both video games and role-playing games such an important part of the 21st century. People have more access to tools and time for creativity. That's about anyone who wants to imagine a better world has thousands of examples of how it's done and what can be achieved with a little constructive daydreaming, and then can find a means to bring it to life that is incredibly satisfying.

I believe it's also part of the appeal of Open Source game engines and open source game movements like the Old School Renaissance, because it gives you the building blocks to very quickly construct a means of getting into that world and exploring it with your friends. Perhaps it's one of the great appeals of solo role-playing games as well. They can give you a motivating force and dynamism while exploring.

I suspected 3D modeling and AI assisted creativity tools expand, people will be able to go in and construct chunks of their world to explore without needing a strong background in game design and development. Possibly even make video games based on there experience with no coding knowledge.

I suspect that's one of the reasons why Dungeon Alchemist is a piece of software has wowed me so thoroughly this past year.

I've spent a lot of time on this blog sharing new worlds I'm working on through the hack systems I've created to express them. Tragically, not all of them even got to be played, but the act of creating a world is its own hobby that I enjoy almost as much as playing in them. And much of my rules hacking advice dovetail strongly with World-Building advice. Some of it in the past has been nothing but oral building advice.

It's over the next few articles that I hope to start by talking about World-Building as a hobby and techniques and tools for building worlds that have worked for me in the past, whether I'm designing them for a role-playing game or for my own edification.