World Building For Game Designers - Part 2
Lesson Two: The Purpose of Setting
WBGD is a series of lessons on the importance of world building in general and for game designers in particular by multi-award winning game designer and world-builder Steve Dee. Each lesson stands alone or can be read in a series. Each entry ends with an exercise for the reader to stretch their world building skills, examine their world and look for ways to improve it, or as a prompt to solve problems they have encountered in their creations
In wargames they call it fluff. The implication being it is lighter than air; the stuff that “doesn’t really matter”. You buy a rule book and there’s a bunch of “flavour text”—fiction, art, expository text explaining the world and the units. The opposite is “crunch”: the “actual” “rules” that tell you what the unit does; how many dice to roll and which ones hit.
I’m sorry about all the quotation marks. Gaming discourse is difficult because a lot of people say things that are absolutely wrong, and this particularly happens in the words we are forced to use. But I digress.
Of course, “fluff” is, in fact, part of the rules. Often a load-bearing part! A critical part of the experience. The absolute GOAT where RPG design is concerned is Robin D. Laws and as he once so famously said “fluff ain’t so fluffy”. Fluff has a purpose and is a potent driver of game experience. For a very simple example you can start with Brenda Romero’s Train, a puzzle game of trying to move the most blocks to destinations as efficiently as possible while hinting that the blocks just might be German citizens being moved to concentration camps.
Fluff controls how you see mechanics.
Last installment we talked about the general question of the purpose of world building: as in, is it for a movie, a book, a comic or a game, and if a game, what kind of game and what kind of things does that game need? As I just said, fluff conditions us on how to feel about what we are doing by giving it meaning. It simply wouldn’t be as rewarding playing the very same rules if it were all abstract, because we wouldn’t get the sense of story taking place. By making it elves with lasguns fighting a last stand for the Bridge of Plotpoint, it takes a very different shape in our minds. And that’s why we look at the art and read the fiction in our rulebooks: so the rules matter more.
But fluff goes even further than this: it explains what mechanics do and teaches us how to use them. The new Marvel Snap 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 Spider-man (ie that his origin story involves the death of his Uncle Ben), this gives huge context to that rule. It even makes the rule seem “natural”—of course that’s what an Uncle Ben card should do. Without even thinking, you will want to add this card to a Spider-man deck. And I 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.
Another great example of this intuitive understanding through story is the Magic: The Gathering 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 your play area, ready to attack said opponent. Along the development cycle, the Akroan setting was developed to be more lion focused, so the card was changed to be an Akroan Lion, and all of a sudden none of the playtesters understood what the card was for. People both instinctively and thoughtfully left it out of their decks. They found it confusing and dismissed it as useless. The designers made it a horse again and people got it.
The point of mechanics, of crunch, is to make the mechanics have a sense of meaning, to make those D6s rolls really feel like elves shooting their lasguns. The point of setting, of fluff, is to make those mechanics make sense to us, so we understand them on an emotional and instinctual level, so we learn them faster and remember them longer.
And let’s be clear: this works even if there isn’t a perfect marriage between the mechanic and the meaning of it. Uncle Ben could give Spider-man +2 damage and we would still have a strong connection with it. But it stops working, and pulls us out of the game, if there is a large enough discordance between the two. You couldn’t make an Uncle Ben card that made Spider-man weaker. Everyone would look at it and want an explanation. And even if the card was amazingly good, a lot of players wouldn’t play it. Or if they did, they would rename it in the jargon. A subculture fig leaf would be invented to make it make sense. An example of this figleaf is that the lasguns in Warhammer 40k are so weak they are often referred to as glorified flashlights and a vast fan-imagined setting re-write imagines them as being given to the infantry out of absolute disregard for the lives of the soldiers. The mechanics clashed, so the players rewrote the fluff in their heads to fit.
Take note of the symbiotic relationship here, the way each thing feeds into the other. It’s the mechanics that make the fluff feel true and correct. It’s the fluff that makes the mechanics feel important and full of meaning. Each confirms the other and makes them stronger. This is why fluff isn’t so fluffy, and why a setting is so key to how a game works and how we experience it. It can’t be separated out. The two work hand in glove.
And so far we’ve only talked about when they are right next to each other, working together. Fluff is everywhere, too, not just entwined with these obvious mechanics. It’s in every part of the game, preparing us for the experience and shaping how we understand it. Which means, to return to those quotation marks, fluff is a kind of mechanic. The art on the box, the font in the title, the symbols on the cards: all of these things are affecting us emotionally and mentally, preparing us for the experience of the game, shaping our perceptions, illuminating that experience. Everything, really, is a mechanic. Hence all those quotation marks. There are no “actual” “rules”—everything is a rule, and setting is maybe the biggest rule of them all.
And so world building for games is a kind of game design, not just a necessary component. That’s why game designers are often so good at it. If you want to be a good world builder, design some games. And if you want to be a good game designer, you have to learn to build worlds. That’s why we’re here.
Exercise:
Last time we zoomed out and stepped back. This exercise, choose a single rule in your game, or a single card or character or component, or step of play. What setting is attached to that idea? Look for every part of setting, from the words used to describe it to the art to the flavour text, to the symbols to the idea of what is being done in game (an attack, a move etc.) Look for parallels. Sometimes this will be obvious: a mechanic that moves a pawn around the board is easy to link to a movement of a character, for example; a Move action for an RPG character literally moves that character in the shared imagination space as well as having some rules meaning as well. Whether you find a strong parallel or not, see if you can find a different meaning for that mechanic, or a different mechanic for that meaning, just to see how it feels. Does this destroy the strong parallel you found? Does it improve a weaker connection? You might not keep these changes of course. This isn’t about fixing your game so much as building your skills. Pick something, play with it, and see what you learn.
This IGDN blog article is brought to you by Steve Dee of Tin Star Games. If you want to get in touch with the contributor they can be reached at tinstargames@gmail.com or visit their website at www.tinstargames.com.
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network's blog series. The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the IGDN or its members.