World Building For Game Designers
World Building For Game Designers
Lesson Three: World Building is Creating Narrative
Steve Dee
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.
As discussed in Lesson One, world building isn’t something that happens outside of the creation of the art in which it is part. It is not an external thing to that art, but intrinsic to the making of it and our understanding of it. If we are creating a story, the world is naturally part of that story and runs on the needs of that story. We cannot get away from it. The human brain is made of the stories we tell ourselves, and we apply it to everything we see. All art, inevitably, tells stories to us because that is how we think. The pieta is held perfectly still in marble, but it is a story of a mother losing her son. Around the edges we see a life of two people, and that forms a tiny world. Even when we are making static art—art that has no inherent narrative—stories creep in. Even chess and go tell stories of battle. Games are an interactive form of art, and so have even more story in them than sculpture or painting, even when they are at their most abstract.
I want us to think about how constructing a world necessarily means constructing a story. Even when entirely static, outside of a novel, film, game, or anything with an obvious narrative, worlds still have stories to them. Worlds are made of stories, just like humans are. And so, worldbuilding is really story building.
When people think of story, what they're usually talking about is more properly defined as narrative—the chronological events and choices that play out around the central characters. Prose fiction, films, and plays—these media are known for their reliance on narrative. In most western media, narrative is either front and center or very close to it. So, when I say story here we will focus mostly on narrative—the things that happen to the characters and what the characters choose to do.
Narrative tends to be centered around conflicts. There are things we want, things we need, and things standing in our way of getting them. So, when I say world building is story building, what I am really talking about is: what are the conflicts that drive the world? Inherent to the world will be some sort of struggle, whether external, internal, conceptual, or any and all of these, concurrent, or consecutive. And here is the rub: games also need struggle.
Over the last few decades game designers have come to use the term “orthogame” to help clarify here. An orthogame is a structured competition (typically between two or more players) with clear rules, a defined outcome, and a way to win or lose. Terminology is still being discussed for the larger subset of activities that include orthogames, but one popular term is idiogame, which refers to an interactive activity where one or more players makes choices or takes actions leading to a non-predetermined outcome (although it can be solving a puzzle, so the outcome is to find the solution or to not). For the most part, when I am talking about world-building for game design I am generally considering the definition of the game to be something narrower here than every kind of whimsical or playful activity. For our purposes, the orthogame and the idiogame require a struggle, against the rules or the other players, toward an outcome.
Since games need some sort of struggle, they need worlds rich in conflict, and thus, in the narrative. The more your world brings conflict-driven narratives to the forefront, the more they will support a game.
Note that the narrative doesn’t always have to be just about characters A and B going through some experience or task. A story can be bigger or more archetypal than that. It can also be internal and psychological, or metaphorical, or political. Star Wars isn’t just about Luke fighting Vader, or the Empire fighting the Rebels. Those are the core narratives, but there’s a deeper pattern that recurs across several narratives that build and build. These share themes and motifs, which become the DNA of the stories, and thus of the world. Star Wars isn’t just a world about planets. It’s about good versus evil, freedom versus oppression, and self-determination versus destiny.
Another way to think of this idea is that narrative explains the verbs in your setting. It can be easy to have nouns—electric mice that can only say their own names, cowboys, cops, aliens, dragons, magic, planetary travel, big cities, great mountains, whatever—but all of these are just static things, just nouns. They exist to make the setting beautiful but they don’t drive action. The “verbs” of the setting are the calls to action and driving narratives. That’s why it is always Cops and Robbers—Cops versus Robbers—so there is always something to do. That something was mostly “kill each other”, but that is the verb. The conflict. The story (or thing that creates a story, as you prefer) is “these guys want to kill each other.”
It might not sound like much, but that’s the story of the worlds of chess and go, and even tic tac toe. The house of X and the house of O might have once lived in harmony—but no longer.
Exercise:
Find a game you have played often; the more abstract, the better, and create a story around the conflict within it. If it already has one, create a brand new one while keeping the core mechanics the same. Why are they fighting? What are they fighting for? What might that imply about the larger world?
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.