Novelist M. John Harrison has nothing good to say about worldbuilding in sci-fi stories:
“Worldbuilding is dull.”
“Above all, worldbuilding is not technically neccessary. It is the great clomping foot of nerdism.” (Via Boing Boing.)
I’ve read sci-fi (and fantasy) novels where the entire focus is on worldbuilding, they definitely smacked of mental wankery on the author’s part. But I’ve also read plenty of kickass sci-fi (and fantasy) novels that heavily emphasize worldbuilding — I don’t agree with Mike’s premise. Would Tolkien’s books have been nearly as enjoyable if he wasn’t a passionate worldbuilder?
That said, even though I’m a big proponent of not building more of your campaign worlds than you need to, reading Mike’s post was a bit of a kick in the teeth. I know the parallels are inexact, but worldbuilding for a story and worldbuilding for a game do have a lot in common — and in both fields, it’s an enjoyable activity for the author/GM. And while I think he takes it too far, he does have a point.
After thinking about it a bit, what I take away from his post is that “enjoyable for the GM” doesn’t necessarily equal “enjoyable for your players.” I’ve never been a hardcore homebrewer, so this could just be my personal GMing biases coming out, but I believe worldbuilding should be done in moderation.
As with any aspect of GMing, if you focus on any one element to the exclusion of all others (worldbuilding included), you’re doing your players a disservice — and your game will suffer for it.
What do you think?
No worldbuilding, no fun for this GM.
Really, statements like “worldbuilding… is the great clomping foot of nerdism.” Should be highly suspect. It’s as relevant and meaningful as saying “only dorks build ships in bottles.” Who cares? Does the dork you happen to know enjoy the process? Excellent! Now the only thing we know about the speaker or his position is that he is… a wanker.
Although I see the logic of saying: if your players don’t see it, it isn’t very worthwhile to play… I would rather save DMing effort on things like stat blocks, as per your post a couple of days ago.
I like worldbuilding, and it’s relatively light work that comes in handy in various spots. You can pull from it when a player says: so what’s over that hill over there, and another player says… “yeah!” A meticulously crafted stat block, on the other hand, can be largely invalidated by a missed encounter.
The size and depth of your world should reflect the kind of game you run. Is your campaign a sandbox or a model railroad?
If your players prefer a relatively simply adventure model in which events are generally linear, you probably serve your game best by minimizing your world-building. You only need to create enough of a world so that your players can get to the business of saving it.
If your group, however, likes to stray from the path (if there even is one) and do its own thing every session, you might want to invest more time in developing your world. It can be hard to create authentic cultures, personal histories for major regional players, good regions for adventuring, etc. all on the fly. If the PCs are going to run around and check things out as the mood hits them, then you’re going to need the details.
While for a traditional home campaign I see how this can be true, I think it loses some validity when extended to the segment of the hobby involved in setting creation & publishing.
Following the idea of Tolkien, had the effort into language building (one of his passions) not been followed, names of individuals, societies, places, etc. would have suffered. As we all know, poorly chosen names can have a significant impact on the suspension of disbelief.
Likewise, without really knowing the religious beliefs of a society, creating believable and consistent customs and traditions becomes more difficult.
Without the framework of the planet, e.g. its relation to its sun, greenhouse levels, latitude and longitude, it can become inconsistent to suddenly have a horrible tsunami or drought… Or to simply have a tropical rainforest only a few kingdoms away from a desert.
Without thorough worldbuilding a well-developed setting loses believability. The more we ask players and Narrators to forget the reality they are used to, without providing a truly internally consistent idea, the more difficult it becomes to maintain a “real” appearance. This can make the mental transition from “real” world to “game” world more difficult.
Ok, I’m the biggest Tolkien fan I know and I have to say that reading tolkien’s books isn’t enjoyable. They are long, history books. Sometimes they are quite boring. Most of my friends don’t finish them. I love them because of their longwinded worldbuilding. The world is what draws me to Tolkien’s works .
Building the world so in-depth like that lets my mind go off and making up multitudes of stories in the little nooks and cracks that are left behind in any inevitable world system. Like Tolkien, however, big expansive worlds are not for everyone. Some people are happy to play in a generic fantasy setting, while some people want to know the names of the elven queens 3rd cousin. It is one of those personal preference things. So yeah, in some circumstances worldbuilding can be a pedantic exercise on the part of the author, but for some people it is what draws them to the work.
As for the issue of Gming, I prefer to have that deep broad world behind me, and let it out in dribbles for the players. Takes a long while to get the players into a full world view (flashlight vs light bulb), but you don’t blind them with tons of detail they don’t necessarily want. If I tell a person about the couple of things that are of high importance to their Gun-Angel character, then they get the urge for more about other parts of the world. Keep that accessible to them, but don’t push it in their face, and I think players will be chomping at the bit for more.
I think comes down to what is the focus of the story or the game. If the purpose is to explore your world through the vehicle of a plot, then worldbuilding is vital. If the world is merely a background and the story can be set in different worlds easily, then in-depth worldbuilding is unnecessary.
Yet to just dismiss worlbuilding regardless of intent is arrogant in my opinoin. I do agree though that some GMs expect their world to be some sort of amazing experience for the players by itself. Your world is merely a setting if you don’t draw the players into it through actual play. Otherwise I couldn’t care less about how much material you have.
This gives us a clue to the psychological type of the anti-worldbuilder & the anti-worldbuilder’s victim, & makes us very afraid.
I get a definite sense of “I don’t like this, so you shouldn’t either”.
Frankly, I appreciate the internal consistency of a well build fantasy or sci-fi world. I don’t need an encyclopedia, but well thought out details make it much easier to suspend my disbelief and appreciate the talent of the writer.
On the other hand, you could just put a Star Trek nose-wrinkle on a human and call him alien… 😀
Gah… I’m losing it.
My post should have “The converse of his Big Point is equally valid:” preceding it, but it got lost in the clipboard.
My post-fu needs improving…
Robin’s laws of good gaming,
You want your players go have an emotional connection so let them read everything about your setting.
I am building a variant of the diamond throne setting just off the map, and I have a thread that any player can read, and then I am creating all the secrets about the setting, keeping those for myself.
But never create more than you need.
I was once solidly in the category of ‘World Builder’. I had composed a magnificent world, and I gathered players around me, and let them join with me in being tourists in the world I had created. And that was the problem. The game I was running was more about the world I’d created and its history and geography, than the players or the game, and I just shake my head when I think about it.
I agree that this comes down to the group. Certainly if you play D&D with a group of Sociologists or Cultural Anthropologists, you may be playing a very different game than the rest of us. Now, I build as much world as is needed to satisfy my players and their characters. The world is all fluff, meant to provide backdrop for the players to have fun with their characters.
But I’m no Tolkien 😛
Lots of writers have lots of contradicting things to say about writing. Particularly when it’s the form of, “I’m making an outlandish statement in order to stir things up,” I don’t feel like it’s particularly worthwhile to pay it much heed.
For what it’s worth, Dune’s probably my favorite science-fiction universe, and also quite heavy on the world building. Given that a large number of science fiction stories could be said to begin with, “What if X?” it seems to me that the process of figuring out how X changes the world (ie, “world-building”) is pretty much at the core of science-fiction.
I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Fantasy, probably ironically, seems to place less importance (as a genre) on “world-building” activities. Most fantasy worlds I’ve seen don’t have any sort of interesting objective or theme to explore, they’re just rehashes of Tolkein’s world with a few changes here and there. Macro-level things (Elves are aloof, Dwarves are gruff, people use swords, live in hamlets and castles, etc.) are pretty much going to be the same and you don’t really need to spend any effort on bothering to explain it.
I guess with Tolkein there’s a big difference between LoTR and the Simarilion. The first has enough story to carry you along through the history lesson while the second is nothing but world-building wankering! 😛
For me there’s a great desire to do worldbuilding, as this is also why I really geek out over something like the Marvel or DC Universes. Reading about characters and ideas woven over seventy years until you have thousands of stories that all combine together to form some kind of cohesive whole. There are those stories which are outside of the ‘official cannon’ but are still enjoyed – like What If? because they play on the whole vibe of the setting. It’s like improvisational jazz.
Getting back to gaming, worldbuilding is a seductive exercise, but if you can’t bring it back to “fun” for the players, it serves no purpose except to fill the empty spaces in the GM’s life.
I was a worldbuilding junkie when I was younger. I enjoyed it a lot more than actually running games. These days I just don’t have the time for it, nor do I really miss it. Well, I do, but not that much.
I recently discovered cooperative worldbuilding when testdriving Burning Empires with my players. It was thrilling, and also kept the effort very focused. We don’t have any unnecessary detail and nobody had to study the world before the game. I think I’m adopting it to many other games from now on.
I have a long-term gaming buddy who’s an aspiring writer. People hate his games because the players are always “spectators” on a guided tour of his latest cool world-building efforts. And he can’t understand why his games always fall apart.
I’m a worldbuilding addict. Ever since I was a kid I’ve loved maps and history. I am also (for better or worse) a huge critic of settings and game worlds. I have created 2 of my own game worlds (1 scifi & 1 historical-fantasy) and I loved every minute of it. My players enjoy learning about my setting to varying degrees so it can be rewarding.
I don’t believe you can over build a world (in a practical sense.) If you are enjoying it then go for it, but don’t expect all of your players to be as interested or to be appreciative. It needs to be motivated primarily by personal satisfaction.
-Kerry
Tonight on “As the Intertubes Turn”: artist says that things he doesn’t like are bad-wrong-fun.
“It also ties in well with Monte Cook’s suggestion in his old Dungeoncraft column of attaching a “secret” to every major fact in a campaign.”
Minor Qualification: That idea game from Dungeoncraft when Ray Winniger was writing it. Monthe may have kept the idea in the later columns. The point is solid, though.
On the larger topic, I look at it this way. When you write a non-fiction essay or report or such, there are several stages in the process (if you know what you are doing):
1. Discovery – using a variety of methods to discover all the stuff you want to include. Brainstorming is the most well-known discovery method, but there are others–including “The Topics” from Aristotle.
2. Rough draft – turn all the discovered stuff into something roughly resembling the final product.
3. Editing for unity/completeness – making sure you cut the extraneous stuff and didn’t forget anything.
4. Editing for coherence and clarity – getting everything in the right spot, tweaking the word choice, and thinking about paragraph structure.
5. Editing for spelling and grammar, followed by final, overall proofing.
6. Layout.
Of course, in a product intended to be sold, you’ll often have experts working on certain steps. To the extent that you are doing something creative, you’ll short-circuit certain steps at times. (Try using brainstorming for a poetry sometime; not much there. 🙂 ) However, for the parts that you do yourself, a key ingredient is knowing when to cut something out, abandon the process (because this material just isn’t working), and so forth.
That said, I find world-building to be highly productive if one approaches is as non-fiction writing. *Sometimes*, the value in world building is the discovery process itself. You make a note about some obscure but interesting fact in the world, include it with other organized notes, and you’ve wrung everything useful there is to wring out of that nugget–until such times as the players run with. Other times, you take something all the way through the process and publish it. Most stuff loses its usefullness early rather than late.
It’s true that you should only produce what you need. Trick is, you don’t really know what you need until you start producing. If it were that easy, we’d all have sat down and wrote A+ term papers in high school without breaking a sweat.
So for me, the key to useful world building is not to throw the baby out with the bathwater, but to be very aware that usefulness should be constantly evaluated as you work.
I’m a big fan of world-building, so long as it’s used properly. Use world-building to create more world, more culture, more back-plot than the players (or readers for fiction) will ever see. Keep it in mind when writing your campaign or fiction. Use it to give meaningful causality to events, both natural and human, in your game or story. Then, and this is the tough part, don’t feel compelled to tell your players or readers about it. You’ll just bore or overwhelm them. (If you must share, save it for your Simarilion or Rivan Codex.)
The benefit of all this world is that your game or story feels more like it takes place in a real, living place, and not on an artificial stage. You end up with mysteries that flow naturally out of your setup. NPCs will be reacting to things the PCs have no reason to know about. Players can tell if your world ends at the kingdom’s borders and it dampens the immersion.
This is one of the weaknesses of games that are made up on the fly; the universe pretty much exists solely in response to the characters actions, and it can show. Without sitting back and intentionally crafting context without significance to the players, a living world is hard to create.
Like most things it’s best done in moderation. Too much world building can be a time sink that takes away from more productive campaign work. You also risk getting too caught up in “your” world, overlooking the need to keep the game focused on the PCs.
I can’t stand worldbuilding. It drives me insane with boredom. All I really do when I map out a game is develop relationships between characters (PC’s and NPC’s, NPC’s and NPC’s), and figure out the feeling of key things/places (dark and creepy, bright and sterile, etc.).
I do appreciate having the fussy world details in some situations, however (some players need that, no judgment), and that’s why I buy pre-packaged scenarios, without caring too much what the system is as long as the genre fits. Then I just gouge them out and insert them if necessary when I play.
I care deeply that the emotional relationships in the game feel ‘real’, as well as the feelings evoked by objects/places, but I don’t care so much about the ‘realness’ of the world objectively. Maybe that’s just a different kind of world building, though.
From my perspective, I think worldbuilding can be worthwhile *SO LONG AS YOU DO NOT SHOW ALL YOUR WORKING*. Tolkein got it right by not expecting us to read the Silmarillion in order to understand Lord of the Rings – heck, it’s debatable as to whether the Silmarillion was ever meant to be published.
If you use twenty pages of worldbuilding notes to inform – at *most* – a page’s worth of description in your novel, your world is going to look interesting and exotic. If you just copy-paste those twenty pages bang into the middle of your novel, it’s going to look tedious. And ideally, *reading the story* should give us enough detail about your world that we need without having to wade through paragraphs of exposition.
As far as *games* go, that’s different: many players will want to know as much about your world as is OOC possible and IC justifiable, especially in that particular brand of “simulationism” which entails the PCs touring the GM’s lovingly-crafted world. There, worldbuilding is very important indeed. But Harrison wasn’t talking about games.
Reading all of your comments, I’m in agreement that Harrison is just doing the whole wrong-bad-fun thing (thanks, Nihilin — I love that term). I still see his point, but there are lots of other points on there.
Based on the trackbacks on his post, I wasn’t the only one who had an emotional reaction to what he said. I still find it odd that it provoked such an emotional response, though.