It’s easy to bring creatives and managers together in a fiction-based media venture by emphasizing “story.” A supposed story focus makes writers feel good because they can take credit for it, and managers feel good because (aside from the fact that many are also writers, former writers or the people who have to do the writing if nobody else does) it’s cheaper than doing the heavy lifting and sausage making of solid IP foundations like worldbuilding.
I mean, does anything make folks feel more legit than saying, “We cut down the IP bible to next to nothing because we realized that story is what really matters!” Hell, I feel like more of Almost an Artist for even repeating it. But that’s bogus. Here’s why.
Worldbuilding Isn’t Where Your Elves Live
Many fans and a few game designers think building a world is about establishing a kind of extended backstory and almanac that tells you what religion your dwarves are, where trade routes go – crap like that. Most people think this way because this type of thing is what teenage gamers are good at and what Tolkien and successors did.
Real worldbuilding is about creating a context where you can implement multiple narratives across multiple media without getting thematically neutral pap, where there’s always a very strong tendency toward a particular look and feel. This includes:
- Establishing core themes and motifs
- Defining sensory (visual, audio, etc.) characteristics in concert with the appropriate departments (mood boards, justifying the visual language and branding in the world)
- Taking stock of core/launch media requirements (integrating the world with game play, matching elements to available production values)
- Creating exemplars to anchor themes and motifs (signature/iconic characters and locations, epistolary elements)
- Creating social relationships in the world that can be adopted by participants (factions, guild support, relationship maps)
- Creating conflict points that can be extended into stories and foci in statements of fact (backstories that generate conflict, faction conflicts, mysteries, general story hooks)
- Inspecting drafts for excess contrivance and artificiality
I am not making this shit up. I’m just telling you what I actually talk about with clients in RPG and transmedia projects in cases where I have faith in the end product succeeding. Note that getting the creation myth or technology down serves everything above. Hard facts aren’t absent at the beginning, but they don’t rule the roost as much as people think.
Sadly, getting this done is expensive and since it’s an obscure craft, it’s hard to get the same degree of satisfaction from the end result. Nobody cares if you brag that you created a context that made it possible for a cool story to exist at all, and to be part of a huge, extended transmedia narrative. They care about what happened last episode, or whether elves live in the mountains. It’s expensive and hard for anyone to get excited about. Plus, these days, some clever folks think they can just get the fanbase to do it for them, which is a fatal misreading of how fandom works with media.
Cubism Ain’t Stacking Toy Blocks
A story though! That sounds reputable, doesn’t it? Your Favourite Literature has a story, so it’s obviously classy. Best of all, everybody learns the components of a story by junior high, so it everyone feels terribly clever because they can identify rising tensions and denouements and crap.
This means that when people talk about story, they think of all the good parts of media they experienced, but actually just work on plot and structure wrapped around some fan-friendly signifiers. (This is a love story with nanotechnology!) To refer to the section header, people sure love to pat themselves on the back for assembling the toy blocks.
Literary fiction long ago came to the conclusion that this is easy and a bogus thing to feel artsy about, and switched focus to style and characterization. That’s why Margaret Atwood can write Oryx and Crake even though you, the SF nerd, have read about post-apocalyptic biotechnology before. Stylistic innovation is a tough road, however, and often distrusted. There won’t be a magic realist Star Wars novel any time soon, folks.
Structure is easier than style. When you reduce story to structure, structure is cheap to implement. Just mate it with some motifs and lists of facts and you’re done! Your IP will eventually fall apart when fans get bored, because they’ll realize the world has no meaning and the story represents the minimum effort it takes to walk a product down the aisle.
At least it’s cheap.
Have You Looked Around Lately?
In the tabletop RPG community people think that skimping on the world is okay, because the fans can fill it in – everyone has a D&D campaign world, right? It’s also easy to believe that nobody really wants the infodumps in CRPGs because it’s not at the center of the play experience. This is the reverse of the truth. In the post-fanfic world where the greatest trend in user-driven RPGs is based on IP canon freeform, people who represent the progressive edge of the audience want the world more – they’ve demonstrated that they can create stories with its guidance.
Tabletop RPGs may be unique in misreading, ignoring and demonstrating denial-plagued pants-staining terror at the idea that its latest innovations are movements in the wrong direction, but I think you might find it in other media. That’s a pity, because tabletop RPGs have a bunch of things to teach about moving in the right direction.
Kill story and take it’s stuff.
If I really believed that most people meant that set of bullet points (and perhaps one or two more) when they talk about worldbuilding, I might be less cynical on the subject. But most people seem to just want to be JJ Abrams and think no deeper than that.
But that said, yes. If nothing else, I think you do not take the point far enough – setting has been the red headed stepchild of tabletop for too long.
-Rob D.
If nothing else, I think you do not take the point far enough – setting has been the red headed stepchild of tabletop for too long.
That’s because it really isn’t easy. Past those bullet points, you also need to obscure, contradict and play with those points. Otherwise it looks too artificial. People can tell when you do that (see World of Darkness 5×5 stuff).
Interesting.
I also think this ties into that tricky juncture between setting and metaplot, and why so many attempts at metaplot over the years have gone wrong.
Ohhh, yeah, but I’m not even close to touching that yet.
Sweet article. Trying to find enough common ground in setting to appeal to an audience without using generics is harder than it looks. Yet it’s always worthwhile.
The alternative is a highway full of Trabants.
The key to success is building a world where you can tell different stories rather than the same one over and over. Hollywood would do well to take note!
Mainstream entertainment wants this. They don’t grab people with the skills to manage a property this way, and the organizational setup doesn’t allow it — the guy in charge is whoever’s working on the foremost expression of the IP. Sometimes that means JJ Abrahms. Sometimes it means Stuart Baird doing Nemesis. Even Lucasfilm only started dedicating employees to these aspects of IP management relatively recently.
I think you need to engage the audience on multiple levels. Superficial flash alone loses you loyalty (see Heroes) and elements submerged within a vague face value concept (see FlashForward) fail to grab folks off the bat.
Which is odd when you think how spin-offs can reap insane profits (Happy Days/Laverne & Shirley/Mork & Mindy or if you prefer Stargate SG1/SG: Atlantis/SG: Universe – a disturbing comparison!) yet the project nature of most mainstream media is a one-hit unless you’re confident or funded enough to do more.
Absolutely agree on multiple-level engagement and again, it’s not easy. Creating a mosaic of distinct yet self-contained elements requires world-building thinking. Given the effort in most world-building work and IP bibles, you’d think there’d be more recycling…
I can’t figure out why the third point isn’t a refutation of the first two, and/or vice versa. I agree with you that the role of setting in story creation is underserved by existing RPG materials.
When I did a pro-big-thick-setting post on story-games (“Why a really detailed setting is great for certain stories!”), picking a random big-thick-setting off my shelf (Kingdoms of Kalamar, 2001), I was appalled to discover that in that entire book there is not one page, not one paragraph, literally not one sentence saying “Hey, thanks for buying our book, here’s how you use it to greatest effect.”
I mean, I agree structure isn’t everything, but criminitly, it’s something, and most RPGs don’t even let it be that. There are RPGs out there purporting to give us the experience of the most formulaic source material on earth, and nobody talks about the fucking formula or why it exists.
1)No, because not everybody thinks in TVTropes (and there’s a reason that TVTropes is overrepresented by RPGNet folks, too). Fanfic appreciates the surface elements and raw detail/ship classes/wizard lore and works *back* from that. Tabletop gamers look for standardized blocks and lose anything more nuanced.
2) Surely you must know that Story Games folks will never sincerely engage you about this.
3) Yes, the advice deficit is real. When I tried to tackle it before, however, I noticed that this can actually damage the potential for more complex relationships. For instance, I’ve begun to see Changeling in a specific way (that it’s about the “soul as the prison of the body” in power dynamics, and the opposite of Mage’s formulation) that isn’t easily boiled down to single references (books, rules, cites). I think there’s a very real fear that making things too structure-focused kills those kinds of discoveries. This is not so important when the setting is really kind of meaningless or meaning-deficient (what is Greyhawk *about*, really?) but it is when you want to build a really sincere connection. Your objectives are structured, but at some point you have to give it a holistic quality.
I felt like I got what I wanted out of the thread, you can be your own judge if it was “sincerely engaged”, since I have no clue how I would determine if they were sincere, or indeed, a dog posting on the Internet.