The Unbearable Weight of Worldbuilding

Or: Playing in the Polycrisis.

This is a talk I gave at the London College of Communications, University of the Arts London, for the Game Design Masters. Thanks to Dr David King for inviting me to do some new thinking for them all. Or, as you may discover, sharing the path my thinking has taken recently.

Pasts, People & Possibilities

I’m so grateful to David for inviting me to offer a provocation to you all today. I don’t know if you use that word at LCC but it was really big in the devising theatre community when I was mainly a theatre practitioner. One of the coolest things about events were when people took the time to stand up in front of one another and discuss what we do and how we do it — and that was often via ‘provocations’.

Practitioner is an important word there too — I always describe game making and story both specifically as a craft: something you practice. You never complete it, you always learn, always grow, always strive to be better. A life-long practice is something to treasure, it’s–unlike a career–something that is wholly yours to nurture and grow.

Anyway in these theatre practitioner spaces we would always be asking ourselves ‘in this centuries old form of play, how do we play better, what do we do it for, what impact does it have, and how do we feel about that’.

In that context provocations aren’t complete thoughts, or needlessly antagonistic ones; they are offerings, seeds, starting points.

I do, as you can imagine, a lot of story 101 talks. Basic introductions to the craft and its tools. Which is why I was delighted when David invited me to speak to you all — masters level students who are ready for more than a 101. And so, in the tradition of the practices I built my craft on: I’m going to offer you a provocation.

What does it mean to build a world? I gave David the title ‘The Unbearable Weight of Worldbuilding’ because, well, okay, I’m a writer and the alliteration and the riff on the Milan Kundera novel is fun. But also because I am really feeling a weight around the worlds I have worked on recently, and I haven’t fully resolved that feeling. And instead of offering you a finished thought, I’m going open up that thought process to you today.

I’m going to talk about a few things first which planted the seed, then give you some examples of how I’ve applied those ideas in past works, and then we’ll take a look at where my thought process is now.

Graeber and Wengrow // Rebecca Solnit // The Quiet Year

Here’s a beginning for the seed. Three seed beginnings, really.

Graeber & Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything, Rebecca Solnit’s A Paradise Built in Hell, Buried With Ceremony’s The Quiet Year

I read A Paradise Built in Hell over a decade ago and honestly most of it has left my brain, however one thing remains: the seed which says ‘every disaster movie got it wrong–in history, when things go bad, people help one another.’ It has a number of documented examples, and it’s important when I think about worldbuilding because whenever we talk about building worlds, what we’re actually talking about is building places inhabited by and made by people. It’s a small part of the seed, but a foundational one.

Then there’s a wonderful tabletop role playing game by Buried Without Ceremony called The Quiet Year which in itself is not far off a worldbuilding exercise I would run with students. But more than that, it mimics in both form and content the thing often missed from worldbuilding as we traditionally think of it — a world is not a finished thing, it’s ongoing, and it’s done by and with people (in our case, including the player). It asks you to build the world you’ll play the game in together as players, each adding a resource, each adding a scarcity, each adding details to the blank piece of paper in front of you until you have a map. Then in terms of content: it asks you not to play as a character in the world as you might in a traditional RPG, but rather as the community and the world.

We all have two roles to play in this game. The first is to represent the community at a bird’s eye level, and to care about its fate. The second is to dispassionately introduce dilemmas, as scientists conducting an experiment. The Quiet Year asks us to move in and out of these two roles.

We don’t embody specific characters nor act out scenes. Instead, we represent currents of thought within the community. When we speak or take action, we might be representing a single person or a great many. If we allow ourselves to care about the fate of these people, The Quiet Year becomes a richer experience and serves as a lens for understanding communities in conflict.

This mode of play is crucial to the effectiveness of the game’s design, and the means by which it offers the idea that place creates people and people create place.

Finally, and more recently there’s David Graeber and David Wengrow’s The Dawn of Everything. Which is a beautiful book, a little complex, especially if you’re not used to reading academic influenced texts, but with bold abandon it sets out to overturn the making of history.

Brief diversion: There’s a play by Tom Stoppard called Arcadia which is a lovely intricate thing I studied at A Level (exams you take at 17/18 in England). It takes place in two times: an Enlightenment era stately home, and the same place in the contemporary day. In the past we see events unfold as in the present they are being investigated by historians, and also misread and misrepresented by interpretation. We see the truth play out in the past, we see how the truth is missed in the present. I think of Arcadia when I think about the premise of The Dawn of Everything. This book is deeply interested in the fact that people create history and then carries it to the companion idea: that history creates people.

The Dawn of Everything is written by an anthropologist and an archeologist as they re-vist vast swathes of what ‘we know’ about history. In it they try and unpick the Hobbesian view of history which seems to be where we’ve gotten stuck. Just as Solnit uncovers how people don’t turn against one other in disaster, Wengrow and Graeber unpick the idea that was put forward in Hobbes’ Leviathan that before the current version of society which we have clear written records of: life was “nasty, brutish and short”

No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Wengrow and Graeber begin there: by reminding the reader that the vision of how people lived together in the past is written by people who largely didn’t live there, who are in fact, interpreting — and in the case of Hobbes, or indeed Locke or Rousseau, who all have an outsize impact on the contemporary story of human nature — actually what Leviathan is, is just thought experiments, provocations, not meant to be read as fact, but as a way in their own era of asking questions. And deeply, therefore, about the era they’re written in, not the one they’re uncovering.

Wengrow & Graeber then move on to consider the archeological and anthropological evidence of what society was like before written history, interpreted in alternative ways. It’s that ‘1878 archeologists from a patriarchal society assuming all remains buried with weapons must be men’ thing writ large. Wrengrow & Graeber apply alternative and anarchist perspectives to interpretations of the evidence to suggest that past societies may well have been far more peaceful, prosperous and egalitarian than now.

But instead of saying ‘this alternative view of how our past was more communal, more co-operative, and more caring than now is definitely the true version of the past’, Wengrow and Graeber are offering us the provocation (the gift) of uncertainty — if the same evidence supports an opposite view to the popular one of history, then perhaps the terrible certainties of our natures that those origins propose aren’t all that certain? And perhaps our futures too; climate collapse, capitalism turned to the max; perhaps those aren’t necessary or certain either.

When we build worlds, we’re building a small part of all those things: history, people, how we see ourselves, how we think people act, and how we act as people in the world with those stories about ourselves and others.

That, to me, is a weight worth weighing the responsibility of. Too many worlds built in the stories we tell, especially of the past or future, make assumptions built on faulty premises, thought experiments long extinct of value. Too many fail to challenge the assumptions we live with today: that this particular individualistic and capitalist society is progress, or that it would progress in the same way to the future.

For our purposes today I draw out the idea from these sources that it is not just place, but politics — how people inhabit place together — which is at the heart of world building.

Fantasies, Futures & Freedom

The next set of influences turn us away from the factual and the interpretation of the past towards storytelling itself. The thesis I am building is that whenever you build a world you’re telling a story about who we are, how we think people could be. I use people here loosely to include aliens and sentient creatures drawn from fantasy traditions.

Laing & Harrison // Chambers // Jayanth

In this section: I offer three more parts to the seed. First up is a short dialogue published in Granta in August of last year. In it, authors Olivia Laing and M. John Harrison talk about how dystopian storytelling can effectively draw the dots for fascists to join up. I’m going to take us through a chunky excerpt of that conversation now, because this is a really hearty part of the centre of the seed I want to offer you. Though it is edited, and I really recommend reading the full dialogue.

Laing: […] I’ve regularly been talking about how pointless I think dystopias are now. This sort of creeping sense that we’re doing their imagining for them. We’re just feeding them — the right — with more and more possibilities for how bad things could get. […]

John Harrison: I think [dystopias are] reassuring. Brian Aldiss called them ‘cosy catastrophes’. They limit the way we can think about our own disaster. Because what’s happening to us now is clearly not a limited disaster. We live in a state where the disaster doesn’t have a clear beginning and it certainly doesn’t have a clear end. […] The disaster used to be the end of the world. It used to be conceivable as the end of the world. What we need now is writers who confront the fact that probably everything is going to be a disaster from now on for quite some time, if not forever. It seems to me to be a problem of how we see. What is a post-disaster story for? What is it there to do? We have to ask ourselves — what do we want that kind of fiction to do for us?

Laing: And people are writing them, very consciously, as ‘this is a warning of how much worse it could be’, but then that scenario comes true. […] It’s not like these stories offer a manual, exactly, but, they do seem to continually shift the Overton window by building possibilities and none of those new possibilities are looking that great. So why not propose other kinds of possibilities?

I think that for a long time I was exhausted by dystopia — not just in terms of sighing at yet another version of a world where society collapsed and so people started killing one another — but in terms of the lack of imagination it exhibits. Reading this dialogue last year began to open in my mind to a thesis for why I had those feelings. Not only were they based on faulty premises, not only were they were doing the work of sketching outlines for people who wish to cause harm… But: They’re also set in a premise of ‘post’, which is a latter half of the 20th Century vision of the world.

I think the dropping of the first nuclear weapons in WWII made ‘post-’ a really vivid and understandable part of our stories about the world, but instead of there being the edge of one reality here, and the beginning of another there, like a cliff edge, the truth I think is that we’re all on a path, and it’s up to us the path we cut in front of us. Imagining is one way of cutting a path. Dystopias, they imagine a path towards harm for people to be driven down. What use is that?

Let me turn this towards games a little. Another talk I recommend often, which is also written up if you prefer to read, is Meghna Jayanth’s discussion of Agency in 80 Days. 80 Days is not post-colonial in its videogame re-telling of Around the World in 80 Days — it is rather anti-colonial. It reinvents the world of the story in a way which exposes the colonial context of the original. That proposes not dystopic 1870s version of the world (I don’t say Victorian, because that’s a very anglo-centric view of that era, and I know not all of you are from the UK, or Europe). 80 Days is rather altopic — alternative. The world building is deeply researched, and to me, deeply ethical in the way it returns to a text which replicates a time when colonialism and imperialism was doing huge harm around the globe (harm which continues but this particular period’s harm is the subject of the game’s lens). Jayanth’s article/talk is titled: Forget Protagonists: Writing NPCs with Agency for 80 Days and Beyond and in it there is this gem among gems in the section called:

NPCS = WORLDBUILDING

Jayanth begins by explaining that:

We explore wider political, social and cultural themes through personal concerns and entanglements — the world feels complex because the way our NPCs think about, react to, engage with the world is complex and often contradictory — this is a much more elegant and natural way to unfold backstory, politics, plot.

We’re back with people = politics = world, but in game design, another item is: freedom, or how it’s sometimes expressed: Agency. Jayanth explores how sometimes the world and the game is best served by restricting the player’s access to it.

In Brisbane you can encounter a girl from the indigenous Murri tribe, working as a maid in the hotel you’re staying at. You can engage her in conversation — and she tells you about the depredations her people have suffered as a result of colonialisation. And she has written a letter of complaint outlining such, which she wants to get printed in the local newspaper, The Moreton Bay Courier — to gain attention for her cause and her people. You — as Passepartout — realise that it is unlikely the white-settler owned newspaper will print such a note, especially not on the request of an aboriginal girl, and you can offer to take her letter to the newspaper offices yourself — and use your whiteness and maleness and position as protagonist — to help her. But she refuses. She does not trust you because you are an outsider, you are white, you are male — you are closer to the oppressor than you are to her, and all the good intentions in the world can’t change that.

And what’s wonderful and perfectly understandable is that there is a heated debate in various forums about “how to get the Murri girl to trust you with her letter”.

This isn’t surprising, games train you — the protagonist — to fix problems — or that, rather, they teach you that all problems can be fixed, and by you, if you try hard enough — but here, in this case, it’s not your problem, and you cannot fix it.

“Solving” it using Passepartout’s white privilege, actually would just make the solution part of the problem. Passepartout cannot ride to her rescue, cannot solve racism by posting a single letter.

When considering the weight and responsibility of worldbuilding in games, it’s important to remember that there is not only the text, not only the drawing of it on the screen through image, audio, dialogue, but so too is there the intersecting quality of player agency. That part, the agency part (which Jayanth sometimes calls the player fantasy) will say a lot about the concept you have of power, otherness, authority, and responsibility in your world.

I want to wrap up this section touching lightly on Becky Chamber’s Monk & Robot two-book series, the first book is called A Psalm for the Wild Built and the second A Prayer for the Crown-Shy. They’re both novellas, and so naturally are a little more poetic, gestural, than full-length novels would be. They’re interesting as a jumping off point into the next section because the societies they describe are what’s often called ‘solar punk’ — they depict a post-climate crisis world, with all solutions harmoniously in place. The world of the novellas is not our world, but a world that had also been facing damage it had done to the planet it lived on, and converted the way they lived to cease that. In many ways the way people live, work, and inhabit the world described in those books is utopic.

But actually, I’m not so satisfied with utopias either. Perhaps I’m doing the practice of imagining utopias a disservice, and I should do more reading, but to take a small example from the Monk + Robot books, consider: Pebs.

Pebs are a social currency in the world of Monk + Robot. In this world if you, for example, grow some crops and give them to someone, they will transfer you pebs. If you ask someone to come and fix your solar panel array, and they do so, you’ll give them pebs. Many kinds of currency exist in our own world, economies exist far beyond the monetary, so this is not an extraordinary concept, if you’ve ever done a favour for someone because they’ve done one for you, for example, you’ve operated in this space.

Having no pebs is not, in Chamber’s world, supposed to mean you can’t eat or find shelter either, people will still give you things, help you, they’re in fact meant to also indicate when someone may need extra support. But it does leave me with an unanswered question — what would having a negative peb balance actually feel like? This is perhaps not in Chamber’s purview when offering a novella’s worth of worldbuilding. It’s a vignette, not a full picture. But for me, it’s unsatisfying. It doesn’t feel like a full world built to me because it misses crucial aspects of what it is to feel human. In a world with a social currency debt would be as distressing to me as it is in monetary currency. For different reasons, but real ones.

That leads me to one of my biggest gripes of the two major works of game I have been Lead Writer/Narrative Designer, and then Creative Director on. Or rather something we have been called:

We have been accused of making ‘wholesome’ or ‘cosy’ games. Something I think Chambers’ work has also been called. We have that in common.

There’s a huge confusion of game mechanics for tone happening in the insufficient and deeply underfunded space of game criticism right now (of course there are brilliant exceptions [Aftermath, Remap] and I’m going to quote from a really insightful piece of crit later — it’s out there! But I think you’d be hard pressed to suggest it’s not a trend in general caused by the ‘enshittification’ of the internet).

That gameplay isn’t combative, or that the mode of play isn’t urgent doesn’t mean that the contents are uncombative, or unurgent.

Both Mutazione and Saltsea Chronicles have been called wholesome. And I hate it. The politics of wholesomeness is deeply conservative, and implies a time or state of being which is ‘whole’, complete, finished, perfect. Uncritically presented wholesomeness is a particular part of fascist ideology: there’s a whole other talk examining the use of wholesome imagery in historical right wing propaganda, as well as the contemporary wholesome-to-alt right pipeline, and what’s more, even when it doesn’t present directly white supremacist ideals, wholesomeness’ portrayal of the removal of difficulty, tension, striving for better paths forward, it removes all the life from being human. And wholesomeness is the story of a product, a finishing point. Not the processes we live in. You remember Laing and Harrison? The ‘post-’ is a fiction un-applicable to the contemporary condition. This is a little of my multifaceted problem with wholesomeness.

We live in what Adam Tooze calls a polycrisis. What use is the wholesome in the face of that? It’s a turning away from the responsibility of storytelling. In my opinion. There are some arguments to be made in favour of ‘escape’ as a survival mechanism. But I don’t even think it’s an effective escape, as worlds which set out to be wholesome in my experience are empty feeling things. But when Laing and Harrison discuss escape, they also touch on the moral banruptcy of such worlds, and the practice of escaping to them. (Perhaps it’s something Augusto Boal’s interpretation of Aristotle would have agreed with).

This is how they explain it:

[…] With a book such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, you’re being offered — it seems to me — the product of that very human ability to devise a world which is completely nostalgic. This enables the reader to feel that thing children feel so strongly, nostalgia for places you’ve never been. To me that’s like going back to staring out of the window.

This vast need to rewrite the world according to your own recipe. I think the danger for the writer lies there. Many of the Victorian and Edwardian writers ended up, as I say in the book, locked inside their dream estate somewhere in the south of England, a space in which they were very clearly trying to bring their fantasies into the real world.

Laing: Leaving more or less horrific collateral damage behind them.

John Harrison: Yes. They cause chaos in the real world as they try to leave it. But I also think it’s dangerous for the reader, because readers not only buy into the fantasy but also the ideology that lies behind it. By the 1970s, fantasy, in all its forms, had become an ideology in itself.

I would however accept that both Mutazione and Saltsea Chronicles are gently radical stories. Along with the fact that the tools for the telling of the story are not combative or complex to control, they are so because they still use fantasy and future settings in order to say that this is a world like ours, but not quite. It’s a long used tool in order to ask the reader or player to extrapolate more easily, from a place of greater comfort, and therefore (you hope) greater acceptance of a world’s radical ideas. And make no mistake, to our world, these communal, transformative justice oriented, non monetary and non hierarchically-governed societies are radically different.

Let’s look at that specifically in Mutazione and Saltsea Chronicles:

Mutazione is a ‘mutant soap opera’ — it’s set in an isolated place where a terrible disaster caused many of the members of the community to mutate, the rest of the world stayed away until a couple of decades before the game starts, when a group of scientists from the mainland came to investigate how the flora, fauna and people of the community had been changed by the disaster.

Mutazione was a story I didn’t think up. I was the writer and narrative designer, but like most games, the actual story and world was drawn by the Creative Director Nils Deneken. A large part of being a story professional in games is coming in and applying your expertise to other people’s ideas. It’s gaining their trust, and applying your craft, and sifting through the source material until you see how to tweak and leaven and underline the contents, and turn it into something effective, affective, and something that none of you could have imagined alone.

The gentle radicality of Mutazione was obvious to me from the outset. Nils described the community of the game, mutants and humans living together trying to live in harmony with nature after a great disaster. How scientists from the mainland came to study the great mushroom at the heart of the new alien ecosystem, how their arrogance caused deep harm to the community, and how at the beginning of the game you arrive at a community still holding that trauma. Not quite our world, but consider how the major scientific discoveries of the 1800s were on the back of imperial expeditions. How gentleman scientists throughout history have subjected Indigenous and Black people in particular to great harm in the name of their work.

It was clear to me that a theme to sift out of the story and heighten was that the grief and trauma was in part colonial. That meant whole new narrative design contexts (focussing the sense of imbalance, disharmony, the restructuring of the gardening mechanic to underline the community, and the words on the screen, too.) We did that work, with Nils’ trust, and I think the resulting story world is much stronger for seeing those themes.

Though it would be disingenuous for me to not also note it was made by an almost entirely white team, living almost entirely in Denmark, and that sits with me in some discomfort: my being the person able to tell that story in a game for the world stage is a result of a complicated collection of colonial privilege.

In Saltsea Chronicles I wanted to push the radical envelope. It was the first game I had Creative Directorship of, which meant that for the first time I got to lie the foundations of a story in a game I worked on. But crucially, those were only foundations. One of my founding principles was to bring in a diverse writersroom of voices to shape it this time. We have 10 people who contributed to the story. Majority trans, LGBTQ+, women, people of colour, although still admittedly with a largely Western perspective.

I set some rules like ‘no cops’ and ‘no capitalism’ but they built the world together on those foundations. My contributions were structural, directorial, editorial.

Do you remember that mode of play in The Quiet Year? Play as the community, not an individual within it? Saltsea Chronicles is in narrative design principles influenced by that mode of play. You don’t play as a character exploring a community, but rather you play as a whole community. Everything from the choice voice, to the opening statement, to the quest mechanic all reinforces this idea: a playable community, people in practice, not a person’s agency and an artefact. I have written an in-depth article on the game design and how it reinforces the world building at gamedeveloper dot com, in case you would like to read more about that.

Another means by which I applied my thesis on worldbuilding was imperfection: to guide the writers in building a world which didn’t have cops, that didn’t have capitalism, but that wasn’t perfect either. (Though they are all such excellent writers they only needed the smallest nudges to do this wonderfully well). This is a really insightful review from Paste Magazine by Emily Price which made me quite proud and which explains precisely what we were aiming for.

[…] Saltsea Chronicles is interested in the injustices that arise when you attempt to construct a wholly non-hierarchical society. It chooses not to structure post-Flood Saltsea as a perfect utopia, instead noting repeatedly and often the ways it fails. In my time with the game this was what impressed me the most: its commitment to realistically presenting the challenges that would be present in a society that’s nominally about fairness and mutual input. […]

[…] treating something seriously is the first step toward saying it’s possible. Treating the idea of non-hierarchical organization seriously here means investigating the ways it could be misused, and this means engaging with it more deeply. It also allows characters space to be wrong and to admit, later, that their minds have changed, another aspect of the reparative framework I mentioned earlier. This is part of what makes the characters feel so great. They aren’t collections of traits, but individuals who are affected by the beliefs of others and learn from them.

I haven’t touched much upon representational worldbuilding — things like Saltsea Chronicles having visible limb difference, size difference, wheelchair users, Black and Brown people, age difference, LGBTQAI+ rep which was central to character’s development, neurodivergent characters, making sure the design of lived spaces was always accessible to people with limb difference or wheelchair users, class isn’t relevant any longer but that would be a factor in some worlds. I just wanted to note that’s obviously an important part of the picture, but that what I’m discussing today is a political practice at the theoretical level of not just what we imagine, but how we imagine. I hope that makes sense.

I’m very proud of both Mutazione and Saltsea Chronicles, and I think that ‘gently radical’ is a useful step in the path that is the practice of worldbuilding but I still feel dissatisfaction.

Thinking forward

And honestly, that’s where I am right now — sitting in the dissatisfaction. Never underestimate creative dissatisfaction as a crucial tool in the practice of your craft. Sit with it; listen to it.

But that’s it, really, that’s the shape of the seed: the provocation. What would an actually radical game worldbuilding look like? One which is not ‘like our world but not quite’, one which wasn’t an escape, or a roadmap for bad actors, or a thing that is ‘post’ disaster?

These are some of the questions I’m sitting with in the context of that.

• What does it mean to set a game in our actual world? (Not softened by part-removal from reality)
• What would it take to break capitalism’s stranglehold in the next 5 years?
• What would it look like to build an alternative in its wake? To do the tough work of not only rising up, but in holding the line afterwards, building better?

Imagine a game set in year one after a revolution in the country you live in. What would it look like? What kind of revolution would it be? Who would lead it and what would the tipping point be? We have a prototype at Die Gute Fabrik that asks those very questions, but unfortunately the likelihood is (because of the huge contraction in games investment right now) is that we won’t get to make that as soon as I would like, if at all (we announced that the company is halting production for 2024 just a few days ago).

But that’s part of being a practitioner in games: you don’t always get to plant every seed. But as a practitioner I will also continue to carry that seed with me. Maybe I’ll get a chance to plant it somehow in the future. Or maybe it will grow in my heart as I tend to other people’s story worlds, and the shape of it will surprise me in a different way.

But it does feel urgent. Personally, and politically. I’m so exhausted by the failure of left politics right now to offer a genuinely radical solution to the genuinely radical problems we face. They’re so busy compromising with themselves to see that this isn’t a time for platitudes and half measures. Every time mealy-mouthed incrementalism is put forward in the world we’re in right now, a vacuum is left which the right is happy to fill with their own radical solutions. This is at the heart of how I think about storytelling and worldbuilding and responsibility as we move into the second quarter of the twentieth century.

For you, I leave this:

• The weight of worldbuilding is more bearable the more you share it with diverse perspectives and experiences.
• Worlds are made by people, politics, and choices about how players intersect with those things.
• People are shaped by the past, the past is shaped by people. Those things are rarely reliable, best to think of perspectives rather than facts.
• When you build a world, you have a responsibility for the story that it tells about who we are, how we have been, or what we might be.
• What does that mean for you?