World Building For Game Designers Lesson Seven: Realism and Believability
World Building For Game Designers
Lesson Seven: Realism and Believability
Steve Dee
WBGD is a series of lessons on 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.
The great Stephen King said, in his book On Writing: “reality can take a flying f*ck at a rolling donut”.
The most important thing I take from this is that even the greatest of us are bothered by the bugbear of realism. And it’s not something we can ever escape, but it’s also not something we really need to care about. The fact is, there will always be somebody who thinks something in your story or your world is unrealistic. And there are things that matter a lot more than that.
But let’s be clear: story has it easy. Story can distract you. Story can be like “yay, the Death Star is blowing up, the rebels are winning” so you forget about whether it would crash into Endor and kill all the Ewoks. It might only catch up to you the next day in the shower. But world building can’t always be hidden by story, or even in mechanics. Sometimes it just shows up right there in straight technical writing, staring the reader in the face, demanding to be believed.
Believed is the key word there. It is not really realism we’re trying to create, because reality is often ridiculously unbelievable. More than once my professional world building writing has been copied directly from real history only to be accused of being completely unrealistic! This isn’t just because history isn’t well known or reality has some crazy things: the pervasive media of our day changes what people expect to happen to what tends to happen in stories. Hollywood movies and popular fiction frequently use unrealistic clothing, styles, attitudes, and behaviours that end up becoming believed to be how things were. We think the Middle Ages were all darkness and browns instead of the pageant of colours they really were.
Ultimately, the issue isn’t really accuracy but expectation. This is why genre cues can sometimes not help, because genre can get too defined itself. I’ve been told that having a Death character not be sombre is unrealistic, and the same about having monotheism in fantasy. I’ve written a planetary romance about two planets tumbling through each other’s orbits so that their rings would scorch across each others’ skies and amazing aliens could flip across the space between and land on the other world, caught in the moment of shared gravity, only to be told by a fan of hard sci-fi that this violates the laws of physics. It’s not really that people cannot suspend disbelief but that there are parts of their brains that “catch” on certain things they “know”. Planets cannot be close together, and no depiction of this is okay—at least for that person. Because that’s just what their brains catch on. It might be armour or swords for someone else, or modern attitudes for another.
Let’s be clear: there will always be a few of them. There’s just no way you can create a world that never catches on someone’s brain. All you can do is cover most of your bases and ignore the critics. But you can do plenty to cover those bases. As they say in wrestling, it doesn’t matter how weird it is, the question is, “can you sell it?”.
And the selling here is almost literal: it’s getting people to buy in. And like selling a product, once they’re in, they’ll convince themselves that they got a great deal and that everything in your world makes sense and is awesome. Points of “disbelief” are things that might lose you a sale, that catch them before they buy in. You deal with these like any smart salesman. First of all, you manage expectations by putting everything in the front window as it were. You establish right out of the box what kind of world it is and what the points of disbelief might be. One obvious example of this is the great movie A Knight’s Tale, where they open with the peasants singing We Will Rock You to let you know this is a light-hearted sports movie that is having fun with history. Actually, it’s also a really really historically realistic film too, but as we keep saying, it’s about believability not reality. Some of the choices in Knight’s Tale will feel unbelievable to someone with a scholarly approach so they set up right away what’s going on. For others, scholars included, it will be note perfect.
There are plenty of other great examples. Star Wars films begin with “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away”. Alice in Wonderland starts by going down the rabbit hole—transportation devices are a textual way of asking us to set different expectations. The roaring tommy gun out of the back of the getaway jalopy on the cover of Arkham Horror lets you know this isn’t a game of psychological horror, and it may indeed also have some liberties with exactly when women started wearing gunbelts.
Which brings us to the second principle of selling: if you can justify it, you can get away with it. If there’s a reason for a change or an element, people will generally be placated. They don’t even need to know the reason, so much as being assured someone has thought about the question and has a reason. It’s the “didn’t you think about this?” that feels insulting. Sometimes the smallest line of dialogue will do it, the tiniest nod in art composition or style. Games, for once, have it easy here because there’s an inbuilt assumption when we come to games that reality may be bent to suit better games.
A classic example? Nobody really likes that bishops can move diagonally in chess. That doesn’t really make any sense and it feels like there’s no engagement with the world. By contrast, a weak king with a powerful queen has a ring of reality to it. When you explain that the rooks used to be chariots, their need to move in straight lines makes sense too.
Another example of this came in a setting I was working on with a friend. We were working on something a bit like the TV show Carnival Row where the fair folk were sort of a stand-in for the Irish and rural folk of the British Isles: their realm had been revealed and partly colonized by the British and now folks journeyed back and forth, and the might of the industrial British Empire stood against the magical, nature-attuned fairies. Originally the setting began with fairy terrorism bombing the House of Lords and Westminster Abbey, and I found it unrealistic, because to me, thinking about the history of the British empire, I thought this would bring things very swiftly to a war while the setting he wanted was much more still at peace, with revolutionary undercurrents. We talked and quickly decided there were also ban-sidhe, evil elves, who were blamed for such action, allowing for my belief to be returned to suspension. Just one little thing to explain it took all the trouble away.
And the best thing about this trick is once you add an explanation, you can use that explanation to drive so many other things. That’s the third step: if you run into disbelief problems, turn their explanations into the whole heart of the setting. Maybe the best example of this is the Impossibility Drive which Douglas Addams invented in Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy to save his novel reaching a point of ridiculous coincidence. Another great example is Dune. Dune wants to be quite-hard sci-fi, but also has faster than light travel. So, it turns this magical hand-waving concept of folding space into the heart of the entire setting, and the macguffin that drives the whole plot. You don’t have time to think that spice letting you fold space is a huge cheat because there’s so many more interesting consequences and implications to think about if that’s true. You’re sold on the consequences.
Put your belief-suspending concepts right up front, make sure there’s an explanation (however token), and then turn the explanation into the thing that is cool. That’s how you get past disbelief.
For one more perfect example, please also check out the City of Doves post. (LINK) https://gallusrostromegalus.tumblr.com/post/623099068352200704/kuusamaagi-hey-btw-another-worldbuilding
Exercise: Nobody likes having a beautiful story thrown back at them because it failed some test of “realism”, but the way to get better at this hurdle is to have empathy for those triggers, and you do that by finding your own. Think of something you’ve seen or read in a world that just didn’t make sense and snapped you right out of your willing disbelief. Or maybe a thing you know that you always catch movies getting wrong. (Me, I always see them getting diving wrong, and I’m going, nope, those people all have the bends now.) Then challenge yourself to justify it in a setting. (Oh there’s a new chemical you can breathe that stops the bends? Oh hello James Cameron’s The Abyss.) Go, and do the same. Find your trigger point, and find a way to justify it to the harshest audience of all: yourself.
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.