World Building For Game Designers - Lesson Ten: Keynotes
World Building For Game Designers
Lesson Ten: Keynotes
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.
“[A good book] is based on one thing you know very well, and one thing you know nothing about” – Stephen Donaldson
In music, songs are written in keys. Something in the key of C will use the notes from the C scale, because those notes all resonate with each other. Once you know the keynote, you know the rest of the scale because all scales follow the same patterns, stemming from that note. Metaphorically then the keynote is the summary of a thing and an emblem from which all the rest stems. Popular use of this term probably comes from Charles Dickens: in his book Hard Times the chapter entitled “The Keynote” describes the core of the book’s setting, the industrially-ravaged town of Coketown, from which all the eponymous suffering stems.
Another genius, film director Francis Ford Coppola, put it similarly. While making his 1974 film The Conversation, he recalls being asked what kind of raincoat the lead character would wear. It is the role of the director to answer thousands of such questions, about every aspect of the film. He answered that the raincoat should be transparent, because the major theme of the film was exposure, of having our privacy invaded, our secrets revealed. By knowing the keynote, directors can find the answers they need.
Worlds too are based on thousands of tiny decisions. The names of every single character, every species, every street, every city, country and planet, and what they all look like. How do you make those decisions? Work out your keynote. Or rather, keynotes, plural, because a good setting usually has two or three. More than four and your work will lack cohesion. With just one you probably won’t have enough ideas to dig into.
These numbers can vary if you break things down into types of keynotes. For example, you might have keynotes about the visual style of your world that are completely separate from the key themes you want to explore. There might also be keynotes that pre-exist because your world is related to something well known or well understood or something that has come before. You don’t need to explain the genre you’re working in, for example, or if the setting is the real world, you can just note the changes. The world building of the TV show Andor has its own very strong keynotes (fighting fascism compromises us but never as much as appeasement), with the keynotes of Star Wars underneath. Likewise the keynotes of The Mandalorian (a monster-of-the-week Western with a touch of Lone Wolf and Child) are different again—but also sit on top of Star Wars. And the Star Wars keynotes are things like ancient traditions in a fairytale galaxy, galactic rebellion and bold space opera tropes—with Space Opera being a genre with its own keynotes.
Keynotes can beget more keynotes, as you divide your setting up. Every place, person, institution or group can have its own keynotes…until finally something is detailed enough to just become description. In a sense, it’s shorthand. It wasn’t necessary to describe and specify every part of the Mandalorian order during the initial development of the show. Nobody sat down and worked out a complete detailed history of Mandalore, because the only people who do that are Tolkein or M. A R. Barker. Keynotes communicate to other people enough to build on, whether they are writers or production designers or directors, and to themselves in the future.
Keynotes are there to keep your setting feeling cohesive and connected, no matter how far away one part of the work is from another, whether that distance is in space across a huge world or a huge project, or across time. The setting you start writing today you might be still working on in ten or twenty or fifty years time, and you need to lay down strong principles to keep you connected to the heart of the idea and the things you wanted to do. In the short term they also let you put down vague ideas you can flesh out later. You might not know where the strange alien invaders come from, but you can note down that they are reptilian, and have an art deco style, and represent themes of environmental judgment. Then you can move on with the laws the character enacted to fight the reptiles, because this setting is all about legal battles—with the confidence that, should you ever need to know more about the aliens, you’ve shored up the principles behind you.
What makes a good keynote? They should be short, for one. You can add explanation beneath or around it, but you should be able to sum up your keynote in less than ten words. Less than five, ideally. Unlike a pitch, it just needs to make sense to you and any of your collaborators, so it doesn’t have to explain, just inspire. Vision boards are the same idea, but more, well, visual than a turn of phrase. It might also be a song, or a quote, or a motto. Whatever clarifies and locks down, without being so limiting it kills your creativity.
How do you make these things? Usually they emerge organically as you work on the early stages of a project. They are not, therefore, where things usually begin. You have to get paint on the page before you can get an idea of what you’re trying to do.
So where do ideas start? Let’s discuss that next Lesson.
Exercise: A very simple one here that follows on from the previous lesson. Try to sum up the keynotes of your setting or some part of it. See if you can get a central theme or content concept down to three or four words, and just three of four of those. Can’t do the whole setting? Try a character, a planet, a city, a faction. If you’re still struggling, try the reverse: start with Coppola’s keynote of “exposure” and build a world from that.
This article is part of the Indie Game Developer Network's blog series. The opinions and views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of the IGDN or its members.