World Building For Game Designers
World Building For Game Designers
Lesson Six: Question Everything
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.
Lesson Six: Question Everything
<body>Assumptions, the late great Douglas Adams pointed out, are the things you don’t know you’re making. It actually takes an enormous amount of work to question the things you don’t even see operating in your brain. That’s how brains work: to help us do everything we need to do, they hide all the things we need to believe to make them happen. To see them, you have to outwit your own brain—and it knows all your tricks.
Luckily there are things we can do to help. We can travel and study other cultures. We can study and read about history, geography, biology and nature, to see how other people and things have lived and explore their view of the universe. We can explore philosophy and do imagination exercises. And if we want to build good worlds, these are all good places to start. And they all lead to the same thing: questioning assumptions.
It’s a learned skill, but not difficult to learn. It’s all about saying “but what if…” What if it wasn’t the way it was? Or what if it was some other way? But there are two catches to that simple step. Firstly: am I really seeing all the assumptions present? The more you can see, the more you can question and the more you can change (and the less trouble you get into for missing the assumptions that were tied into the things you changed). The second part is not immediately abandoning an attempt to change something because it “doesn’t make sense”.
Let’s look at an example, and try to keep it really simple. Let’s pick something that also appears in lots of games (almost as a fetish nowadays): fishing. What are the assumptions in the idea that a character might fish?
First, obviously, that fish exist. That means there’s oceans, or rivers, or some bodies of water (unless fish aren’t water creatures?) Things live in that water and some of those things fish use to stay alive and there aren’t sufficient predators to kill all the fish. It means the creatures doing the fishing don’t see the fish as having any great right to not be eaten, or if they do, practical concerns are permitted to override that. The creatures that do the fishing are allowed to eat the fish, presumably. Or, do they fish for ceremonial reasons? To prove themselves, to gain entry to a cultural status, or to lord status over others? Or just for fun? There are so many reasons one might fish…
Let’s assume they eat the fish for now. Let’s also assume it’s some sort of tool-based fishing, not bears fishing with their claws. So, these fish eaters are tool users of some sort (or they choose to be in the case of fishing) who have access to the raw materials to make fishing tools and the ability to learn how to do so. That in turn implies things about the environment they live in and the culture it supports—that they can gather raw materials and pass on knowledge, or are smart enough to learn on their own. There’s even one deeper assumption we missed: that one person fishing implies many people fish. That this is a habit of the creature’s species, not just an individual.
And then all we need to do is question every single one of these things. Starting at the top: maybe fish don’t exist but people believe they do. Fishing might be an exercise in hope. It might be a ritualistic practice. As the joke goes, anything archaeologists don’t understand is labelled as having a ritualistic purpose. Of course, this is only one possibility. Maybe some fish exist, but not everywhere. Maybe fishing is like playing the lottery, or a complicated game of tracking. Maybe fish used to exist, and people continue the ritual in the hope they’ll come back—or, maybe to hide that they’ve gone. Maybe only one or two fish exist, nigh-mythical fish that folks want to catch to become heroes, but will likely never do. All these possibilities with that very first assumption: that fish exist.
If fish don’t exist or barely exist, then what does that say about the ocean? This leads us to that close friend of assumptions: asking the implications. If fish don’t exist, do the smaller animals, free of natural predators, grow in wild abundance? Or do some other creatures gobble them up, taking on the role of fish? One would assume that a lack of something higher in the food chain would cause things below to grow without control, but that’s one of those assumptions. This could be a world where food chains don’t exist—or rather, one where such ideas aren’t important. A world of fantasy, say.
Every time there’s an implication, it too is powered by its own assumptions. Which means this game of inspiration is self-sustaining and never-ending. Make a change, consider the implications, then question the assumptions therein, and loop around and around.
Obviously, a premise like “food chains don’t exist” is a big one. The bigger the assumption, the more things it might affect, and the more fantastical a world where it doesn’t hold. It also requires more knowledge about the topics at hand. “There is no food chain” is a big idea to think about. You might need to read some books on biology or ask a biologist. It is also worth noting that sometimes those people can’t help you because one of the consequences of knowledge is you internalize things, just like we said at the beginning. It might be quite hard indeed for a biologist to even think of what the question might mean, let alone conceive of an answer. That depends a lot on the biologist.
It might be better to ask a small child. The great science communicator Julius Sumner Miller loved to ask small children what might exist outside scientific categorization because they hadn’t had their doors of perception closed with knowledge. Not that small children are necessarily easy to come by. You might instead ask a cartoonist or a comedian. Indeed, one skill that they teach in improv and in writing comedy is the ability to build nonsense, without censoring yourself. This is the second part of questioning assumptions: the need to allow for nonsense. The ability to tolerate nonsense.
This is a skill as well. A lot of worlds do very well with nonsense in a few places. Note that nonsense isn’t the same as a world not making sense. Everyone knows that in a Road Runner cartoon physics doesn’t work the way we know it, but that world has rules and makes sense and we love those stories all the more because of it. If every now and then the Road Runner fell off a cliff…it wouldn’t work.
Rules matter. Internal logic matters. But rules and logic can be made of nonsense.
Obviously not every world can handle a lot of nonsense. We don’t want every world to be like the Road Runner. But humans are inherently silly creatures so beware of making your worlds too po-faced or too logical. The silly, the stupid, the inexplicable and the odd—our own reality is full of these things. A world where people fish even though there are no fish in the sea may seem silly at first, but real-world humans have done far, far sillier things. The ability to accept nonsense helps you find the more believable or less silly assumptions worth breaking. Now as for what makes something believable…that’s a topic for next time.
Exercise:
Practice your assumption-busting skills and nonsense tolerance by thinking of fundamentally limited concepts, where things are only A or B, or only A,B,C or D. Try to think of extra categories or the consequences of fewer. What if a world had day, night and a third thing? What if instead of four states of matter there were only two? What if battle arenas weren’t just land, sea and air, but only two of those things, or two more things, or a completely different list? You get the idea. Note: this is supposed to be hard. It’s supposed to make you think it might be impossible in some cases. Keep at it anyway. Your brain needs to conceive of the insane a few times a day if it’s going to be good at creativity.
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.