Lesson 7: Setting and Worldbuilding (Part 2)

No time for introductions, we’re getting right into the swing of things from where we left off from part one.

Our Orcs Are Different

The “Our Orcs Are Different” trope highlights that in fantasy media, orcs have become kind of a staple fictional race, sarcastically calling them “different” when in reality, the audience kind of already knows an orc when they see one. 

This is neither good nor bad, but it is dependent on how you use common archetypes to your advantage. Worldbuilding from existing tropes gives you the advantage of not having to explain as much. And orc character is going to be strong, a vampire character is going to drink blood, and there’s not much that you as an author has to say about it unless you’re really trying to make something different. 

This is basically the same effect that fanfic writers face all the time. We have the advantage of having characters and a world that is already established, meaning we can write a lot less while trusting that our readers will have some basic knowledge and expectation. 

Where it can feel like a drawback is with our stories that are more original or independent of established lore and norms. If you are writing a vampire story and your vampires work differently from the traditional modern understanding of vampires, you are going to need to focus on showing those details. And that can make your story feel loaded and weighed down with exposition. 

This will vary based on the length of your story, but in general, in order to pull off these different details, less is generally more. Meaning, you need fewer significant differences, so that the differences you do have in your story have space to breathe and grow. The more differences you load onto your story, the more often you are going to need to keep reminding your reader of all those differences. We can’t expect our readers to retain lore as concretely as our outlines. 

So, never be afraid to strip it back. If you can have even one unique difference in a sea of tropes, and you harp on that difference and develop a wide range of consequences for a simple change, your world is going to feel both in-depth and unique even when you’re still cutting corners in all the other ways your world isn’t different.

The Book is Cut Out!

This brings us to the issue of “deep” worldbuilding. Open-world video games have led us to believe that a world with no limits, where the audience perspective can go everywhere they see, is an in-depth world. But, unless you have a few years of spare time and a linguistics degree to make conlangs, you’re probably not going to be producing the Silmarilion. 

More likely, you’re going to be relegated to doing what most authors do, which is to tell everyone that you’ve written something like the Silmarilion but when you open up the cover you find that there’s a hole cut out of the pages where you hide the whiskey flask. Why do this? Because if we let ourselves overload our stories with a lot of worldbuilding and lore, we’re going to end up writing an encyclopedia with a million 1-page entries. A lot of content, but not a lot of depth. 

This gets less and less applicable as you write longer and longer stories, and by the time you have a best-selling multi-book series, you can add a few thousand words here and there of extra lore. But if you’re writing something like a novelette, novella, or even a short novel, you’ll want to keep the perspective small and show the world from a distance. 

The Hunger Games is a pretty good example of this, to the point where we can even count how much worldbuilding does and doesn’t get done. How much does the audience know about Katniss’s hometown, District Twelve, with its mining industry and widespread poverty? Quite a lot, it’s the setting of the introduction and the main character is constantly thinking about home even when she’s away for the Hunger Games.

How much, then, do we know of the other districts? There’s one for fishing, farming, one that raises soldiers for the peacekeeping force, and others. We get glimpses here and there, but most of our exposure to these other districts come from the characters who have lived there. We see their personalities and we get a sense of how they grew up. 

This is great because as the reader, we get shown one really complicated community and we can extrapolate that the other districts are just as complex, and when people from those locales arrive, we see their behaviour and falls in line with what we think we know, reinforcing the idea that a consistent world is being described to us. But all the author has to do is write a few other characters, not develop the inner workings of eleven other districts. 

It’s like a magic trick. You’re telling the audience there’s a lady in the box when you saw it in half, but really the box is empty.

A Thematic World

In Lesson 1, I mentioned the work of Guerilla Games who pioneered a new IP “Horizon: Zero Dawn,” an open-world action RPG that is almost a master class in worldbuilding, not to mention storytelling and game design. 

One of their design elements, and a huge selling point of the game, came to audience members in the form of something that, on paper, can sound really dumb: robot dinosaurs. But just as every fantasy world needs its own version of an orc, this robot world needed a different take on its robots.

The robots move fluidly, like the animals they are based on, and it is immediately clear to the audience that the panther-looking robots will act like panthers, the ostrich-looking robots will be like ostriches, and so on. This is our trope language, this is communicating with the reader (or gamer, in this case) by using the familiar to introduce the audience to the bizarre.

Thematically, the design of the robots is baked into both the development of the game and the in-world logic. Engineers today use biology as inspiration for design solutions, and so too does the designer of the robots, studying millions of years of evolution to learn and create reliable designs. For the game’s themes, there’s a strong message that “life will continue after the apocalypse,” and so it is aesthetically consistent to have animalistic robots within the world.

The key is, it doesn’t always have to “make sense” externally. Internal consistency is much more important, and though it was a happy coincidence that biomimetics is a growing field of engineering, it did not need to be in order for them to introduce the idea into the story. As long as the tone, theme, and aesthetics of the world was consistent, the appearance of depth is present. 

Homework:

Pretty short part 2, but this closes out our overview of worldbuilding. To gather more examples and learn from professionals, we need to look into the worlds and stories that we want to tell. As homework, I will leave a few links to GDC presentations that focus on topics of worldbuilding.

• Building a world of robot dinosaurs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iDqDPsjrz94&t=837s
• Worldbuilding through architecture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V1n7Qmtp97g 

• Choice, Consequence, Complicity: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-FfITxaXeqM 

  • Not a worldbuilding video itself, but the developers at Failbetter Games are masters of atmosphere and tone and know how to make a reader navigate a world. 
• Geography, for all you geography worldbuilders: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVGonAUUQ8c