The Question at the Heart of the World: what question is your world trying to answer?
The calling (Why World Build)
I've been thinking a lot about why I, or anyone for that matter, builds fictitious worlds. Often times people seem to world build for particular projects, such as creating a narratively consistent setting for a story or a game. I began that way, with the desire to create a setting for a series of story ideas I had. But over the years the story has fallen second place to the world building itself, and I’ve often wondered what it is about world building that is so compelling to myself, and as it turns out, to a large number of others.
There is definitely an element of a power fantasy to world building. Playing god, and it’s a wonderful form of escape where you focus on the details and do the creation. I lean towards the human cultures, history and geography side of world building, rather than the space or magic side of things. I get a lot of my fun from having some constraints in place. In my case that’s the constraint of geography, and, for a lack of a better word, humanity.
I’d say I’m a combination of a history fan and artist. I’ve spent some time as a linguist/anthropologist, but honestly I feel the greatest satisfaction when deep in visual creation. World building happens to be the perfect creative practice that marries my two loves. I world build because it's a creative output of things I've learnt about our beautiful and terrible world. Learning facts about the rotation of our planet, the amount of heat we get from the sun, the circulation of heat in our oceans and atmosphere, the energy that creates and moves literal mountains by plate tectonic to say nothing about the complexity and diversity of our species history… learning about these things is really incredible, and it still BLOWS MY MIND when I sit and actually contemplate this. World building is, for me, literally awesome. What other creative practice comes even close to exploring and experiencing the epicness of time and place through creation?
Curiosity Engine
I think world building is often an an attempt at answering a question about possible worlds. The Templin Institute talks about the pillars of world building which is close, but for me there's always an explicit “what if” that sparks the creative process, and lies at the centre of a world and drives it's creation and guides the details to be explored. The question leads you to follow up resources to inform your world.
- What kind of civilisation would you find on a desert planet with FutureTech and giant sand worms?
- What kind of world would you have if there is a magic system that combines the four European elements with East Asian martial arts?
- What would a world of British-Celtic mythology be like? -What kind of Alien species might evolve on a planet that is different to earth?
- What might silicon based life forms look like?
It’s like the Feynman question of your world. The open-ended questions that you constantly think about, and that you put your energy towards exploring to try and answer.
For me, there are three questions that have kept me coming back to a particular world building project over and over again. I realised only recently that the questions are actually quite personal, and this is probably why this world building project has stuck with me over the years.
The first question is “What happens at cultural crossroads?” How do cultures and civilisations adapt to one another through trade, learning, immigration, resettlement, conquest, and natural disasters? For those of us who have ever felt caught between worlds, you know what I mean by cultural crossroads. Perhaps you moved countries of residence, or you moved between social classes, or your parents immigrated to the country you grew up in and you have a view through a window to the world they left behind. I’m a bilingual and bicultural Japanese Australian, and growing up as the child of immigrants you have so many questions, discussions, opinions and conclusions about this experience throughout your life. The story ideas that prompted my world building to begin with are about characters grappling with various themes related to being at a cultural crossroads.
The second question is “how is a society's environment reflected in their culture?” I'm just endlessly fascinated by how different societies adapt to their environmental niches, and reflect this back out as artifacts, stories, beliefs, and language. The technical innovations that people come up with to live more comfortably in their natural surrounding, the world-views that emerge from experiencing life in certain biomes, the aesthetics and designs that are inspired by nature. It's a window into different experiences and ways of being, and I find it so creative and beautiful.
The last question, relatedly, is “what unique and internally consistent aesthetics could we have in fictive worlds?” I love European based-fantasy as much as any other nerd out there. And I am genuinely fascinated by the details and differences of premodern European visual cultures. But I don't feel like I've got much to contribute here as an artist. I want to see what other kinds of visual worlds can be designed.
But I also don’t want to replicate the visual cultures of our world either. Having a fantasy Japan, China, Persia, Africa is fine, and I’m all for having a range of fantasy world aesthetics. But the aesthetics of a culture are the way they are for a number of reasons. Japanese aesthetics are the way they are in our world because of the adoption of Chinese aesthetics by Japanese people at various points in history. If I’m going to create a fictive world with aesthetics unique to it, I want to create something that would somewhat make sense for that world.
I get really excited when I see works that have a unique identity. This can be visual or conceptual, but I really like it when I can get a glimpse of the creator’s curiosity engine, and maybe even an idea of what question lies at the heart of their world. If you are a world builder, what are the questions at the heart of your world? What are some questions in other well-known fictive worlds?
The Question at the Heart
If I were to combine my two world building questions into one, it would be: “What would a pre-modern fictive world look like culturally and aesthetically on a landmass that is a bit like the Silk Road meets + northern America + Patagonia?” I know, this is a really specific question, but I might give it more thought in a log later. I admit that this question might sound quite dry (reflecting my academic training, perhaps. One of the things I feel that the academy can continue to improve on, especially in the humanities, is to break down why lofty sounding topics are actually really close and familiar to all of us, and not at all distant. But this is a topic for another day.)
It turns out, this is actually a hard question to answer, and my on-going project and this outlet is my continuing attempt to grapple with this question of creating a unique and internally consistent aesthetic for this fictive world. The difficulty is completely self-inflicted, since I’m making it unnecessarily complicated for what I ultimately want to do: design, make art, and tell stories from this world. But I love the process, both of the world building and making art. So I'll keep at it.
I don’t know how far I’ll get before I deem it enough or too hard, but this little artistic and intellectual experiment has been with me over the years, and only recently am I giving it a proper go. Let’s see what happens. I’d like to share some of the nerdy world building process, which is going to be messy and full of questions as the world hopefully emerges through my tinkering. But I’d also like to inspire you with some semi-polished work, putting on the airs and tone of the world as it develops.