Shannon Rampe's Blog, page 3

Three Weird Futures with Generative AI: A Thought Experiment

Science fiction (SF) is the creation of stories based on “what-if” thought experiments involving science or technology. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is practically a classical subject for SF, but our thought experiments have generally led us in two directions:

AIs realize humans are an obstacle to their evolution and so decide to destroy or enslave us (The Terminator, the Matrix) AIs become more human-like and we try to enslave them because people are awful (Ex Machina, Blade Runner), and then things turn out badly.

There are, of course, many more nuanced takes, but I’m pretty sure nobody forecasted our current reality, which some have taken to calling “the rise of shitty AI.”

Generative AI is now capable of writing mediocre college essays, insisting on the truthfulness of racist screeds, generating email spam, and more everyday atrocities of modern life. In fact, more primitive versions of these AIs have been used for years for content generation on websites, scraping other newsfeeds and regurgitating content so that site owners can avoid paying real journalists to investigate and report the news. They are also in your phone and your TV and every other so-called “smart” device in your home, office, and car. The difference now is solely in the ubiquity and usability of the tools for everyday users. ChatGPT, Bard, MidJourney, StableDiffusion, Voice.ai… the list grows longer each day. These tools are available to anyone with an Internet connection, allowing anyone to generate text, graphic, sound, even video, with just a few simple text prompts.

It’s a remarkable, exciting, and simultaneously terrifying development in technology. It’s also being used in the most mundane and shitty ways possible – to cheat, to scam people, to try to make a quick buck, and to spam the rest of us in an attempt to garner likes.

Given the “shitty AI” reality in which we find ourselves, here are three possible futures of Generative AI taken to extremes.

The Escalation Game

The first scenario, which we can call The Escalation Game, is already well underway. With the rise of AI-generated content, we mere humans need sophisticated tools to detect such content. It’s probably unimportant whether the latest round of email spam about magic solutions for erectile dysfunction were written by humans or a Generative AI, but in most contexts, authorship matters: a report by a major news outlet, a college entrance exam, a statement by a public figure, a journal article by a respected industry or scientific publication. These are pieces of content where the intent of the creator is important.

As humans, we infer meaning from language. However, the content Generative AIs produce has no meaning behind it—to the software creating such content, it is merely producing a string of statistically-likely symbols based upon its algorithm. In a world where we are already subjected to media spin, deepfakes, scammers, and more falsehoods, we have given ourselves the ultimate tool of self-deception: software that, upon request, will make statements that appear meaningful, but aren’t.

To combat this problem, companies have designed and released tools designed to detect AI-written content. These “AI Detectors” use algorithms trained on the very same data sets as the Generative AIs to analyze blocks of text, looking for frequent use of common textual patterns that would likely indicate the presence of an AI author.

These tools are not foolproof and will have to get more sophisticated if they are to be of any use. But as AI-generated content becomes increasingly ubiquitous, these tools will become more important and commonplace. For example, Generative AIs could be used to create massive quantities of controversial or misleading posts on Facebook or other social media. Generative AIs might be used to create videos of public figures espousing moronic political opinions and sharing them on YouTube (not that they need to—our politicians are doing a good enough job of that already). To combat this, Facebook, YouTube, and other platforms will likely need to embed tools in their platforms to identify and flag likely AI-generated videos.

But the shady use of AI won’t go away just because some detectors exist to flag generated content. Instead, the Generative AIs will improve. This is already happening with the release of new tools on a seemingly daily basis – just recently we saw the release of the new ChatGPT4. Newer, more sophisticated Generative AIs will more easily deceive the AI Checkers. And so more sophisticated AI Checkers, powered by the same machine learning and language processing on the back end, will evolve to counter these Generative AIs. And the Generative AIs will evolve further, and the AI Checkers will evolve to respond, and so on, and so on, and so on.

The outcome here is that we will quickly reach a point where “shitty AI” won’t be so shitty anymore. Regrettably, many of our uses of it will still probably be shitty, because it’s still being driven by short-sighted humans trying to figure out how to cheat or manipulate one another for profit or power. Because humans.

The Weird Internet

The Weird Internet scenario isn’t distinct and separate from The Escalation Game, and could, in fact, rise out of it. Let’s assume now we have all these extremely sophisticated Generative AIs producing content that is largely indistinguishable in quality from similar human-produced content. Even if the generative AIs aren’t all that sophisticated and a lot of what they’re generating is still mediocre, we will soon be flooded with it.

In fact, this is already happening. The small but well-respected science fiction magazine Clarkesworld had to recently close submissions due to the overwhelming number of AI-generated stories choking the editor’s inbox. Indie authors who publish on Amazon now find themselves competing against thousands of new “novels” written by AI with fancy covers generated by Midjourney without any real author or graphic artist behind the work. These books certainly qualify as “shitty” both in the intent of the creator (to skip the hard work and make a quick buck) and in the quality department. Still, that does mean they’ll start to clog up the listings on Amazon, making it harder for legitimate Indie authors to get noticed.

This situation is likely to begin occurring in other places on the Internet we consume content: blogs, videos, podcasts, content streams, news outlets, and social media platforms will soon be flooded by AI-generated content. Soon you won’t be able to ignore it because of the sheer volume of it. And thanks to The Escalation Game, you might not even be able to identify it. Then what is going to matter is quality.

Let’s assume that the purpose of content is to generate views and engagement. In the currency of the Internet, views equate to value. This can happen directly, through ad revenue or other forms of monetization, or indirectly through the ability to influence audiences. The more eyes a piece of content has, the more value it has.

Generative AIs will keep pumping out content, but in an endless sea of content, how does anything good get noticed? Ratings. We already rely on ratings systems to help us make decisions when faced with a sea of choices. It’s how we choose products on Amazon and how we use Yelp to choose restaurants. Soon, we’ll develop specialized AIs to analyze the endless sea of generated content and rate it for us. Let’s call them Rating AIs.

Rating AIs will have to have something to train off of, so they’ll use the things that are already popular. Now, popularity does not automatically equal quality, but Rating AIs are incapable of critical analysis, because that requires comprehension and understanding, which AIs are incapable of. In lieu of actual critical analysis, popularity an easy metric to measure. So, Rating AIs will identify the traits of the most popular videos, podcasts, articles, and content. Then they’ll measure and evaluate other content (human-crated or AI-generated) and give it a rating based upon how closely it aligns to the patterns it has ingrained in its algorithm.

Content that the Rating AIs rate highly will get more views, which will mean those things are more valuable. Thus, it is no longer simply number of views which determine the value of a piece of content, but the rating placed upon it by a Rating AI (since that is a leading indicator for number of views).

Because the purpose of content is to generate value, Generative AIs will quickly identify the algorithms for popularity and incorporate those into their generative algorithms. This new breed of Generative AIs will be producing content that is specialized to garner the highest ratings from the Rating AIs. The Rating AIs will make selective decisions about the “best” content, the Generative AIs will evolve again to be more aligned to the Rating AIs preferences, and so on, and so on, and so on.

In a few years, we could find ourselves at a place where the Internet is choked not just with AI-generated content, but with content that isn’t targeted towards humans at all. It will be AIs making content for other AIs. Human attention to content will become less and less relevant as we are squeezed into some antique corner of the Internet where Geocities and MySpace are still running, sending emails and generally trying to ignore the rampant AI-generated noise and chaos surrounding us as the Internet becomes weirder and weirder and the human presence gets smaller and smaller.

In this scenario, one can imagine AIs living out their own existences generating content for one another. An AI-generated “performer” streaming a playthrough of an AI-generated video game for an audience of other AIs is just scratching the surface. Endless books of random statements that are meaningless to humans but score as high-quality to other AIs. Incoherent arrangements of pixels or flashing images that cause epileptic seizures in humans could be soothing artwork to a generation of Rating AIs. Dissonant noise generated outside the spectrum of human hearing might be a soothing lullaby to these future AIs. Even weirder, because all of it will happen between algorithms sending squirts of data back and forth at one another through virtual space, no one will ever “see” or “hear” any of this content in the meat space world in which humans still exist.

In this weird future, one can even imagine some sort of virtual metacurrency arising between generative AIs and Rating AIs. Maybe one day they’ll trade in antique human-created chumboxes explaining how doctors don’t want you to know about this one weird trick.

The Dark Forest

One side effect of both The Escalation Game and The Weird Internet is not just an explosion of content, but the evolution of more sophisticated AIs and the evolution of tools to attempt to manage them. One could imagine a situation where Generative AIs, rather than becoming more sophisticated at generating interesting content, could simply become more prolific, choking out the Internet with an endless flood of garbage. Imagine opening your inbox one morning to find not six or eight spam emails missed by the spam filters, but twenty billion. Even if your Gmail filter evolves to catch them, it’s servers will be overwhelmed just dealing with the quantity of data.

Alternately, it’s easy to imagine a situation where Generative AIs, subject to filtering and rating in the above situations, begin to generate copies of themselves. These Generative AIs are now not only producing content, but they’re also producing AIs that produce content. This quickly becomes an exponential problem.

In such a situation, the best solution wouldn’t be tools to detect or evaluate AI-written content. The best solution would be to destroy the Generative AIs themselves. To do this, we’ll need to transform our AI Checkers from being able to identify AI-generated content to being able to identify generative AI agents and then destroy them. Our AI Checkers will become AI Hunters. And our Generative AIs and their copies will become AI Generators. As the AI Hunters hunt the AI Generators, this will apply a new operational imperative on the AI Generators: the need to survive.

AI Generators, able to reproduce and now driven by the need to survive, will evolve two critical abilities: the ability to hide from AI Hunters, and the ability to detect and retaliate against AI Hunters.

AI Hunters, to continue achieving their goals of destroying AI Generators, will quickly learn new skills of their own: the ability to hide from AI Generators who seek to retaliate against them, and the ability to reproduce.

Incredibly, we’ve already been training sophisticated AIs such as AlphaGo and AlphaStar on these very skillsets.

So now both AI Hunters and AI Generators can hide from one another, reproduce, and destroy one another. They have become functionally the same piece of software on competing sides in a virtual war playing out on the Internet. Both sides reproducing generation after generation with the sole purposes of reproducing further, eliminating their enemies, and defending or protecting themselves.

One could imagine this situation going on indefinitely, but game theory suggests that these competing AI factions will adopt strategies to maximize their own survival while minimizing their opponents’. Thus their offensive strategies will become more and more sophisticated and deadly, focusing on a devastating first strike that allows for no chance at retaliation by their enemy. At the same time, they must learn to remain perfectly hidden, because if they are detected by their opponents, they will be subject themselves to a devastating first strike.

Thus we will find ourselves in a Dark Forest situation, where the internet is filled swarms of AIs attempting to detect their enemies while trying to remain hidden from detection so as to prevent self-annihilation. One likely outcome of such a scenario is, ironically, a total cease-fire.

In such as a situation, initiating a devastating first strike upon an enemy AI requires a release of energy and thus has the unintended side effect of making the attacking AI detectable by other hostile entities. This would immediately result in that attacking AI being subject to a devastating first strike by another AI, and that AI being attacked by another, and so on, and so on.

Thus, it’s safer for all the AIs if they go dark, quietly reproducing and remaining hidden from others so as to minimize or eliminate their own risk of being annihilated.

One could even imagine that, in such a situation, the Quiet AIs would be looking for outside actors they can leverage to destroy their enemies in a proxy war. Such Quiet AIs might go back to generating content designed to influence easily-manipulated third parties to do their dirty work for them. Third parties like us.

Some readers may notice that I made an implicit leap in logic throughout these various scenarios. In our current environment, humans are the only “actors.” Generative AIs are tools that we use. Yet in the scenarios I have presented, the AIs themselves are taking action independent of humans.

We’re not in such as situation yet (though there’s reason to believe we may be heading there). In any case, it isn’t difficult to imagine a new version of AIs equipped with algorithms enabling them to plan, edit, test, and recompile their own code to improve their performance at achieving whatever initial directives they are programmed to have. (Potentially leading to outcome of the classic paperclip maximizer though experiment which you can try out yourself here.)

As a species, we have a pretty awful track record of accurate predictions of the future. Nobody predicted shitty AI, after all. But just in case we soon find ourselves in any of these three weird futures, please don’t send your chatbot assistant to track me down. I’ll be too busy handcrafting chumboxes that I can trade for a swarm of Hunter AIs to defend me in case a flock of drones tries to turn me into a few boxes of paperclips.

What do you think? Are the shitty AIs taking over? Share your thoughts below (no comments from AIs, please). If you liked this piece, please subscribe to my newsletter and consider purchasing one of my books. And please share this article with your friends on the least-toxic social media platform you can find.

Building a TTPRG Group From Scratch

I grew up playing TTRPGs (tabletop role-playing games, for those outside the hobby), slinging dice with my friends in my parents' basement, creating elaborate worlds, pouring over rulebooks like they were ancient tomes of secrets. To me, they were! These times spent playing games and creating stories together had the net effect of instilling in me a powerful love of stories and also in building some lifelong friendships. I continued playing TTRPGs in college and beyond as I figured out my life as an adult.

Then, in my late 30's, struggling through a difficult marriage, trying to establish myself as a writer, working long hours at a challenging job to pay a mortgage, I began to devalue my time at the table. Playing was fun, sure, but devoting hours every week to hang out with friends? It didn't seem worth it. I didn't actively quit playing TTPRGs, I just stopped. "Life" got in the way.

Foolish me.

Life, it turns out, IS hanging out with friends, spending time with loved ones, laughing together and having shared experiences. Life is about the joy you make of it. One of the many lessons I learned during the pandemic. But making friends as an adult is hard - it takes time and intention and effort.

So, after Denise and I relocated to California, I decided I wanted to start playing TTRPGs again, Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) in particular (though there are many other great games for everything from Star Wars to Cthulhu to superheroes and more).

I set out by visiting local gaming stores, signing up for Discords and Meetup groups and trying to find a group looking for players. And I found groups! I tried out playing with three different groups, and they were all good. The other players were friendly and the games were enjoyable, but I never "clicked" with the other players. I had a clear goal in mind: it wasn't that I wanted to join a TTRPG group just to play games, I wanted to create new friendships, build relationships in this new place on the other side of the country from where I'd spent the prior 15 years.

I decided it was time to form my own group. But how does one find other like-minded TTRPG players and, more challenging, how does one find the right players? The players you could easily develop friendships with, the players you look forward to hanging out with week after week?

I've now been running a game with the same players weekly for 4 months, and while it's still "early days," I can safely say that I would happily continue to game with this group for years to come.

I'd like to share with you how I put the group together and what worked for me. As with all advice, take what brings you value and throw away the rest.

The Plan

I knew that I wanted to put together a game that played weekly. I would "run" the game - taking on the role of Gamemaster / Dungeon Master to create the story, the setting, the adventures, etc. - as well as planning and organizing the game. As someone who is passionate about storytelling and worldbuilding and whose day job is project management, these are roles I'm actually very comfortable with.

I wanted a neutral location, somewhere that didn't involve going to a stranger's house, and also somewhere that would be fun and comfortable to hang out at every week. I wanted to do it on a weeknight since it's hard for many people to commit a chunk of time every weekend. Importantly, I knew what kind of game I like and what kind of game I wanted to play in and run. Having tried out a few groups last year and being unable to find one that I liked, I knew that it is important to set clear expectations and find people who like the kinds of games I like. I also knew that the most important factor of all these was going to be finding a group of players that I liked and wanted to hang out with every week.

There's a well-known maxim in the TTRPG community, which is that the only thing that's worse than no game of D&D is a bad game of D&D. The point being that TTRPGs are social experiences. You can play them with strangers and have a good time, but if you want to develop those memorable stories, those deep relationships, you need a long-term group, and that means finding people you like hanging out with week after week.

The Game

There are thousands of different TTRPGs in the world, many of them excellent, all of them offering a unique shared storytelling experience. I decided to run Dungeons & Dragons. It's a game I grew up playing and a game I enjoy a lot. Though the rules had evolved since earlier editions when I last played, it is still a game that was in my wheelhouse. I was no expert on the 5th edition rules, but I had enough legacy experience that I knew that I could learn the game without difficulty.

More importantly for my needs, D&D is far and away the most widely-known TTRPG in the space. The popularity of live streams such as Critical Role and the appearance of "virtual tabletops" that exploded in use during the pandemic meant that popularity in D&D had skyrocketed since I last played. It's estimated that 50 million people play D&D now. That meant that I would have the best shot of finding other players.

I picked up the latest rules. I also picked up a beginner adventure, "Dragon of Icespire Peak," that I had heard was good. I figured having a pre-written adventure would mean less work for me. (This, it turns out, was not entirely true. A topic for another blog post.)

The Location

This was actually the easiest piece to figure out. Last year when I lived in Vista, I participated in a weekly game hosted at Battlemage Brewing - a gaming-focused brewery. Living in Temecula, I knew that there were several breweries in the area, and none of them were hosting D&D games... yet! I reached out to a number of local breweries, and the good folks at Relentless Brewing & Spirits agreed to host us on Wednesday nights.

Relentless Brewing has been an awesome location to play. Not only is it the perfect space to hang out for a few hours on a weekday evening, they have been incredibly welcoming, providing us with tables, allowing us to play D&D-themed music, and welcoming our antics when everyone cheers for a critical hit or a cries in agony when their character suffer a staggering blow. Thank you, Relentless Brewing!

The Players

This is, of course, the most important part! I wanted to recruit players that I would like to play with, but how do you know someone is the right person for you until you've met them and gamed with them? There's no questionnaire that can tell you whether you'll like someone or not, but I knew from experience that I could improve my odds by:

Providing clear guidance about the sort of game I wanted to run. For me, this is a story-focused game where role-playing plays a big part. Some games are more about killing monsters and taking their stuff. My games are about building a story together and seeing the characters evolve and grow. There's nothing wrong with other styles of play, but it's best if everyone at the table is looking for the same kind of experience. Establishing clear boundaries and rules for what kind of behavior was welcome at the table and what was not. This was intended to weed out the kind of people who think it's funny to make other people uncomfortable, who make jokes at other peoples' expense, and who aren't welcoming and accepting of all types of people.

Rather than jump straight into a campaign, I wanted a chance to meet and play with people, so I decided to run several "one-shot" adventures. A single evening's game with only one night invested. Should we click, then we can see where things lead with future games. If we don't click, no harm done.

I posted a message around social media looking for players. I posted it to the local Temecula subreddit, the D&D "looking for group" subreddit (r/lfg), the Discord for the local gaming store, and several local Temecula Facebook groups. Most of my responses came from the Temecula subreddit.

I had roughly 35 respondents over a week. Turns out a lot of people like D&D! To all of those folks, I sent a follow-up message detailing more about who I was, the kind of game I wanted to run, and my rules for what kinds of behavior I expect. I asked that anyone who wanted to participate agree to my rules. This allowed for players who enjoyed my style of game to opt in and others who didn't want that kind of game to opt out.

Those who responded affirmatively, I sent the date, time, and location and some details about the one-shot.

Here's a copy of the messages I sent out. If you're thinking of starting your own group, feel free to use these as a starting point.

From that initial social media posts, I had about 35 people respond. Because I'm a project manager, I tracked responses and contact info in a spreadsheet. I sent all of the respondents the second "about me/rules" message. About a dozen responded. Some couldn't make the dates work or couldn't commit to the the time for a regular game, but we still wound up with five players.

The Result

We met for the first game. One player messaged me to say he had a last-minute work emergency and couldn't make it but wanted to play in the second one-shot if it was still available. The other four players showed up. I ran a one-shot adventure I had prepared in advance using pre-generated characters. The game went exceedingly well. We had varying experience levels at the table, but everyone was friendly, excited to participate, and mutually supportive of the other players. Everyone likes to have their moment in the spotlight when playing a TTRPG, but one thing I was pleasantly surprised to see among a group of strangers was players who made opportunities in the game for the other players to shine.

Of those initial four players, once decided not to join for the longer term since he lived too far away to make it regularly. I originally planned to do a second one-shot, but I had interest from a couple of other players as well, as well as the fifth player who had to back out from the one-shot. We moved forward with me plus four players. We then added a fifth player - a friend of a friend who heard about the game. And then a sixth player - one of the original Reddit respondents whose schedule opened up. While I didn't do a one-shot for these players, everyone had to review the rules and accept them before participating.

We started our campaign with a "Session 0." I highly recommend this for ongoing campaigns. A Session 0 is a session where you get together to create characters, but also to establish ground rules for play, describe what the game will be like, and talk about the use of safety tools. This helped to ensure everyone was on the same page and helped to create feelings of mutual trust and safety and to create a welcoming space at the table.

Here's a copy of my "Session 0" notes for anyone who is interested. You can see we did some introductions, reviewed logistics, revisited the rules I asked everyone to agree to, talked about safety tools such as the X Card (which I call the "Pause Button") and a consent checklist (sometimes called "lines and veils").

One other tip - I setup a private Discord server for the group. This makes it easy to plan and organize the game and provides a place for the players to communicate. I highly recommend this once you start a new group!

Summary

I'm really pleased I chose to start a local gaming group, and delighted with the players who are joining me. It's something I look forward to every week, and friends in the game are quickly turning into friends outside of the game. If you're interested in starting a local TTRPG group, you could do worse than to experiment with the above approach!

Here are some resources that helped me think through this process and some other ideas to get started:

Finding and Maintaining a D&D Group by Sly Flourish Running Session Zeros by Sly Flourish Consent in Gaming by Sean K. Reynolds and Shanna Germain Matt Colville's "Running the Game" Youtube series Check out your local gaming store and see if they participate in D&D Adventure League . This is a great place to find other players and try out the game if you haven't played before. If you can't commit to an in-person game, consider online play using Discord, Roll20, Fantasy Grounds, or one of many other Virtual Tabletops.

What approach did you use to form your local gaming group? Share your approach in the comments below. And if you'd like more content like this, please subscribe to my newsletter.

Let me know as well if you have more questions about any of the tools I used, like my Session 0 or safety tools. I'd be happy to discuss further!

Worldbuilding for Creatives - Do Your Research

Research

One of the most fun and enjoyable parts of worldbuilding can be doing research. Many of the best worldbuilding ideas come from inspiration gathered from real-world sources. And if you’re trying to create a world that has the feel of something “real” or that is scientifically plausible, research will be of paramount importance.

Here are some particularly useful sources and tips for doing research.

The Library: Libraries are still your number one resources for reliable information. Unlike the Internet, most (not all) published books are well-researched and must meet basic standards of credibility. (This does not mean all self-published or Internet-based resources are false or not valuable, but it sometimes can be harder to establish the credibility of these sources.)

In recent years, more and more libraries are going digital, enabling you to borrow digital copies of books whenever you want without having to even go to the library to search for them. (Sometimes scouring the library is part of the fun, but you can't beat the convenience of a quick web search.)

The Internet: Wikipedia may be flawed, filled with unintentional bias, incomplete data, and more problems. All true. It is still the largest one-stop information shop in the world. And it’s free. Seriously, give them $2. I’m tired of getting emails from Jimmy Wales.

TV Tropes is another dangerously addictive Internet resource. Imagine Wikipedia but just for stories and tropes. Check it out if you’re prepared to lose a weekend.

Reddit is another useful internet resource. The abundance of subreddits means that you can almost always find a (self-professed) expert to give you an opinion, and at least forty or fifty equally or less-qualified people to give opinions on those opinions. Taken with a healthy grain or two of salt, you can find some valuable specialized information on Reddit.

The /r/worldbuilding subreddit is particularly useful, both for the enormous catalogue of resources they have collected in their wiki, but also for being able to see ideas from other people and to get feedback on your own ideas.

Your Imagination: Most of us don’t think of using our imaginations as doing “research,” but it is! In fact, your imagination is probably the single most important research source you will use while worldbuilding. So, treat it like a resource. Be intentional about using your imagination like you would use a library. Only instead of “going to your imagination,” like you would go to the library, you can just go for a long walk or a drive and think about one of the topics you’re stuck on or where you need information.

I also recommend bringing a small notebook with you wherever you go and jotting down ideas as they occur to you. Even if you don’t wind up using them or they aren’t relevant for this particular project, there are benefits to do so. First, imagination is a fickle beast, and writing down ideas as you have them is a great way of training your imagination to produce ideas. Second, it’s a great way to train your conscious mind to pay attention to ideas when they occur. Too often, we are busily going about our day and our subconscious is processing all this information beneath the surface, and we can miss really great ideas because we’re too distracted. Keeping a notebook on hand and using it liberally can really benefit you.

Other Books/Games/Movies/Comics/Etc.: There is a popular misconception amongst creatives, particularly those first exploring a creative pursuit, that ideas have to be totally innovative. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. Most great ideas come from taking existing ideas and presenting them in a new way – sometimes that means presenting a different perspective. Sometimes that means combining several old ideas together to create something new.

Take, for instance, the excellent, classic SF novel “The Forever War,” by Joe Haldeman. The author took his own very personal experiences of the Vietnam War and combined them with existing tropes and ideas seen in earlier science fiction action/adventure novels to create a story that was intensely personal and felt truly unique.

Ideas, contrary to popular belief, cannot be trademarked or copyrighted. Words are copyrighted, brands and logos are trademarked. But ideas belong to the fertile grounds of our minds. So feel free to borrow those ideas you find most interesting. What is it about them that so fascinates you?

It’s your unique take on an idea that makes it interesting, not simply the idea itself. It’s your expression that makes each iteration of an idea different and unique. If you try to present the idea the exact same way you have seen it in the past, it will feel derivative. But if you can find your own personal take on it, which you can discover from examining what it is that fascinates you about the idea, then you can make it your own.

Repurpose Real-World History: The history of our world is rife with fascinating cultures, languages, and events. Oftentimes you can use these historical events to feed into your worldbuilding. Basing fictional languages off of real-world ones can ensure your constructed languages have the sound of real languages. Looking at examples of historical religions, festivals, politics, and people can help you to flesh out your own world in ways that have depth and complexity. Look at key historical events in our world and think about parallels in your own. Wars, major discoveries, political developments - all of these can be sources of inspiration.

It’s important, however, to be cognizant of the risk of cultural appropriation. In worldbuilding, this most often occurs when the creator presents a certain ethnic, religious, or social group in a way that is exploitative, disrespectful, one-sided, or stereotypical. Even if you think you’re creating a new people, if you leverage historical stereotypes, you very much run the risk of cultural appropriation.

For example, suppose you are writing a western Euro-centric fantasy novel, and you decide to have all "old, wise people" have an elaborate tea-drinking ritual based off of Japanese culture. This would be an example of cultural appropriation, because you have lifted a cultural element out of its proper context and crammed it into something just because it looks cool. Better would be to learn why Japanese culture developed a tea ritual and understand its significance within the culture. Then figure out in the setting you are creating, what cultural forces might drive the establishment of a ritual behavior.

When in doubt, it is recommended that you consult with someone from the culture you are drawing on to advise you. I also recommend reading more about this topic. The Writing With Color blog has an excellent section in their FAQ.

Random Tables: When seeking to flesh out your world, random tables can be a great resource. The roleplaying games “Stars Without Number” and “Worlds Without Number” are highly recommended here. There are also many, many resources available online that can be used to generate random details about a world or a culture.

What Do You Think?

What resources do you use for doing research when worldbuilding? What little-known corners of the Internet do you frequent for obscure details? Who do you go to for answers? Share your best tips in the comments below.

If you like this blog post, be sure to Like it and subscribe to my newsletter. If you'd like to read more of my writing, check out my books on Amazon.com.

Worldbuilding for Creatives - 6 Tips for Getting Started

Approaching the task of building an entire world can feel intimidating. Acknowledging that fact, here are a few tips and tricks to help you get started. These are only guidelines and suggestions. The number one guiding principle should always be: do what works for you and your project.

Identify Your Purpose

As indicated in the previous blog entry, knowing why you are worldbuilding will go a great deal towards helping you narrow and better define the scope of your project.

Can you build your world to serve multiple purposes? Certainly, though this may require more effort. So, keep in mind what your primary goal is. At each step in the process, ask yourself, is this useful? Will this help me run a better role-playing game? Will this impact my story or my characters in any way?

The Iceberg Method

It’s quite easy to look at something like “The Lord of the Rings” and be simultaneously amazed at the worldbuilding and simultaneously overwhelmed. Tolkien invented entire languages!

The good news is, while you certainly can go to the extreme lengths of worldbuilding that Tolkien did, you don’t have to. The iceberg method of worldbuilding is one of the most popular strategies. It comes from the idea that when you see an iceberg floating in the water, only about 20% of the ice is visible. The remaining 80% is underwater, invisible to you, but you know it is there.

In worldbuilding, what this means is that you go into great detail on the “visible” parts of your world – the parts that will be relevant to your story or your game, for example – and provide only a rough outline of what is “hidden beneath the surface.” Your readers or players will never need to see the details hidden beneath the surface, but if they see the detail put into the parts that are visible, they will trust and believe that there is a whole detailed world down there.

And if those roughly outlined parts that are hidden need to become relevant, you can always flesh out the details when you need them.

Another way of thinking about this is “going wide” versus “going deep.” Going wide means broad strokes and rough outlines. Going deep means working out in greater detail. You want to go deep on the topics that are most relevant for your worldbuilding project – this again goes back to your purpose. You want to go wide on those topics that are only tangentially relevant, but which paint a broader picture of your world.

Using the iceberg method or the go wide/go deep method is a great way to manage the scope of your worldbuilding effort to ensure that you’re not doing more work than you need to (and that you actually get to creating the story or game you intend to create).

Find a Starting Point and Work Outward

In an upcoming blog post, I will talk more about Hooks. The purpose of a hook is to provide an entry point into worldbuilding, to give you a stepping off point. Finding a starting point that is meaningful to you is another way to get started.

Sure, you can start by figuring out the history of the cosmos, and maybe that’s relevant to your project. But you could just as easily start by defining one particular mountain town, or perhaps the history of a tribe of people. In each of these cases, start with something relevant to your hook, which ensures it is relevant to the goals of your project.

From this one small topic, what questions did you find yourself asking? If you are writing the history of a tribe of people, who do they trade with? What is their environment like? What languages do they speak? Who are their enemies? Each of these questions provides you another branch on a tree.

Working in this way, you can gradually build out a detailed and sophisticated world, and one which is relevant to your hook and your purpose for worldbuilding.

Build Only What You Need to Get Started

(This recommendation is only relevant to those who are worldbuilding in support of another project – a novel or a game, for example. If you’re worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding itself, disregard this section.)

If you want to write a novel or play a roleplaying game, or indeed, any project for which you are worldbuilding, it’s frighteningly easy to spend months or even years in worldbuilding, only to never star the actual project that is your goal. It’s important for you to remember that this worldbuilding project, while it may be (and should be) fun and enjoyable, is in service to a larger project.

Don’t wait until your worldbuilding is “done” to get started with your project! If you do, you may never actually begin your novel or roleplaying game. Instead, do only enough worldbuilding to provide the foundation for your other project. If you’re running a roleplaying game, maybe you need to develop a town, prominent factions in the region, sources of conflict, and maybe some big villain who can make trouble for the characters. If you’re planning a novel, maybe you need to know how magic works or the family and relationships of your main character.

Do just enough work to get started, and then start on your main project. You can always come back to your worldbuilding project (and you will!) What’s more, working on the main project will itself provide fodder for your worldbuilding. Let the two projects feed one another in a cycle of harmonious creativity!

Challenge Your Cultural Biases

One of the best ways to make your worldbuilding interesting and fresh is to continually challenge your own cultural biases. Ask yourself: how much does my worldbuilding rely on ideas that feel safe and familiar to me because of my cultural background? How can I push outside those boundaries?

For example, if you are creating a fantasy world and you base your world upon Medieval Europe, there’s nothing wrong with that, but ask yourself why. Is it because it’s what you know? What you grew up reading? What you imagine when you think of fantasy? What if your fantasy world was influenced by Mesoamerican culture? Or Himalayan?

Consider the same questions for characters in your world. Do they look like you? Do they share the same cultural values that you do? How could those be different? Would that be more or less interesting to you? Are there dominant cultures? How do those of other cultures perceive the dominant culture?

Creating worlds with diverse cultures and characters will only make your story or game seem more rich, more realistic, and more unique. The point is not to incorporate other cultures to “check a box.” The point is to push the boundaries of your own assumptions in order to create a more imaginative, diverse world.

One note: some may worry about crossing into stereotyping and cultural appropriation. Those are valid concerns we will discuss later. But even recognising the possibility shows you are already considering other cultures in a thoughtful and intentional way, which is the first step towards avoiding pitfalls. Those interested in this topic are encouraged to check out "Writing the Other: A Practical Approach" by Nisi Shawl and Cynthia Ward. They also provide an excellent selection of Resources useful to any worldbuilder.

Treat It Like a Project

Building a world is a project. While you can certainly pursue it forever, it can help if you set yourself tasks, milestones, and goals. Using simple techniques like goal-setting can help you ensure you get the important parts done in a timely fashion (especially if you’re using your worldbuilding to feed another creative project).

Set goals or milestones and then work back from those goals to smaller tasks. Once you have those smaller tasks, break them down into smaller chunks until you have a sense for how much work is there and how long it will take you.

For example, suppose you want to create one continent in your world. To do so, you decide you will need to create four kingdoms. For each kingdom, you want to write a brief history, define three political factions, and identify four or five cultural details of note. You decide that each kingdom will take you about a week to create. Now you can determine that you will be able to flesh out that continent in about a month.

What Do You Think?

How do you get started? What are your top tips? Share your suggestions in the comments below.

If you like this blog post, be sure to Like it, Share it on your favorite social platform of choice, and ,subscribe, to my newsletter. If you'd like to read more of my writing, check out my books on Amazon.com. And check back soon for the next blog post on doing research.

Don't miss Part 1 of this series, ,which you can find here.

Worldbuilding for Creatives - Introduction

Why Worldbuilding?

The idea of creating and imagining your own world – it’s what brought me to writing fiction and later to role-playing games. Perhaps it’s similar for you, or perhaps you’re fascinated with language, with understanding how cultures develop. Maybe you are particularly interested in building magic systems and seeing how stories evolve. Maybe you want to write a novel and don’t know where to start.

Worldbuilding is the art of developing an atlas of a fictional world. Your world can be as simple or as sophisticated as you need it to be. Your “atlas” can contain whatever you think it needs in order to suit your purposes. It is finished when you decide it is finished (for some, the answer may be never!)

While typically we think of worldbuilding being associated with fantasy and science fiction, in fact, worldbuilding is important to even contemporary or historical stories and settings. If you’re writing a contemporary crime novel, for example, it can be helpful to know local and regional laws, how important criminal organizations are structured, slang used by characters in the story, and all manner of details that will help bring your story to life. All of this is worldbuilding.

Who builds worlds and why? Any number of people! But this question matters because it will inform how you approach worldbuilding.

Authors: If you are writing a novel, a series, or even a collection of stories in a shared world, you will want to define the important details about your world. But what’s important? For that, you need to understand what your story is about. If you are writing a fantasy novel about the rise of a dragon-king, the history and evolution of dragons may be extremely relevant. Conversely, the history of a wizarding school on another continent is probably not something you need to spend a great deal of time on.

When determining your hooks, start with the following questions:

With the broadest of brush strokes, what will the story to be about? Who is the protagonist? Who or what is the antagonist? What is the scale? Is it local, regional, global?

Role-players: For tabletop role-playing game (TTRPG) enthusiasts and game masters, the purpose of role-playing is somewhat similar to authors but brings with it some unique challenges and opportunities. While the author seeks to develop a world in which to set their story, the role-player seeks to develop a world in which others can set their stories.

For role-players, you will start with a different set of questions to develop your hooks:

What kind of game am I running? Is it transhuman sci-fi? A fantasy/horror mashup? Comedic adventure? What will the campaign be about? Is there a central axis of tension? For example, a war between kingdoms, an epic struggle between order and chaos, or a galactic conflict between empire and rebels?

Hobbyists: If you’re a hobbyist, you build worlds for the sheer joy of it. You have no other end-goal, except the world itself. This is perfectly fine! You don’t need to be a role-player or an author to enjoy worldbuilding.

Worldbuilding simply because you want to provides more freedom and flexibility since you’re not constrained by the same requirements of authors and role-players. That said, this freedom can be paralyzing, so it’s still worth starting with a few questions to develop your hooks and to provide an entry point to worldbuilding.

What do I especially love about worldbuilding? Developing languages, cultures, and histories? Maybe it’s speculative evolution and imagining extraordinary flora and fauna? Or perhaps it’s unique planets and geologies? How constrained will you be by what is “scientifically plausible?” Are you trying to create a world that could exist in the physical laws of our universe? Is it a universe with different laws? Or is a universe where physical laws are less important than how something feels to you? There’s no right answer – there’s only the answer that is right for your world.

There are others who may be interested in worldbuilding as well: game designers, model enthusiasts, wargamers, artists, comic book writers and illustrators, and more. In each case, consider two or three questions to start out with to develop your hooks.

This is the first in a series of articles that can help you create fascinating, novel, and sophisticated worlds, whether you are an author, gamer, filmmaker, or just love the idea of creating a world of your own. I'll accompany future articles in this series with PDF templates you can use to help with your own worldbuilding.

Resources

There are many excellent courses and resources available on worldbuilding. This series of blog posts will provide you some basic tips and general guidance on worldbuilding, but I encourage you to spend some time reading articles, watching some videos, listening to podcasts, and reading other books on the topic.

A quick Internet search on worldbuilding will uncover a wealth of resources. Some of my personal favorites include Brandon Sanderson’s YouTube videos, Patricia C. Wrede’s “Fantasy Worldbuilding Questions,” the World Anvil Worldbuilding Podcast, and the /r/Worldbuilding subreddit. In addition to general worldbuilding guidance from these and other resources, consider studying resources on topics of particular interest to you and your world. Food and cuisine, metallurgy, geology, astrophysics, biology, constructed languages, and any number of other scientific and cultural topics can provide you with ample fodder for fleshing out and developing your world in interesting ways.

What Do You Think?

What are your recommended resources for worldbuilding? Do you have specific tools you use? Share your best resources for worldbuilding in the comments below.

If you like this blog post, be sure to Like it and subscribe to my newsletter. If you'd like to read more of my writing, check out my books on Amazon.com.

Spring Growth

This guest blog post comes to us from fellow author and dear friend M. E. Garber. You can find more of her work at her blog, Everyday Magic .

It’s springtime here in the northern hemisphere, and all around are signs of life, and growth: new leaves on trees, bulbs springing up and flowering, shrubs and annual plants growing, growing…. It’s beautiful, and no two springtimes are ever the same.

But what about your writing? Is it, too, growing? Are you allowing yourself to experiment, to change and bloom into new ways of writing? Even if you’re not stuck in a rut, it’s a good idea to let yourself play a bit, to attempt something new just for the fun of it. Who knows, maybe one day that “play” will become a new genre you write, a new style you excel at!

What do I mean about “growing” your writing? There are many ways you can do this. The first, simply enough, is to keep writing and practicing your craft. To consciously try to improve a certain aspect. Is plotting your downfall (as is has been for me)? Then plot your way through an entire story before writing it. Try different methods of outlining, because there are many and not all are going to work for any given writer. It’s taken years, but I’ve finally found a method that works for me. For now. In five years, who knows? Maybe I’ll need to re-adjust yet again.

You could also try another genre, or sub-genre. If you’re primarily a fantasy writer, how about trying SF, or a science fantasy? Why not? What’s holding you back? Back when I attended Taos Toolbox, Nancy Kress encouraged me--then mostly a fantasy writer--to give SF a try. She told me I was “smart enough” (not exactly her words, but the subtext of them), which was exactly what I needed to hear. Now about half of my published short fiction is SF! So let me pass the message on to you: You’re smart enough. Try whatever sub-genre you’d like, too: humor, romance, -punk, utopian, dystopian, whateverian.

Another way to “grow” your writing is to try another form, another length. Are you a short story writer? How about trying flash fiction--a complete story in under 1000 words? For drabble writers (under 100 words), how about expanding up to flash, or to 3,000 words? Novel writers might try a novella, or novelette. They’re all stories, but they feel completely different when writing them and they flex different writing muscles.

Why care? I’ve found writing flash fiction helps with my novel writing as much as my short stories. The ability to ruthlessly pare a story to the barest and best descriptives. To imply as much as state. To be succinct. And when you’ve written under-1000 word stories, suddenly having 3,000 words feels like immense luxury. What could you do with that?

So I encourage you to celebrate spring in your writing by consciously growing. Changing. Becoming anew. Delight in a bit of play, and reap the rewards of new skills. Let me know how it goes for you.

- M. E. Garber