When Words Collide 2015 Recap – World-building Presentation from Game Design

Continuing on in my When Words Collide 2015 recap, I’m finally moving into the regular programming portion of the festival. This one is about Susan Forest’s world-building presentation on Crafting Magical Worlds with Extra Credits’ Mario Theory.



The reason why I wanted to include this one is because it really blew my mind. I love finding parallels between written storytelling and other storytelling media like games. And Susan Forest presented it wonderfully with the parallel between solid world-building techniques in both mediums.

A lot of the time, stories convey world-building, such as how magic systems work, with some three methods that kind of break the flow:

Telling with exposition. I remember when…
Prologues. Worst idea ever.
Dialogue. ”As you know Bob…” “Let me explain how magic works…”

Game design tends to rely on tutorials, similar to prologues in fiction. It doesn’t get you into the game right away. It’s an infodump that you have to make it through–and readily recall later–in order to survive the battle or scenario coming up. However:

Too much information up front slows the pace.
Too little information and the reader doesn’t know what is happening.

But in old school Super Mario Bros., there was no tutorial. No infodump. You started in the middle of the screen. Only one movement allowed for the scenery to change (moving right). As you encounter blocks, question boxes, enemies, and jumping over obstacles, you learned how to do things precisely when you needed them. In addition, shown information is more memorable than told information. Conflict, action, and characters are what readers care about and will make your world-building more memorable.

The final thing that really resounded with me was the difference between world-building depth and world-building complexity. Depth was the ability for the reader/player to make decisions and get engaged with the world. Complexity is the number of rules a constructed world has. While a certain about of rules are necessary to achieve depth, too much complexity in world-building might act as a barrier to depth.

Complexity can be lowered if built off of existing lore. But if you are calling on a previous understanding of the complexity presented in your book, you need to be clear which lore or convention you are building on. Stupid example: are your vampires deadly or sparkly?

Needless to say, world-building for me was so much more clearly presented with the as-needed Mario theory for genre fiction. The comparison brought the needs of fiction into focus for me that generic writing advice hadn’t done for me in some time.

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