Today’s Shadowrun Sundays addresses game design. Designing a game from scratch requires a lot of work. There’s world building that needs to be done, threats that need to be created, rules that need to be set up, and then everything needs to be tested. It sounds easy, but designing the game is only half the battle. After game creation comes the business side of the coin: networking, marketing, distribution, brand building, and sales. I’m no expert at game design, but the steps seem similar to how fiction writing works.
Everything starts with a concept, a single sentence snippet that gives a grand overview of the game world. In D&D, it would be something like “A medieval world with magic and gods that combines the high fantasy worlds of Tolkien and Camelot.” In that single sentence, we have what time period the game will be placed in, what types of weapons and armor will be available to our players, the basic idea for the religious setting, and two initial threats: magic and torqued-off gods.
From this sentence, we start our world building. Medieval society tends to be very fractured. Even empires are small due to traveling constraints and the burden of supporting professional armies. On the other hand, we’ve given ourselves magic, which means we can break the normal rules of how traveling works. Teleportation and magical portal gates could be involved to speed things along. But before we get ahead of ourselves, we need to start with the basics. The number of countries, ethnicities, societies and cultures we want.
Richard White writes an fantastic series of World Building articles (Terra Incognito) in Penumbra eMag, starting in Volume 1, Issue 5. Richard starts with a concept, then builds up to that concept from the very beginning by defining the land first, which includes shapes and climates, then moves on to people (indigenous and immigrant), governments, religions, trade and finance, and even politics and mythology. I don’t quite work that way. I start my world building with the initial concept and reverse engineer the society I want.
My WIP novel, Circle of Fire, starts with mid-European medieval society fused with elements of the Roman Empire, Scheherazade’s Arabian Nights world, and Greco-Norse mythology. In order to pull that together, I needed to map out my world, decide my climates (much like Richard did), then find the reason why all these elements got fused together. Unlike Richard, though, I knew my pantheon and how my majority religion worked before I got to designing kingdoms and mapping out migratory patterns.
It doesn’t matter what direction we work from. It only matters that we answer the basic questions that will be needed for gameplay. World building isn’t just a matter of having background color. The world dictates the rules of the game and is an essential building block for attracting players and long-term fans. Even board game designers are aware of this. Look at Monopoly and Ticket to Ride for examples. There are stories behind these games, creating a common culture for the fans that make the game memorable. If our game world is memorable, if it gives something for the fans to apply to real life situations (like the phrases “Critical Failure” and “Automatic success!” when achieving something fantastic), the game is more likely to be successful.
World building is just one component of game design, though. It is both easy and hard, over-engineered and overlooked. Too much world building can sink a game as fast as not enough world building. Finding the balance is key.
What do you think about games and world building? Does it help or hinder your game play?
