I have a confession to make. I make it in the hopes that, out there in the world, there are other strange deviants such as me - who can perhaps help to form some sort of support group or, failing that, a terrorist organisation bent on world domination.
My confession is this: I love to play RPGs, but I often wonder if the hobby is just a vehicle for my chief obsession, which is imagining other worlds in fine detail. Since 'worldbuilding' itself isn't exactly a hobby as such - there are no magazines, no clubs, no organisations, no conventions - I attach myself limpet-like to D&D. But if it were socially acceptable to say at a party that in one's free time one enjoys 'building worlds' (can you imagine?), that is probably what I would say.
Where does the desire to build worlds come from?
I don't think it is entirely suppressed megalomania, though I do not dismiss the possibility that it partly is. It would make sense that people who have an urge to play God would find ways to do it in their spare time - making and destroying entire continents, peoples, civilisations and indeed worlds with the mere sweep of a pen. And those who know me personally will tell you that I do indeed have a certain amount of suppressed megalomania - I would make an extremely unenlightened despot if put in charge.
But that cannot hold true generally, I think, because when one thinks of the great worldbuilders - Tolkien, Le Guin, GRRM to a certain extent, CJ Cherryh, Gene Wolfe, etc. - one doesn't immediately reach for the word 'megalomania', at least in respect of their public personae.
Certainly, creativity and imagination have a bearing, but that is too diffuse a statement: it doesn't explain why the creativity and imagination are in some people channelled into making up elfworlds where as for others it finds its way into, say, painting or sculpture or interpretive dance.
And nor can it just be mimicry or mimesis, though no doubt world-builders tend to be influenced and inspired by what they read or encounter in the books (or RPG modules) they consume: how many people did Tolkien, for example, convert to the idea that it is possible in the first place to just sit down and make up languages and entire geographies for fun? I don't think this is the whole story, though, because it doesn't explain why some fantasy enthusiasts 'get the bug' while most simply don't.
I think, in truth, we have to get a little bit more phenomenological. What does it feel like to make up an elfworld? Speaking personally, it is almost ineluctable: I just get ideas. I can't control it. In idle moments, my mind produces them. Other people may sit staring out of the car window when stuck in traffic imagining what they are going to have for dinner, mentally undressing a co-worker, reminiscing about their childhoods or humming tunes; I, inordinately often, find myself thinking things like 'Yes, but what if there was a world in which the water cycle operated through the medium of blood??'
Why does this happen? Short of imagining myself to be an idiot savant blessed with insight into the existence of alternative realities, I can only speculate that it's a phenomenon with a momentum of its own - once you start, you find it difficult to stop, and that difficulty increases over time. It becomes a habit of thought that is self-cultivating - not, I suppose, all that unlike the compulsion Stephen King feels to write novels or Al Di Meola feels to play the guitar (though I wish it had something of the same level of financial rewards). The implication of this would be: all you need to do to end up as a complete weirdo is to start acting like it. What are you waiting for?
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