The older I get, the less interested I become in having a detailed setting that all makes sense. Somebody on the rpg site linked to this io9 article, in which a painfully hip and clever journo sets out "The 7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding"; it's the sort of thing I probably would have appreciated 10 years ago, but which I now view as dangerously wrong-headed. Setting aside M. John Harrison's critique (which is that what we know about our world fills umpteen libraries and not even that is enough, so why on earth would you expect a fantasy world to be that detailed?), no fantasy author who you would care to label as being "great" has ever cared about any of those things. Especially not Tolkien, who for some reason is always seen as obsessing over detailed setting creation but who clearly didn't care a jot about economics, infrastructure, non-monolithic socio-political groups, or portraying members of different ethnicities in three-dimensional ways (or having three-dimensional characters in general, really). You could say exactly the same thing about Peake, Wolfe, Vance, Howard, Zelazny, Moorcock, Lewis, Harrison... Even modern authors who are renowned for being interesting "worldbuilders" - Mieville and Martin spring to mind - show no real evidence of considering the creation of a world that makes sense to be one of their key tasks. (I remember reading an interview with GRRM in which he said something along the lines that the Dothraki language has 7 words because that's all it has needed so far, and when he needs an 8th word he'll create it; this seems to neatly sum up his philosophy towards worldbuilding.)
This is because fantasy in general has always been about theme. As long as things are thematically coherent, readers tend not to care about much else: it's never bothered them exactly why it is that The Shire is so prosperous and why we never see female orcs, or where Gormenghast gets all of its luxury goods from. They're interested in the story, and the themes which underlie it, and as long as things aren't egregiously ridiculous they couldn't care less about these "7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding". (Indeed, you might say that the moment a reader starts nitpicking about stuff like that is the moment you've lost him as a reader: the reason he's nitpicking is because he's bored by the story.)
I tend to think that the growth in fan-dom amongst nerds in the internet era has contributed to this strange notion that everything has to be perfectly thought-through. Unlike in the 1930s and 40s, when Tolkien was writing The Lord of the Rings, there are now baying throngs of fantasy and SF fans who define themselves by their geekdom and who veritably froth at the mouth at the prospect of debating the minutiae of their favoured franchises with people who are Wrong On The Internet. The game has changed, and not for the better; ultimately I think it is a childish expectation that everything has to fit together, and a childish expectation that everything can be explained.
Of course, I'm not a fan of that other disease of nerd-dom, which takes the view that theme doesn't matter and literally everything that you like should be mixed together, on the principle that I like ice cream and I like spaghetti bolongnese so why on earth wouldn't you want to mix them together? It seems to me that all that's required is thematic coherence and if you have that taken care of, you've won.
Ironically, this might be why the article may be of more use to RPG setting design than it is to fiction authors. Thematic consistency is far more viable when you are a single author writing a story than it is when you are refereeing a game for players who need to be able to pitch in their own ideas if the game isn't going to turn into a linear recitation of the GM's notes.
ReplyDeleteJust one reason why it's hard to replicate good literary fantasy on the game table, and why stories derived from the game table tend not to make for high-quality fantasy novels.
I see your point. I think the GM can build thematic consistency at the beginning though, just by setting expectations and also through his setting itself.
DeleteI just found out replies have an upper limit, So let me just link to my newly minted blog to reply.
ReplyDeletehttp://gortsfriend.blogspot.com/2013/08/world-building-as-disease.html
I don't really disagree with any of that. I am behind you 100% on this issue of "explaining". Explaining how things happen, in horror or fantasy (and often SF) almost always diminishes it.
DeleteThe classic example for me is Hannibal Lecter. He was ta genuinely evil, inexplicable presence in Red Dragon and The Silence of the Lambs. Once Harris felt the need to explain why he turned out the way he did, he became just another serial killer, and a pretty silly one at that.
Nerds don't understand expressionism.
ReplyDeleteWhich is really bizarre when you think about it, because nerds like fantasy, which is surely the most expressionistic literary genre there is.
Deletei thought the point of MJHarrison's 'clomping foot of nerdism' comment was that the encyclopedic detail the hyperrational types obsess over has nothing whatsoever to do with maintaining the 'vivid continuous dream' (john gardner's term) so the 'worldbuilders' and their nerd-fans should fuck well off because they're not helping beauty along in its course.
ReplyDeleteharrison is a better writer than god so he'd know.
perhaps what nerds dislike about expressionism is that the idea of emotional engagement/manipulation at a subconscious (or in any case linguistically slippery) level makes them uncomfortable -- the folks who want the mechanics of vancian spellcasting to be made explicit for them may get weirded out when the emotional (psychological) work of the artwork is resistant to being made similarly explicit.
some people thought the extra 'physics of time travel' bits in the DONNIE DARKO director's cut improved the film. they are wrong; they rule the internet.
I know Harrison has made that argument, but he also made the argument about the real world and libraries and the sheer brute impossibility of it. Imagine how insane a writer would have to be to contemplate emulating the complexity of the real world, and how doomed to failure he would be.
DeleteI think probably you're right about emotional engagement, and it stems from this obsession with rationality that is a characteristic of nerd-dom.
Obsessing over world-building in lieu of storytelling is like obsessing over socket wrenches in lieu of sports cars. I suppose it has an appeal 'cos then you don't ever need to leave the safety of your garage.
ReplyDeleteI've learned this lesson over long years of being an obsessive world builder myself. If there's no way for a person to engage or interface with that accumulated detail in a meaningful way, then why should they care? And how much work are you putting in for so little payoff at that point?
I used to justify it as allowing for greater immersion. If you map out a building you need to know where the bathrooms are, that sort of thing. Now I understand that if for some reason the adventurers need a trip to the loo, then a loo there shall be around the next corner. A horse will turn up if you put a cart there.
Nowadays, I find that achieving verisimilitude or having it "feel right" is a lot more direct and useful than having everything mapped down to the molecule. If you're familiar enough on an aesthetic and emotional level with your setting that you can answer questions off the top of your head, rather than looking up an answer in your hand typed encyclopedia, you don't have to work as hard and you're ready for anything.
I think one trick all the greats like Tolkien get away with is using a lot more off the shelf parts than people realize. How many fantasy epics hang off of a European history framework? How easy is it to make yourself seem exotic just by swapping out that infrastructure (Like M.A.R. Barker using Meso-America as his substrate instead of medieval Europe.) For some reason folks seem to think that's cheating, when the fact is 100% original is an unattainable goal, and you're better off combining different existing stuff in new ways.
And in the end, if you really want to cause an obsessive world builder to gnash their teeth, quote the MST3K Mantra: "It's just a show, I should really just relax."
Or the loo is a convenient escape route into the sewers, a hiding place when the Inn is on fire, a way for the thief to sneak into the castle after climbing up the side, a spot to wait to assassinate the cowboy who cut up those whores, or more likely given the simulated era, an explanation for why there just happens to be a bucket filled with excrement, when a player is looking for something to chuck into the crowd as a disturbance. (thanks NPR for that segment on why modern cess pits are the depth they are, rather than the depth they used to be)
DeleteMore and more, I tend to think that the approach a DM should take in worldbuilding is to "know" his world at the thematic level so well that he can simply answer players' questions on the fly and describe things in such a way that it all fits together as if it was pre-planned.
DeleteYou get out of my mind now.
DeleteThe point of my world building vs. adventure building is exactly that. I don't use Forgotten Realms, because I'd have to look up such things. When it's my world, I can always improvise, because I invested an hour one time sketching in the previous kingdoms on cocktail napkins. Having an idea of a historical time line and who built all those lost temples and ruined castles lets me not write a specific description of the carvings on that ornate dungeon door ahead of time. Which doesn't sound that important, except the decor clues them into them being on the right track. That door is a vague clue that they're getting close to yet another part of the silly multipart artifact they wanted.
For every one thing I prepare, I usually have a half dozen notes written down to remind myself of what I made up on the fly. The sketches I made on the erasable board.
Also, having now gone to look at the article, what I see here is the nerd's reflexive resistance to the trivialization of their passion. By striving for "realism" they can stand their ground and say "See! This is not silly! This is *serious business*!"
ReplyDeleteTo which I say "Lighten up, Francis."
The silly is a feature, not a bug.
This briefer response is probably better than the rambling one I just made, but the spirit is the same.
One of the reasons I won't GM for my regular Saturday group is becaue I KNOW those guys will pick apart anything I run... 'Oh! that aqueduct wouldn't work that way!... and 'Oh! You've got the physics of that all wrong!' I'm really reluctant nowadays to run anything for self-proclaimed 'gamers.'
ReplyDelete"all that's required is thematic coherence"
ReplyDeletevery true.
>>7 Deadly Sins of Worldbuilding<<
ReplyDeleteHe sounds like a guy looking for an excuse for his writer's block.
Quite.
Deleteor looking to post copy to a well read blog to help sell his latest self-published opus.
DeleteI'm going to frame this and put it on my wall. World-building should be like comfortable furniture made from scrap wood and other clutter.
ReplyDeleteGreat post--I wholly agree with the sentiment. My contribution would be that nerds' obsessive desire to catalog and confirm and assure detailed factual harmony within a context is related to "speculative" or "hard" science fiction. Such sci-fi focuses on describing a plausible future, so the details are *supposed* to work and be internally consistent and the whole idea is that the author has been obsessive about getting it all "right." That's part of the exercise, and its part of the appeal to readers. Clark, Asimov, etc. (I don't really go for that type of sci-fi myself). Nerds like sci-fi. Nerds like fantasy. So it makes sense that some nerds would treat fantasy like hard sci-fi, to be dissected and analyzed for purposes of "accuracy" and scoffed at when it falls short of that standard.
ReplyDeleteI wonder when it all started? It didn't seem to be a factor in Star Trek: TOS.
DeleteDon't know -- Jules Verne or something? My guess is that TOS gets classified as "soft" sci fi, so it wouldn't be part of the conversation.
DeleteWhen did it start?
DeleteWhen there was enough "product," that is science fiction which can be sorted into good and bad for consumption. Star Trek's looseness with real science and the audience's forgiving nature is largely a product of it being produced in an era where quality scifi was rather rare. So they often got a pass on the science, because people were just so happy to see quality story-writing connected to anything with space ships. In the same way, Star Wars gets a pass with the public, but gets torn apart by the "serious" scifi fans. By the time that TNG came out, you saw a lot of episodes attempting to resolve some of the sillier TOS ideas, such as just how Spock is half Vulcan. TNG was built upon obsessive nerd fandom, it needed to please them. TOS was built as a way to sell wagon train watchers on scifi. Once Lord of the Rings came out, it's a bit hard to explain you liked Krull.
I think at it's core, a lot of nerd nitpicking is reversed engineered. It's a gut dislike of the product, which is then justified by logically constructing a reason to hate the product.
Which still doesn't change the fact that Water World is horrible, but the Road Warrior is great. Sometimes it is about the science.
I gun for tonal coherence in my games. This place feels like this so whatever I put in it needs to compliment, augment, nuance, etc... that feeling. Thematic coherence is valuable but it's secondary. My players love a bit of expressionism.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree. My personal brief for myself is 'get the mythology right,' if thematically it rings true and sounds like it'll generate stories it's in, otherwise there's no need to write it.
ReplyDeleteMost of your examples of authors who ignore those 7 worldbuiding sins are classic writers who were writing in a very different age than we live in now. While we can recognize their brilliance, we can also recognize that expectations have changed, and there's no use bemoaning that fact. Sure, you can get away with committing the 7 worldbuilding sins, depending on the type of work you're doing. But for the most part, readers expect more these days. I don't think the modern authors you mentioned are particularly compelling counterexamples, either. People like GRR Martin do their worldbuilding in a more organic fashion than most worldbuilders, but they do it nonetheless. In fact, Martin is an amazing world builder. I challenge you to find one of those 7 worldbuilding sins that Martin has willfully and consistently violated. The example you gave of how Martin only creates as much language as he needs is not a counterexample, either. It simply demonstrates how he does his world building organically while writing, rather than doing it up front.
ReplyDeleteI'm not suggesting that you CAN'T write a good book that violates one of the 7 sins of worldbuilding. Of course you can. You can violate almost any of the so-called "rules" of writing that people talk about, as long as you have a good reason and you do everything else well. I'm just saying that I think you are overreacting by trying to throw them all out the window as if they were ridiculous. In my opinion, those 7 worldbuilding sins are solid pieces of advice, and you ignore them at your own peril. You don't have to go overboard or spend years worldbuilding to get these things right, either. Just having them in mind as you write is enough.
4 - Creating monolithic social, political, cultural and religious groups: Dothraki and pretty much anybody outside of Westeros.
Delete7 - Introducing some superpower without accounting for how it would change society: the fact winter only arrives on an irregular basis.
I put it to you that one of the reasons why modern fantasy is rather dull and lifeless is that writers have largely forgotten why world-building is not the be-all and end-all, and why GRRM and China Mieville are exceptions who prove the rule.
Also I'm not sure where I said all of the rules are ridiculous and you should throw them all out of the window.
DeleteYou said "no fantasy author who you would care to label as being "great" has EVER cared about ANY of those things" (emphasis mine) which is a pretty big statement. The rest of your post didn't give me the idea that you felt the 7 world building sins from the article had any value. But I apologize if I'm putting words in your mouth. I should have stated it differently.
ReplyDeleteYour examples are pretty good. I can't refute them off the top of my head, although I seem to recall that not all the Dothraki agreed with Khal Drogo's opinions. I also noticed that "monolithic" is the wrong word. The author of the original article should have said "homogenous." Monolithic implies that they are all-encompassing or world-wide, but that's not what he really meant. The Dothraki are hardly monolithic, since they're just one of many cultures outside of Westeros. But they are pretty homogenous, and I can see your point there.
Anyway, I don't want to spend too much time splitting hairs or arguing minutiae. In a way I think your examples also back what I was saying—that yes, you can violate SOME of the 7 worldbuilding sins and still write a good story, but only if you do it REALLY well. Martin steers well away from most of them, and maybe violates some of them some of the time, but it only works because he's such a great writer and he's writing such a great story. So I think we're basically saying the same thing as far as that goes. The problem is that most new writers don't know how to do it really well. If you willfully ignore all the 7 sins, you're likely to create a stinker. Best not to mess around with that stuff unless you're really confident. Or at least only violate one or two at a time, and do it for good reason.
I disagree that worldbuilding is in any way a root cause of modern fantasy being dull and lifeless. I think there was just as much dull and lifeless fantasy 50 years ago, it's just been forgotten about precisely because it was dull and lifeless. I'm sure you can also find many examples of classic fantasy that's full of tripe and garbage. I doubt the modern fantasy that you're complaining about is dull just because the authors spend too much time worldbuilding. If anything, spending time worldbuilding shows a genuine commitment to at least try to innovate rather than mindlessly emulating past authors.
I'm actually a little surprised to be the only voice of dissent around here. Maybe I'm in the minority, and that's OK. I get where you're coming from, I just disagree with a lot of what you're saying.
Disagreement is fine!
DeleteI don't think we are saying the same thing; I think a great story will be great irrespective of these 7 rules, and a rubbish story will be rubbish irrespective of them too. No amount of detailed world-building will make a poor novel into a good one or even an average one, and the reverse is almost also true - it would be very hard to turn a good story into a bad one by disobeying some or all of the rules cited. So it hardly matters - except obsessive world-building often results in the desire to show off the world rather than follow the plot, to the detriment of the work as a whole.
To me, an rpg is basically an immersion game with a metagame of resource management. Detail is required. I'm not trying to play Conan, even if I play in Hyboria. Conan had 4 18+ stats and a lot of luck, which is not what most characters have. The setting is there to have adventures in a world of _______, not to recreate the plotlines of the novels it's based on. For THAT thematic consistency you need to figure out what is in the world, and if you're playing Conan or Elric settings combat needs to be short and lethal. Your character is not a demigod emperor or ubermensch, the game's protagonists would break the game or (just as likely) die in a random battle because they're not wearing Plotmail. So I think going in expecting it to be like S&S, rather than in an S&S mileu, is confusing the nature of the beast. It's not possible to replicate author armor and still have a good game unless all the players are improv geniuses. Most players are lazy and not particularly original, so the game that plays like Conan reads is a fantasy. And all of these 'cinematic' games fail even worse, Conan was not a frickin superhero.
ReplyDeleteAlso, many of us like our fantasy specifically because or lore or attention, or it becomes D&D with different names. If you're into historical or ancient themed worlds (like Glorantha of RuneQuest) you need cults, you need to know how bronze differs from steel. True , Robert E. Howard can make all this up. But we need mechanical resolution for it, and most DMs can only make up so much without it becoming garbage. On top of all this, a lot of us wish there was a ton more information on Hyboria or Middle Earth. It's pleasurable to read, and as I really like engaging the religious political and survival aspects I NEED this information as a GM and I get bored without it as a player.
So I basically disagree, it sounds like you're just not playing the same kind of game I am.
And most fantasy is shit because most writers are hacks selling crap to morons. Television and movies are shit, too. Bad taste and formulaic laziness is why modern fantasy is retarded PC crap, not world building.
ReplyDelete