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?
You may be deviant, but you're not alone! I'm a member of several world building communities, some quite large. Some are RPG focused but some are for authors and some are just for building new fantastical worlds (because the world is not enough?). I have one beloved setting that has evolved over 40 years, but I have probably a dozen others that have some degree of depth. I wouldn't say I imagine new worlds when staring out the window, though. I tend to spew ideas for things within my worlds - characters, events, phenomena. But it sounds like that's just the way the deviance presents for me. Keep it weird.
ReplyDeleteFunnily enough, worldbuilding is a cross discipline hobby for a lot of people. There's an entire subreddit for it, https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/
ReplyDeleteThanks for this post. I've spent many hours creating RPG settings, adventures and NPCs that I sort of knew would never be actually be used in playing with other players. And as such there is the tacit acceptance that world-building is not just an important part of the RPG hobby, but can become a pastime in its own right. The RPG rules (usually some edition of D&D) are really only used to quantify and define things like monsters, characters and wondrous magic. I am not qualified to say what drives this but it is an outlet, a focus, for the creative urge that so many of us have. Some sketch, some cook, some craft things, some make music, some write stories, I write about non-existent elfworlds.
ReplyDeleteI know exactly what you mean. I was intrigued with my family's world atlas from a young age, and started to make up imaginary wars between nations (and even US states). The Hobbit was mindblowing to me when I read it in grade school. I even imagined my backyard was a map, with individual nations and a long history.
ReplyDeleteWhen you're younger, world-building is a good way to process what you are learning about the world. It's like other sorts of play. As an adult, it's a way to model complex systems. And dammit, it's FUN.
(at least now as an adult, I no longer put hot humid jungles right next to cold, norse-inspired northlands, so that's a good thing)
The Heretic
For me, it's exploring. Exploring the world, discovering it. Exploring the history/lore. Exploring the details of a town, of a dungeon, of a kobold tree village. Discovering new things, that come from random dice throws and from my imagination.
ReplyDeleteYou know, it's often said that this sort of subcreation is characteristic of future writers, and sometimes of children who grow up to be highly intelligent adults generally. The Brontës are probably the most famous and frequently cited example, with their Angria and Gondal; a great example in fantasy would be E.R. Eddison, who invented his Mercury and many of the episodes of the Worm as a schoolchild together with Arthur Ransome. I'm not terribly well versed in the phenomenon, but in any case, it's an established one.
ReplyDeleteI'm sorry, man, but Stephen King is totally a world builder and addicted to his world building. It's the sharing of his world (though his novels) that's made his career.
ReplyDeleteI imagine that I, too, am attracting to RPGs for the various fantasy worlds they portray...I can't imagine that it's an attraction to different game "systems," since system is just the means by which we interact with the game's content. However, for many, many years I was not a 'world builder' myself but, rather, a world USER...and that, if anything, is probably a truer symptom of megalomania.
These days, I DO dabble in world building (I only do it inasmuch as it's needed for running my campaign), but I am still an infant in comparison to you and others (never mind the Tolkien's etc. of the world!).
The creative spark is present in all people...the drive to create and express ourselves. I would guess that "world building" becomes the outlet of people who have taken IN a lot of material (through reading, mainly), and have a burning need to process what they've internalized before externalizing it. In some people, this is tied to feelings of self-worth and self-identity...in other people it's just that creative self-expression urge. These differences account for the depth and breadth and form the world building exercise takes in individuals.
At least, that would be MY half-assed theory.
; )
The thing is that everyone is a world builder, but we just don't think of it that way. When we think about reality, that 'reality' is a world we have constructed in our head to match all of our incoming sense data. Every time you learn something you populate a little corner of your world.
ReplyDeleteWorld-building hobbyists (in the typical sense that we use the term) are people that want to play with hypothetical, to imagine how things might look if we shifted this variable, or that setting. I think the appeal is basically one of creativity, as JB says. Man is it one hell of a way to spend an afternoon. It's basically space & time travel.
Worldbuilding appeals to those of us who are "assemblers" by nature; those who don't navigate the world primarily by socio-political links like -- to use an overused term -- "neurotypical" people, but who rather construct a sense of the world from unbroken absorption. Building (hopefully) coherent, complicated wholes by drawing together information and input, continuously, is how our minds function. Since the "real" world is based on neurotypical perspectives that prioritise social standing and political games over coherency and internal logic, it's an escape of sorts. Those of us who can't "point deer, make horse" have our own form of fantastical worldbuilding. The difference is, we know which parts are real and which aren't ;) Which is to say, our imaginative endeavours draw from and reflect reality as we understand it, incomplete and flawed as such understanding must be. Dedicated worldbuilding involves at least an amateur interest in vague or not-so-vague ideas of geography, cartography, politics, economics, biology, anthropology, archaeology, evolutionary history, etc. All these interconnecting understandings, and to weave them into something that, to at least some extent, *works*, is satisfying. As satisfying as I imagine it is to neurotypicals when "he said this but she didn't agree and told them and they did this" and when their team scores a point in team-game.
ReplyDeleteBut you yourself iirc noted that currently there is a hobby very close to this: fanfic writing. And I have noticed that this hobby (as well as that of alternate history one) includes many people who just write up some new worlds and offer them to any writer who would place a story in them.
ReplyDeleteMike