The creation of a world - mapping it, populating it, chronicling its history - is in itself a hobby. I suspect for a lot of DMs it is indeed actually the main purpose of RPGs. The game is really just an excuse to indulge in Tolkienian sub-creation.
There is nothing wrong with this: I consider it to be my hobby too. But I would like to use this post as an opportunity to probe into where its pleasure comes from.
The first is generic to all hobbies: when engaged in some aspect of world-creation it is easy to get caught up in the activity and enter a flow-state which is in itself pleasurable. This is something akin to what lay people sometimes refer to as 'mindulfness', but it is really the absolute opposite of that. It is a state of being in which one truly presences, reflecting neither on one's physical self nor on one's thoughts, but simply being in the activity itself. One is allowing oneself to be carried along by the act of doing, as though on a river. This is enjoyable for its own sake. It is a retreat from intrusive thoughts and quotidian activities, to be sure, but it is not merely escapist. There is a kind of happiness (dare I even say 'joy'?) in the feeling that one's conscious, subconscious, and physical self are all bent towards the same goal.
The second is that it is escapist, and there is nothing wrong with that. Life can be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short even when not in Hobbes' state of nature (Spinoza once said that we never leave the state of nature, anyway). And we therefore take what pleasures we can find. Drawing maps and thinking about elves is a lot more wholesome and worthwhile than watching TV, if retreat from the sheer banal horror of your humdrum existence is all that you are searching for. It is an opportunity to create something which, even if nobody else even looks at it or knows of its existence, can be pleasing to your eye, your mind, your soul. So why-ever not?
The third is that it is a small act of rebellion against the inescapable and terrifying fact that there is only one world that you will ever live in. It is grotesquely unfair that, with an entire universe on our doorsteps, the best that any person can ever do is explore a small part of the surface area of one single planet. It is even more grotesquely unfair that there are many more universes that can be imagined and we will never be able to explore any of those. This - the fact that we are able to imagine places we can never go - is a monstrous constraint and one about which we should be outraged. Channel that rage into something useful: get as close as you can to possessing all of reality and all other realities as your oyster by, God-like, detailing your imagined corner of creation.
The fourth is that it is also a small act of rebellion against the banality of small-mindedness. There are lots of people out there who not only want to stay swimming in their own tiny intellectual fishbowls and never go out into the ocean of the mind, but want everybody else to be the same way too. Well, remember Cinderalla's admonition - they can order you to do all kinds of things, but they can't order you to stop dreaming.
And the fifth, related pleasure is that it is so liberating. Debbie Harry sang 'Dreaming is free'. I have always loved that line. Dreaming costs nothing. But it also frees us: in the world of dreams there are no constraints. It doesn't matter how poor you are, how crappy your home life is, how lonely you feel, how bored you are. You can get a piece of paper and a pencil and, within your relationship to those obejcts, make yourself free.
The world needs a bit of subcreation here and there. So what, really, is stopping you?
Reading this, my mind wandered back to past posts of yours - somewhere in the either of Blogger's neglected search capabilities - that reflect on distraction. I view them as companions to this. Distraction is what keeps me from doing this; distraction tugs at the strings of my mind tightening it into a glob of inert brain matter. I appreciate your calls to action that often come with your posts about creativity and process. It's unfortunate that people can feel the need to ask permission for something such as dreaming - that dreaming's inherent value can be forgotten. Still, to say out why it remains important in this little manifesto is helpful. It's worth carving out that space.
ReplyDeleteMy calls to action, to be clear, are as much for myself as others!
DeleteDistraction comes for us all. Periodically, it helps to refocus explicitly and consciously.
Absolutely! Saying it out to ourselves and hearing someone say that to themselves to prompt you.
DeleteThank you for this post. I have always considered world-building to be a big part of this hobby, and the main part when I have not been able to play with others. For a long time I told myself that this was all in preparation for when I did run a campaign for other players, and it would be magnificent and splendid in its depth and detail. However, these days I accept that a lot of my world-building was and still is for its own sake. And yes the reasons you have given all apply. I suppose that these days I can share my world-building on my blog in case anyone else is interested.
ReplyDeleteThanks, John. There really is nothing wrong with doing it for its own sake. You could also use it as a setting in which to write stories. Why not?
DeleteI hear your points and agree with some of them, and even the points that I have issues with are invalidated by "well people have a different hobby than I and/or are doing a hobby different from my way of doing it, so why should I force them to conform to my thinking?"
ReplyDeleteYet, Ugh, I hate world-building. The reasons why are exactly what M. John Harrison gives.
I guess if I had my druthers, things would be more like Yoon-Suin, where there is an idea of the setting, a dream of the setting yet nothing concrete and exact. Or, in the case of novels, especially sci-fi/fantasy there would be an agreed-upon conception that they are texts of legends from the setting, like getting an equivalent of the Beowulf poem from the far future or another universe. There is the text of Beowulf and we can surmise things of Beowulf's world from it, however those theories could be wrong, if you want to imbue a suspension of disbelief and not face the fact that you are reading about something made up.
I guess my two big other bugbear issues are I believe narrative and story come first (though not in a storygame sense of the terms) and they should be first both in fiction and rpgs. A lot of rpg settings are great to read yet are impossible to play in, usable on the table, or even lift ideas from (case in point Gurps Fantasy II: The Madlands).
The other issue is too many big or biggish capitalist companies see settings as IP and exert IP control. The best example is Cyberpunk 20XX universe or universes. From R. Talsorian Games, it's a big, awesome sandbox, throw in or take out as much as you want. Want Arasaka to turn into a saintly organization saving the world? Sure. Want all the meta-narrative characters to die in an embarrassing car fire, unknown and unremembered while your 16 year old street punk goes on to become the most legendary cyberpunk the universe has ever known? Hell Yes! Night City invaded by giant psychedelic bunny rabbits on the orders of the literal supernatural Norse God Odin, tired of not being taken seriously? Fantastic.
CD Projekt Red on any of those questions?
No,
No,
And no!
Granted, video games and rpgs are different things yet I think my point is still valid.
Addendum, that last crazy idea of the giant psychedelic bunny rabbits of Odin are likely because I've never gotten out of that shadowrun/palladium games nonsense phase/the Gary Gygax bizarro dungeonland phase. I separate those two phases, although a blog post could be made that both phases are the same, just coming from different generations of people, Gygax in the 70's/early 80's while Shadowrun and Palladium games from the 90's role-players.
It depends what is meant by 'world-building', of course. In a sense M. John Harrison was world-building - you can get a pretty good idea of what the setting of Viriconium is like in all its iterations. But it is also important to remember he was writing novels and short stories. An RPG campaign setting has a good excuse for being more concrete!
DeleteThank you for letting me feel like it is ok to spend most, if not all of my gaming time worldbuilding. I’m a solo gamer, and worldbuilding is the activity I really engage in. This hits home.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the nice comment!
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