Book Excerpt: Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games

gamedeveloper.com:

Worldbuilding is a craft, it’s a muscle that gets stronger the more you exercise it, and there are certain principles I’ve focused on as ways that help me solidify and evolve my practice of worldbuilding. These are not goals but are tangible practices I can work on and work into a world I am building in order to achieve a variety of worldbuilding outcomes.

These key principles are:

This principle comes from the premise that the game’s world should strive to be believable rather than realistic. This is a concept Joel Burgess spoke about often when discussing the world direction for Watch Dogs Legion (Ubisoft Toronto, 2020). Burgess, the world director on Watch Dogs Legion and with a long legacy leading level design practices at Bethesda on games such as Fallout 4 and Skyrim, explained that when he was providing direction for the team to recreate our near-future version of London the goal was to make our London believably feel like the real-world London versus being a faithful replication of it. Similarly, in a workshop about crafting secondary worlds, award-winning speculative fiction writer N.K. Jemisin points to the difference between science and plausibility, and the importance of striving for plausibility in our worldbuilding. (Jemisin, Growing Your Iceberg: Crafting a Secondary World That Feels Ancient in 60 Minutes).

Plausibility and believability as terms both get at the core of the same idea: namely that your world should function, and it should tick, and it should do so in a way that makes sense with all its parts working together. You can have a believable sci-fi world set centuries in the future because what makes it believable isn’t necessarily the setting, but the rules, the culture, the politics, and the way