On the Plurality of Worlds

One of the great things about the human imag­i­na­tion is that, as well as com­ing up with ideas for use in the real world or con­jur­ing up fic­tional ele­ments (such as a child’s imag­i­nary friend), imag­i­na­tion can cre­ate an entire uni­verse or world, straight out of whole cloth.

This power is some­thing I have always admired in oth­ers and cher­ished in myself.  Imagination ren­ders us into gods, with uni­verses blos­som­ing from empty fir­ma­ment to spread and grow on paper, or film, to take root in the mind of oth­ers.  This per­sonal Genesis fas­ci­nates me, and pro­vides end­less enjoy­ment.  Some like to tell sto­ries, as do I, but I am not con­tent with this alone.  I like to build worlds.  Worlds with all the detail of Tolkien’s, oft-imitated, never-equaled, land­scape of sword­play and sor­cery that has become the tem­plate for almost every other fan­tas­tic fic­tion since, the ‘stan­dard fan­tasy set­ting’.

I also like to explore oth­ers’ worlds, such that the back-story of a game alone can inter­est me enough to pur­chase it.  Examples of this include games like Genesis Rising and Demigod.
Video games have a unique capa­bil­ity in what I will here­after refer to as “world build­ing”.  With this new medium, all the visu­als, sto­ries, and voices of your world are on screen.  Now cin­ema, too, can pro­duce these, but the inter­ac­tiv­ity of games allows the player to ‘live,’ how­ever briefly, in these worlds, to step into the armored greaves or mag­netic space boots of the char­ac­ters onscreen.

One per­sis­tent trend in games con­tin­ues to bother me.  This trend is what I call the ‘codex’ method of back­ground.

For exam­ple Dragon Age, while an excel­lent game, con­tains a ‘codex*’, lit­er­ally referred to as such: An in-game ency­clo­pe­dia of the world’s char­ac­ter and back­ground.

Other exam­ples include Mass Effect, small sec­tions of Dead Space, Dungeon Siege 2, any instance of a “time­line” sec­tion, a la Halo Wars or Chrome Hounds, Alien vs. Predator: Extinction, and Metroid Prime.  This last one is a par­tic­u­larly egre­gious exam­ple, as to acquire any infor­ma­tion, the player must scan a liv­ing enemy, stand­ing there like bait.  This is poor immer­sion.  Background should not be bor­ing text.  Background should be inte­grated into the game­play both in the story/plot and the mechan­ics and art, not tacked on as a user man­ual (see Homeworld).  Encyclopedic descrip­tions of set­ting should have ended with text-based adven­ture games.  When the tech exists to ren­der things like Cronos in God of War 3, the hair of a brute sol­dier in Halo, or, say, this scene from Drakengard 2.  What excuse is there for rely­ing on sim­ple text to con­vey any detail of the scene or nar­ra­tive of the story?  This is related to long expo­si­tional rants in movies and huge explana­tory blocks in nov­els.

If done incor­rectly, such details remind me that, while inter­est­ing, this world I inhabit is mine. Mine to save, and mine to influ­ence.  Games, even the good ones, inad­ver­tently solid­ify you or your char­ac­ter as the pri­mary mover and shaker in the game. Fable 1 & 2 are offend­ers here, cast­ing some ran­dom farm boy/street urchin as the world’s main agent of change. Sometimes this makes sense, such as in sequels, when your char­ac­ter has gained con­sid­er­able sta­tus from sav­ing the world or Fable 3, where you play as the crown prince of a large sov­er­eign nation. Such a per­son should have def­i­nite weight on the world stage.

However, some­times it is that much more engag­ing to real­ize that the world is filled with other names. Names that also affect the world, names that may be big­ger than you are. BioShock does this well (yes, I too, have been bit­ten by the BioShock bug).  Through the game’s grisly scenery and the scat­tered audio logs, the player’s dis­cov­er­ies begin to shed light on Rapture’s last days. There are also lit­tle asides, such as the machine that rewards you for select­ing Big Daddy (if you have played the game through to the end, you will know what I am refer­ring to). This is not so much back­story, how­ever, as it is plot.  It is action that involves you, and that you have a role in, how­ever small.  Plot is impor­tant, no doubt, but it is not the sub­ject of this dia­tribe, rant, or what-have-you.

Integration of the world-building woven into story, as it should be, is real­ized in the Lord of the Rings. I dis­cover Middle-Earth through the actions of the char­ac­ters, the places they visit, and the peo­ple they meet. Where you first learn the his­tory of Middle-Earth is where you should, inte­grated into the main events within the story and plot.  Tolkien skill­fully makes allu­sions to the fic­tional past, as well as present asides that only serve to enrich the set­ting with detail and a sense of con­sis­tency (I hes­i­tate to use the word ‘real­ism’ in this case).

Although Dragon Age: Origins failed by using the “Codex” approach, as did Mass Effect, both of these sto­ries also offered steps in the right direc­tion. In Dragon Age: Origins, this step is taken by Leliana, a red-headed tale-weaving rogue and bard, whose tales taught you a lot about Ferelden, the set­ting of this game (although it should be noted, only one of mul­ti­ple coun­tries in the larger world of the Dragon Age series). “I love sto­ries far too much to keep them to myself,” she says, and through lengthy con­ver­sa­tions, you can dis­cover a bit more about Ferelden’s his­tory, as well as the his­tor­i­cal moti­va­tions and expla­na­tions of con­tin­u­ing events. The past influ­enc­ing the present, just like in our world. That is the cor­rect way to inject such details.

While some games would not be helped or hin­dered by all this addi­tional back-story or “fluff,” I think that some­times a game needs not just char­ac­ters, but a world for them to inhabit. This is opposed to what seems to be the stan­dard fare, where a world is built around and specif­i­cally for a char­ac­ter.

Instead, world build­ing requires set­tings and “fluff’ beyond the present story, a world that allows for mul­ti­ple tales, and in the best cases, demands that more be told. The eas­i­est exam­ple is to cre­ate a past, to detail a world’s his­tory, to show how the past leads up to the present, but this is only a small part of the suc­cess­ful exe­cu­tion. As I men­tioned above, good world build­ing demands that sto­ries go on with­out the char­ac­ters, whether these other sto­ries occur before, after, or pos­si­bly dur­ing the story that is being told now. Action should be occur­ring both on and off the screen, with mul­ti­ple events hap­pen­ing simul­ta­ne­ously. Sometimes it is reward­ing to see these ele­ments shift and react in response to the player’s actions, other times it is awe-inspiring when you are reminded that you rep­re­sent but one man/woman/alien in a much larger world.

Mass Effect 2 has a good exam­ple of this: on Illium, an alien city, you will often hear news­reels detail­ing polit­i­cal events, cul­tural exhibits, and eco­nomic trends.  Occasionally, Commander Shepard’s (the char­ac­ter you con­trol through­out the series) actions will be men­tioned, and the choices he/she makes will be reflected in the greater nar­ra­tive of the world. Other times, this fea­ture is used to cre­ate fore­shad­ow­ing, hint­ing at mis­sions yet to come. These asides, while often humor­ous, remind you of the vast­ness of the galaxy, a galaxy, you, the player, must save.

Mass Effect 2 has another great exam­ple of behind-the-scenes expo­sure. On the planet Tuchanka, in a dark bunker, you find two native Krogan. They have a con­ver­sa­tion that is a won­der­ful insight into their lives, lives that Shepard has no con­trol over, but are a part of his/her world nonethe­less. Originally, I was going to try to find a video of this, but it seems YouTube does not have videos of this speci­fic con­ver­sa­tion, so I will try to sum­ma­rize it as best I can.

All right, these aliens, the Krogan, are infected with a dis­ease that makes all but one out of every 1,000 babies still­born. The Krogan are a war­like race that spends its days in inter­tribal feuds. The females have their own sep­a­rate neu­tral clans that house chil­dren born to fathers from many groups. This way, rival clans will not seek them out and kill oth­ers’ heirs, as any one of the chil­dren could eas­ily be theirs as well.

When you enter the area, two of these Krogan are talk­ing, and one men­tions that when vis­ited by the females, he saw a child he believed to be his own. The sec­ond con­grat­u­lates the other, but the first Krogan focuses on his feel­ings for the son he is not allowed to raise, that he will not get to watch the whelp grow.

This is a won­drous insight into ‘some ran­dom Krogan’s daily life’. It’s a rather heart­felt exam­ple that serves to drive home a large thread of the Mass Effect story, but the aside in of itself is a won­der­ful reminder of ‘the world beyond’ or ‘the action off-screen’.

Done cor­rectly, such world build­ing can instill a very organic and dynamic soul into a care­fully crafted world, a world that can, and should, tell dozens of sto­ries as time goes on. Done poorly, it can reduce a won­der­fully detailed land to ency­clo­pe­dic bore­dom. At worst, such minu­tiae can seem to be noth­ing more than smoke and mir­rors, extra­ne­ous details that are waved before the player in the hope that poor story craft­ing will be ignored.

Go forth and forge worlds, fel­low geeks!

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*In case you were inter­ested, codex is an Aztec word. The Aztecs kept long detailed books, often vibrantly illus­trated, bound together with rope. The codices (the plu­ral form) were metic­u­lously detailed guides and man­u­als on par­tic­u­lar sub­jects. These sub­jects ranged from a sin­gle reli­gious rit­ual, long cre­ation myths, texts on mil­i­tary strat­egy, lessons from a promi­nent politician’s career, and, a favorite it seems, “Why you should never mess with a pow­er­ful empire that prac­tices human sac­ri­fice”, where the power and might of the Aztecs was put on all gory dis­play. Particular detail was given over to the many hor­rid ways that the priests would dis­mem­ber you. Isn’t his­tory fun?