Why Worldbuilding is Bad

ShinHakkaider · Apr 17, 2007

Reynard said:
All statement made of tasty, tasty truth. Obviously, the whole quitting smoking thing is starting to take its toll. My apologies.

Best of luck quitting the habit.
Also, If I offended you in some way you have my apologies as well.

Celebrim · Apr 17, 2007

Mallus said:
If you're in the US, you probably haven't heard of him because his books weren't readily available here until quite recently (he's British).

Except that I've not only read a lot of works by British authors, I have quite a few on my shelf. Right now I'd argue that the preeminent British sci-fi author publishing is Iain Banks, which makes for interesting counterpoint, because Banks is known for among other things, his intricately crafted and engaging settings. (The premier British fantasy writer is probably Terry Pratchett.) Do only 'great plodding nerds' like Iain Banks or Pratchett? There must be more 'great plodding nerds' than those presumably admirable (in his eyes) people who prefer Mr. Hamilton's stuff. Does Iain Banks write like a 'great plodding nerd'? Should Iain Banks 'scare' me, as if his stories were written by someone mentally or pyschologically deficient because they have detailed and engaging settings that almost certainly couldn't have been crafted without someone doing a great deal of thought about a setting? Should I think that Gene Wolfe is a poor master of prose because his works are so heavily dependent on thier settings? Is he shallow and of little depth? Should I despise Tolkien because he more or less invented world building as we now know it, and with it helped usher in the revival of epic prose and high fantasy and unintentionally to no small extent role-playing games (read his forward to LotR)? Did these writers not know what they were doing?

No, stretch back a little further. What are we to make of the Illiad or Beowulf if we think world building is of little value. Certainly, neither Homer nor the author of Beowulf thought of what they were doing as 'world building', but consider how carefully they construct thier setting. Troy's ancient walls inspired 'great plodding nerds' to heights of revelry long before Tolkien and still do today, not because of the Troy that actually existed but because of the Troy that Homer invented. Is Homer a poor story teller??? Would to God that I was that bad, that I could only communicate to people as distantly removed from my own culture as the cultures of the works of Science Fiction are from my own!

How about Victor Hugo? Is he a poor story teller? He doesn't engage in world building as we know it today, but he does craft everything that a modern world builder would have to craft as a vehicle for his stories. (Read him unabridged!) The same goes for Alexander Dumas, or in the modern era Asimov or Heinlien and so forth.

This guy's opinion goes against all the evidence that we have of what it means to craft an enduring and beloved story, and he's so pompous about it that he finishes not just by declaring that everyone who disagrees is probably mentally defective, but in a fit of unintentional self-disclosure basically compares what they do to 'George Bush' - which I'd guess for someone of his mentality is as damning of an insult as his mind could conjure.

The only works of his that I've read are the novel Light and a collection of his Viriconium stories.

Light is one of the best SF books I've read in years, if not in, well, ever. It also gives you a some perspective about where he's coming from. The Viriconium stories are also good, but they're more akin to Calvino than mainstream fantasy.

For the record, I (kinda) agree with what Harrison is saying at the same time I think he's dead wrong. He's making the fairly common mistake of starting from the position that all fiction has the same goals. Or that the same criteria apply universally.

In addition to the craft of story telling, we must in this context of this forum be concerned with the craft of game management and adventure creation. And here, the goals of our art differ so markedly from the goals of a novel that we can dispense with most of what little insight Mr. Harrison's rant might provide us. Because, while there is some value in suggesting that a story is about its plot and protagonists and central characters and the setting is but secondary to this, I think most of us would agree that the principle role of the DM as a creator is not to create the plot and protagonists but to allow the players to create the protagonists and to have a large or even the larger role in creating the plot. To do this, nothing else serves but to give the players a world in which to move through - one that hopefully has the illusion of as few grey and unpainted areas as possible and iprovokes thier couriousity to explore it and even emmerses them in it emotionally so that they actually care about the outcome.

Don't expect Viriconium D20 or GURPS splatbooks any time soon.

I agree with Umbran and others that this is not a binary issue. But the problem is that in order to agree with Mr. Harrison, I'd first have to agree to some straw man definition of what it meant to engage in world building which a priori defined world building to mean 'at the expense of creating a story'. And once you realize that his rant only works for a straw man, you realize just how shallow the peice is.

Corsair · Apr 17, 2007

I somewhat agree with the basic premise. Worldbuilding taken to an extreme creates a very detailed, but generally less fun world. My analysis is based on playing with 10 different DMs. Invariably, the three that had the least enjoyable games were the three who had the extremely detailed worlds, and spent more time populating the countryside with the correct number of people to maintain population density than they did focusing on crafting interesting adventures.

Are these mutually exclusive? No. But I read the author's point as "if you are building a story (or game in our case) on just the world, you're making a mistake". The adventure/story is more important and should receive the majority of the effort.

Celebrim · Apr 17, 2007

Hobo said:
Sorry, Set, but that just made me laugh out loud. Lovecraft was not a worldbuilder and rather infamously held out the opinion more than once that there was no cohesive strategy or philosophy behind his "Yog-Sothothery"--it was all just a bunch of plot devices made up on the spot for the needs of the story at hand. It later developed into a kind of in-joke where a small club of writers shared names of books, entities and personalities--but worldbuilding it most assuredly was not.

Although I'm generally on the 'Mr. Harrison is full of crap' side of this argument, Hobo is quite correct. Lovecraft was not, or at least not primarily, a world builder. There is very little like a coherent world in his stories, because his stories have little need of a coherent universe that spans between stories and arguably would be ill-served by one. Much of the world building and coherence one would attribute to Lovecraft, was actually done by his fans and admirers.

However, there is a good deal of small scale world building going on his stories to the extent that he finds it necessary. Take a story like 'The Shadow over Innsmouth'. While we don't normally think of world building on this scale, because it is so intimate, Lovecraft is engaging in something that most DM's would see as world building for almost the entire duration of the story. Almost all of the story consists of a character taking a walking tour of a small town and narrating its history and the details of its architecture to the reader, with alot of vague hints at its connections to mysterious larger things in the wider world. The actual action and characterization in the story is minimal, because what the author needs to do first and foremost is emmerse you in this town so that the reader is (or feels as if) they are there, so that when things go 'bump' the reader jumps. And the technique that he uses is almost indistinguishable from world building - laying out the streets, describing individual buildings, family trees, and a detailed history - to the point that it is quite easy to create RPG materials from what he wrote.

Rodrigo Istalindir · Apr 17, 2007

Hobo said:
Running a game takes place in something closer to "realtime" than writing a story, so you need to have some details already in place when your players encounter them, becuase if you have to stop to think about them when they get there, that makes for a really boring game. It works for writing a story, but not playing a game.

Like when Homer asked if Itchy and Scratchy was broadcast live, and told no, that would be too hard on the animators. :lol:

First of all, there is an inherent give and take between DM and players. They have to come to some mutually agreeable division of labor. At the one end of the spectrum is the total railroad in which you might as well be reading a book. At the other end is rolling on the random encounter table, fighting, and then rolling again. Most group fall somewhere in between, and it's up to them to decide how much of the world they want drawn in, and how much remains 'here there be dragons' territory.

The essence of most 'art' whether its writing or painting or music, is its unidirectional. The artist presents and moves on to his next interest; the viewer/reader/listener consumes, and while they certainly form their own opinions and can express them (in excruciating detail sometimes), they by and large have no effect on the artist.

I would argue that RPGs are the antithesis of this. While the DM holds certain perogatives, so do they players, and its the interaction of those two that produce (IMO) the most fun and interesting and unexpected games. I don't think GRR Martin gives a rat's patootie what I think about his writing; I damn well expect my GM to care whether or not I'm enjoying the game.

More to the point, world-building, even if elements of the world never see print or play, is essential to presenting a cohesive story. Glaring plot lapses, implausibilities, continuity lapses, unbeliveable characters, all are symptomatic of instances where a little more world-building would have helped.

Umbran · Apr 17, 2007

Pbartender said:
Really? I thought he was proposing that extraneous world building is bad.

I don't see that at all in the text. There's no explicit mitigation for a little bit of it being useful, or even okay. I don't even see any wording that allows for that interpretation to be inferred. He's quite negative on it as a whole, with no allowance for exceptions.

If you can tell me what in the text brings you to your conclusion, I'm very interested in hearing it.

Pbartender · Apr 17, 2007

Umbran said:
If you can tell me what in the text brings you to your conclusion, I'm very interested in hearing it.

Oh, nothing in particular... Just an impression that in hindsight, and after rereading the text in question, was likely mistaken and fully influenced by my personal view on the matter.

The Shaman · Apr 17, 2007

Kamikaze Midget said:
The idea that Tolkien isn't that great of a writer is hardly a revolutionary idea.

"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer." - JRRT

Mallus · Apr 17, 2007

Celebrim said:
Except that I've not only read alot of works by British authors

I didn't mean to imply you weren't familiar with British SF, I was hazarding a guess as to why you hadn't heard of him seeing as he was only recently published in the US.

I have quite a few on my shelf.

The British SF/F on my bookshelf are all US editions, well, except for books 2-6 of the Malazan Book of the Fallen, 'cause I got hooked.

Right now I'd argue that the preeminent British sci-fi author publishing is Iain Banks, which makes for interesting counterpoint, because Banks is known for among other things, his intricately crafted and engaging settings.

I like Banks, too. After Light, my favorite recent SF novel is his Use of Weapons. They're both really strong works.

Do only 'great plodding nerds' like Iain Banks or Pratchett?

No comment

.

Should I think that Gene Wolfe is a poor master of prose because his works are so heavily dependent on their settings?

Of course not. Then again, neither do do I believe that the The Book of the New Sun should be the model for all fiction, despite my unabashed adoration of them.

Different books have different aims. Harrison's advice applies to certain modes of fiction. It isn't universal. In the same way that creating/evoking a setting a la Tolkien in Middle Earth isn't a universal for good fiction.

This guy's opinion goes against all the evidence that we have of what it means to craft an enduring and beloved story...

No, his opinion goes against your opinion of what constitutes an enduring and beloved story. Do you want a laundry list of well-regarded works of fiction that don't prioritize setting, or a journalistic impulse towards place?

Can't we just agree that different fiction has different goals and employs different methods?

And here, the goals of our art differ so markedly from the goals of a novel that we can dispense with most of what little insight Mr. Harrison's rant might provide us.

We agree completely here. But to be fair, applying Harrison's comments to RPG's was the OP's doing.

But the problem is that in order to agree with Mr. Harrison, I'd first have to agree to some straw man definition of what it meant to engage in world building which a priori defined world building to mean 'at the expense of creating a story'.

The trick is to recognize that Harrison's remarks aren't universal. The fact that the don't apply to all fiction doesn't merit they don't have merit or merit discussion.

Mallus · Apr 17, 2007

The Shaman said:
"Some who have read the book, or at any rate have reviewed it, have found it boring, absurd, or contemptible; and I have no cause to complain, since I have similar opinions of their works, or of the kinds of writing that they evidently prefer." - JRRT

Why did you post a quote of Tolkien's that makes him sound like a petty ass?