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Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 9114277" data-attributes="member: 6790260">Whether they agree is irrelevant to whether it is true. Most world-building is not done for its own sake. I truly do appreciate good world-building. But, well, the word "building" kind of explains why this is true.Architecture is an art. But it is also a technical skill, a practice, something people make quite a lot of money doing as their trained job. Any architect will tell you that buildings are built for some purpose. They are almost never built solely to display architectural skill. That sort of thing is what models, sketches, and concept art are for. And all of those things are also important! In their absence architecture is a much impoverished field. But, ultimately, you build a building for it to be used, for it to do something. The same is true of fictional worlds.You build a world to say something, or to examine something, or to ask (and/or answer) a question, or to act as the stage for something else. That does not, at all, mean that world-building is of no value, rather the opposite, it has tons of value. But that value is instrumental, not intrinsic. What the world enables is the purpose, not building a place and cosmology solely because places and cosmologies are cool (though they absolutely are cool.)Worlds are tools in the writer's toolbox. Good tools are better than poor tools. But the purpose of tools is to do something, not to be really pretty and sit on a shelf. Ornaments are nice, but they have rather a bad habit of sitting on a shelf or hanging from a wall and collecting dust.</blockquote>

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