Why Worldbuilding is Bad

[GVDammerung]

I think I disagree here. Ringworld is a case with very limited worldbuilding. The main alien races are describable (and are described) in one or two sentence statements. The Ringworld itself is only loosely described (and in the original book, was thought out porrly enough that it wouldn't work without the additions made in Ringworld Engineers, as the structure would have been unstable). The cultures of the Ringworld inhabitants are described in very limited ways, and only sufficiently to drive the narrative. In Ringworld, the story triumphs over worldbuilding.



Yes, they are a great example, but not of what you say they are. CHOAM is described in a couple sentences, all of the politics of Landsraad are reduced to a small discussion. The Bene-Gesserit are described to the extent that they have great martial arts and manipulative skills and they are trying to breed a Kwisatz-Haderach, and little more. Mentats are given a paragraph or two of description. The world building, compared to the story, is slight.

Your other examples are, to a great extent, similar. Note that Harrison didn't say "no worldbuilding". He said "story should trump worldbuilding". Star Trek, in the main, does this. Star Trek, when it comes in the form of technical manuals, does not. Imagine if the material in the "technical manual" was crammed into an episode of one of the shows. How crappy would that be? Lots of science fiction and fantasy writers fall into the trap of doing almost exactly that, and it makes their writing suffer. And that's exactly what Harrison appears to be talking about.

I think this is a cup half-empty or half-full disagreement.

In my view, worldbuilding need not be page after page of exposition on the setting or context devoid of any narrative function other than description. Rather, good worldbuilding in fiction (IMO) accumulates in the course of the narrative so as not to overly get in its way. Thus, for example, we learn a little about the spice mining in Dune here, some more there and still more over there, there and there etc. It is when we add up the sum total of the scatttered bits of worldbuilding that the world comes together.

I read your opinion as grounded on a lack of extensive world development in one spot. My opinion is grounded on a appreciation of development that is scattered in a variety of places and builds the world, not all at once or in one spot, but throughout the text.

I think the Ringworld and Dune books more than support my sense of how the respective worlds are built in the text - gradually in the course of the story, so as to be unintrusive to the story.

 

[GVDammerung]

Once more, world-building doesn't mean "intrusion of reams of information in the narrative" -- it means the necessary work to establish the setting that the narrative requires.


RC

Put another way - what he said!

 

[wingsandsword]

If everything in the world is predetermined before the characters are even created, then the likelihood of them affecting the world is next to none. There is no sense of wonder in exploring or discovering whats over the next hill when its already written down for you to read.

Look at Forgotten Realms today, where the main complaint Ive heard about the setting is that the PCs don't matter in a world where superpowered npcs exist. That every area of Faerun is so intricately detailed that a player only has to read a sourcebook to know everything about a society. There's nothing for a gm to describe and if he changes it from what is written, a player can accuse him of getting it wrong.

No wonder, no excitement, just reams and reams of boxed text. No attachment for the players, because they never had a chance to have any effect on it. They are just going through the amusement park, looking at the pretty set pieces, but never actually getting to create anything.

Your mileage may vary, but that's almost the exact opposite of the way I've seen the Realms unfold in play.

Take my last Forgotten Realms campaign, 5 PC's, and in terms of setting knowledge we had:
1. A person who had only played the Baldur's Gate video games and read one Realms novel (Spellfire) and it was her first D&D game.
2. A person who had read a few of the novels (Avatar trilogy and a handful of Elminster and Drizzt books) and played D&D but not in the Realms.
3. A person who had played a lot of RPG's but only a very slight amount of D&D, and never in the Realms, and they hadn't played any video games set in the realms or read any novels set there.
4. A person who had played a lot of D&D, but the only Realms game was in one where the DM heavily altered the setting.
5. A person who had played a lot of D&D, including a lot of Realms games and had learned a certain amount of realmslore, but was fairly casual about the setting and as long as the major organizations/religions/cities/countries lined up with his broad expectations he didn't have a problem with the details being different from game to game.

I'm a fan of the Realms myself, I know it better than pretty much any gamer I know locally and can use that to add flavor and dimension to an RPG scenario in almost any part of Faerun (and some parts beyond there), but compared to some hardcore Realms fans I've encountered online I know very little. Yes, there are some people who are obsessive over the Realms enough to be upset if they go down a certain road and the DM doesn't say they run across a specific inn from a 15 year old Dragon Magazine article or if they find that the Guildmaster of the Coopers Guild in Waterdeep isn't the same guy they read about, or if some High Priest of Chauntea they find at a rural temple espouses some dogma that is somehow slightly incompatible with the as-written description of their faith. However, that's more of a player problem than a DM problem.

It's sometimes come up of "why doesn't Elminster help us?" or "Where is Drizzt now?" or the like. In every FR game I've ever been in, the "big name" NPC's have always either been busy with crisises of their own, or made at most brief cameos to help briefly and moved on. It's a big world, and there is enough problems out there for lots of people to get involved. Think of all the bad things that have happened in the Realms, like the destruction of Tilverton or Karsus's Folly, not even the Uber-NPC's get to save the day all the time, and sometimes tragedy could have been averted if the right hero (i.e. a PC) was at the right place at the right time.

For many DM's, a well built and detailed setting means they have lots of help in creating the illusion of a fantasy world that the PC's are living in. The presence of a large stable of established NPC's gives more of a feeling that the PC's aren't alone in the world, not that they have competition for what the PC's are doing.

I think the Forgotten Realms is a prime example of worldbuilding gone right. It is the depth of the setting that draws a lot of people to the Realms.

 

[Storm Raven]

I think this is a cup half-empty or half-full disagreement.

I think it is more a difference concerning whether Harrison is saying "worldbuilding is verboten" and "story should trump over worldbuilding".

In my view, worldbuilding need not be page after page of exposition on the setting or context devoid of any narrative function other than description. Rather, good worldbuilding in fiction (IMO) accumulates in the course of the narrative so as not to overly get in its way. Thus, for example, we learn a little about the spice mining in Dune here, some more there and still more over there, there and there etc. It is when we add up the sum total of the scatttered bits of worldbuilding that the world comes together.

And what you describe as "good worldbuilding" is something that I don't think Harrison would disagree with. He says "writing must triumph over worldbuilding". By inserting worldbuilding elements in the narrative in a method that is designed to support and enhance the story, the writing is paramount over worldbuilding. The opposite occurs when "cool" world design elements are slathered on for no good narrative reason, even if they are added in small chunks. There is almost no extraneous worldbuilding material in Dune (the tightest written of all the series), almost every element introduced has a purpose in the story and helpd drive the narrative. The Eye of the World, in contrast, is laden with piled of totally irrelevant material, even when included in small bits (just about every farmhouse they stop at during their journey is described in tedious detail, as is every meal, and every girl's tug of her hair, and so on). Even though it is spread throughout the book in small bits, it adds up to a massive, clomping, tedious level of dullness that detracts from the interesting parts of the story. L.E. Modesitt also does this, describing endless meals of crusty bread, and repeated dinners, stops at inns and other trivial elements of world atmosphere that serve zero purpose in the story other than to show off all the background detail of the world.

I think the Ringworld and Dune books more than support my sense of how the respective worlds are built in the text - gradually in the course of the story, so as to be unintrusive to the story.

And as such, the limited level of worldbuilding that takes place in those books supports Harrison's point, because the story takes precedence.

 

[apoptosis]

Once more, world-building doesn't mean "intrusion of reams of information in the narrative" -- it means the necessary work to establish the setting that the narrative requires.


RC

This is probably the fundamental disagreement then. WHAT is considered world-building? What you defined as world-building, I do not. I think what you described is setting (detailing) the narrative. I believe world-building in reference to writing is basically "intrusion of reams of information in the narrative"

By this I mean you can world-build behind the scenes and it never really enter the story except to flesh out the setting of the narrative and give it a living/breathing feel (This is actually not a bad use of it). Frankly the reader never really knows you have "world-built"

But world-building as I see it (in fiction) is when the world-building takes place in the narrative. Where the writer basically info dumps about his world which is basically irrelevant to the narrative.

This is without a doubt not a fine line and there is a lot of grey area (info dump vs making the setting seem real); but I do know that I can recognize when it happens and I tend to see it as the mark of poor fiction writing in general (there are always exceptions to this).

Apop

 

[Celebrim]

...(just about every farmhouse they stop at during their journey is described in tedious detail, as is every meal, and every girl's tug of her hair, and so on). Even though it is spread throughout the book in small bits, it adds up to a massive, clomping, tedious level of dullness that detracts from the interesting parts of the story. L.E. Modesitt also does this, describing endless meals of crusty bread, and repeated dinners, stops at inns and other trivial elements of world atmosphere that serve zero purpose in the story other than to show off all the background detail of the world.

Except none of this has anything at all to do with world building. There are several ways to demonstrate this, but the easiest is to note that none of this requires a thought experiment of any sort. I don't have to create a 'map' in order to detail endless travel across an imaginary landscape. I don't have to think about agarian economics to describe endless meals of crusty bread. I don't have to think about how much fertile land a nation has and what its birth rate is to have endless battles of seemingly endless hordes. I don't have to compute actual travel times from Earth to Neptune assuming a constant .2g acceleration and the position of the planets in September of 2209, to have endless tedium in zero g. I don't have to engage in world building at all in order to fill a book up with tedious detail. The two things are completely unrelated. I don't have to have a realistic or at least coherent technology to spend pages describing the various decks on a starship. I don't have to have battles that actually reflect the technological assumptions I desribe. I can engage in alot of world building and the vast majority of it might never appear directly within the story. You may not notice that the fact that the date of departure from Earth and the date of arrival in Neptune is realistic for the stories assumptions about technology, and the hours of calculation and study of planetary physics might end up in the story as a single sentence. Tedious detail has nothing to do with world building. True, you can introduce tedious detail into a story with world building - for example, I could lay out precisely how you calculate the travel time between Earth and Neptune in the story although rarely have I ever seen that done in a published work - but you can introduce tedious detail into a story without it and most tedious detail in fiction never came from a world building process.

Another way to note this is to look at a short story like the previously mentioned story by Joyce, 'The Death'. Now, Joyce does do things much like world building in say Ulysses (he openly stated that among his goals was to detail Dublin in such detail that if the city were destroyed it could be reconstructed just from the text), but in the 'The Death' such world building elements are much less in evidence. There is however alot of very fine grained detail that has nothing to do with world building - for example longish passages of small talk at the gathering that don't seem to directly advance the story but just set the stories scale and mood. The detail here again doesn't involve any world building.

World building is a very specific process that is largely external to the writing. It isn't merely atmospherics and details, although hopefully, evocative, intriguing, and internally consistent details are the results of the process. But, you can have all sorts of atmospherics and details that are unrelated to world building and which weren't created by a world building creative process and where just thrown in on a whim of the author's creativity without much apparent thought as to what they imply. (China Meiville, I'm looking at you.) An obvious example would be a story which contained in its numerous details inconsistancies and self-contridictions and the very sorts of things that world building is designed to avoid. (Incidently, this is precisely why Star Trek is a horrible example of 'world building', because with the exception of Klingon language, almost nothing in the 'story' was created by a world building process. Hense, all the various inconsistancies, retconns, unresolvable contridictions, abandoned story elements, and so forth.)

So you aren't really complaining about world building at all; you are just complaining about tedious detail.

And in that case, you've said nothing more interesting than 'boring stories are boring'. Well, OK. Thanks for that insight.

 

[The Shaman]

Except none of this has anything at all to do with world building. . . .

So you aren't really complaining about world building at all; you are just complaining about tedious detail.

And in that case, you've said nothing more interesting than 'boring stories are boring'. Well, OK. Thanks for that insight.

Yep.

The implicit assumption is that those who engage in a more extensive world-building process are inherently likely to introduce extraneous or tedious detail during the game. I haven't found that to be the case.

 

[apoptosis]

Yep.

The implicit assumption is that those who engage in a more extensive world-building process are inherently likely to introduce extraneous or tedious detail during the game. I haven't found that to be the case.

As far as games go, I would probably agree that this is correct. But in my opinion while this relates to the issue, it is not acutally the issue at hand (of course I could be wrong).

I really think Harrison is talking about world-building within the context of the narrative itself. Not that having a detailed world is bad, but that world-building in the writing itself is not a beneficial writing style. Using the story as an excercise to show off the world is what I consider when he talks about world-buidling in fiction.

In relation to a game, i believe that the introduction of world-building as a DM's narrative techinque would be the real issue. In this case world-building would be the 'introduction of extraneous and/or tedious detail' during the game as a method of showing off the world.

 

[Reynard]

As far as games go, I would probably agree that this is correct. But in my opinion while this relates to the issue, it is not acutally the issue at hand (of course I could be wrong).

I really think Harrison is talking about world-building within the context of the narrative itself. Not that having a detailed world is bad, but that world-building in the writing itself is not a beneficial writing style. Using the story as an excercise to show off the world is what I consider when he talks about world-buidling in fiction.

In relation to a game, i believe that the introduction of world-building as a DM's narrative techinque would be the real issue. In this case world-building would be the 'introduction of extraneous and/or tedious detail' during the game as a method of showing off the world.

After reading his mini-rant a couple of times, I am not sure what he is saying, if anything at all. If he is saying, "Writers who go on forver about the history of elven tea are boing and nerdish," well, duh. That doesn't mean some folks don't like that kind fo detail, however. If he is saying, "Making uo the history of elven tea is useless, boring and nerdish," then I have to vehemently disagree.

Really, i think he made a little rant, didn't think about it or its implications much, and got a bunch of us boring, nerdish clods in an uproar over it.

 

[Jim Hague]

After reading his mini-rant a couple of times, I am not sure what he is saying, if anything at all. If he is saying, "Writers who go on forver about the history of elven tea are boing and nerdish," well, duh. That doesn't mean some folks don't like that kind fo detail, however. If he is saying, "Making uo the history of elven tea is useless, boring and nerdish," then I have to vehemently disagree.

Really, i think he made a little rant, didn't think about it or its implications much, and got a bunch of us boring, nerdish clods in an uproar over it.

Given his later blog post, he did it purely to stir the hornet's nest in as childish and churlish a manner as possible. Provocation in order to create thought is one thing, but it's clear his intent wasn't to do that, it was just him screeching 'look at me, aren't I smart?!'. You'd think that someone like him would be a bit more mature.