A theatre stage serves the actors upon it, but remains in place once the show's over and everyone's gone home for the night. A game world or setting is the "stage" on which the "actors" (the inhabitants of said setting, including the PCs) perform, and it serves said actors by its very presence.
Well, the inverted commas around "stage" tell it all, don't they?
An actual stage is an actually existing material thing. Once constructed, its existence is independent of the mental states of any particular person. The same is not true of a purely imaginary thing. [MENTION=16586]Campbell[/MENTION] is drawing attention to this point, and expressing a view about
whose mental states should be understood as constituting the "gameworld" - namely, all the participants, not just the GM.
I recently picked up City of Mists. It's a new game that's partially based on the Powered by the Apocalypse system. It's very character driven.
What's interesting to me, reading this book while also taking part in these worldbuilding threads, is that the game is designed with the expectation that the entire first session, called the Exposition Session interestingly enough, is to be spent constructing the player characters, establishing their relationships to one another as part of a Crew, and then establishing the aspects of the City itself.
So the first session is where everyone sits down and talks about the characters, the setting they inhabit, and how those two elements interact with one another, which is loosely the story of the game. This is what I would call Worldbuilding. The fact that it's done mutually by the GM and players doesn't change what it is.
What other term would any of you use to describe such a session?
<snip>
everyone is involved in establishing the game world.
The last quoted sentence seems as good as any to describe what is going on. I think the current usage of "worldbuilding" in discussions of RPGing brings with it an assumption of GM authority over that process. I think this is very evident not just in many of the posts in the current threads, but other threads one reads on ENworld, blogs one reads, presentation in D&D rulebooks, etc.
It's also very often taken for granted, in RPGing, that a "gameworld" is more-or-less independent of any particular group of players or characters - which relates to the idea of "neutrality" that has been put forward by more than one poster in these threads. The process you describe for City of Mists does not produce a "neutral" setting.
Once these things are established, the GM then goes about setting up scenarios and details based around the goals established by the players for their characters and their Crew. So in this sense, the GM does not have any preconceived ideas prior to the Exposition Session, but thereafter is free to introduce any elements he likes, as long as they fit in with the ideas and goals established.
This, to me, seems to be a pretty good example of a middle ground.
This description seems to be of a game that broadly conforms to
the "standard narrativistic model":
One of the players is a gamemaster whose job it is to keep track of the backstory, frame scenes according to dramatic needs (that is, go where the action is) and provoke thematic moments (defined in narrativistic theory as moments of in-character action that carry weight as commentary on the game’s premise) by introducing complications. . . .
The actual procedure of play is very simple: once the players have established concrete characters, situations and backstory in whatever manner a given game ascribes, the GM starts framing scenes for the player characters. Each scene is an interesting situation in relation to the premise of the setting or the character (or wherever the premise comes from, depends on the game). The GM describes a situation that provokes choices on the part of the character. The player is ready for this, as he knows his character and the character’s needs, so he makes choices on the part of the character. This in turn leads to consequences as determined by the game’s rules. Story is an outcome of the process as choices lead to consequences which lead to further choices, until all outstanding issues have been resolved and the story naturally reaches an end.
Now given that it's a PbtA game, I suspect (without having read it) that the emphasis on scene framing is less than in the standard narrativistic model. But I think in the context of this thread that's probably a minor point. I think the difference between what you describe, and a traditional GM-heavy-worldbuilding game, is fairly striking.