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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 3461330" data-attributes="member: 4937">While I'm normally a fan of applying a most charitable interpretation to what someone said, I think some of Mr. Harrisons defenders have gone overboard and are now substituting what they wish he had said for what he actually said.In particular, as I said before, Mr. Harrison's argument only works if you assume a straw man definition of 'world building' - something along the lines of 'world building that gets in the way of the story' or 'world building that exhaustively details things that aren't relevant to the story'.  But of course, the former is a circular definition that tells us nothing that isn't trivial, and the latter doesn't actually occur often enough in practice to be of concern.So let us settle down and say what world building is.  World building is any imaginative process of detailing a setting that creators of fiction use which does not directly create a story, but which is preparatory to the story and designed to aid in creating versimilitude, emmersiveness, and internal consistancy within whatever story that the creator is setting out to tell.  So for example, creating a scale map of any sort is world building.  A map is not necessary to a story.  You can tell a story just fine without any sort of scale map and without worrying about the travel times between any two places.  However, many authors do create maps, either as illustrations so that readers will understand the imaginary geography, or else as illustrations so that they the writer will understand the imaginary geography.  For example, Tolkein famously created highly detailed scale maps so that he could plot out the travel times of the various characters in the story so that he would know where each character was on any given date and that it would be reasonable within the story that they had arrived at that point in the time described.  Now, that might not strictly be necessary, but it doesn't get in the way of the story.  Instead, it enhances the story IMO, by helping the reader understand what is in fact a very complex story with very complex and diverse goals.(I should note that I'm of the group that says that Tolkiens writing is very efficient indeed, and I found the mention of 'The Great Gatsby' particularly funny, because when I teach Tolkien's LotR's, one of the devices I've employed is putting pages from the LotR side by side with 'The Great Gatsby' so that the writing styles can be compared.  This is generally a revelation to anyone that actually wants to learn and doesn't have there minds pre-made up and set by LotR's reputation as difficult to read, ramblilng, or 'inefficient'.  Anyone that thinks LotR is 'inefficient' simply isn't looking very closely.  I also consider this a pretty bizarre criticism of the story considering how much story Tolkien crams into the work in the space he uses, compared to modernist stories like Joyce's 'Ulysses' that are hailed as triumphs of the literary art.  I know whose writing strikes me as more 'efficient', but for that matter I don't think that efficiency is a very good standard for judging a story anyway.  In a story, I don't care how quickly you take me from point A to point B; I care how much I enjoy the ride.  Air travel is very efficient, but not nearly as fun as canoeing, hiking or even a leisurely car trip if the area you are travelling in is interesting.  I'm generally inclined to think that most critics of Tolkien's writing are basically peeved that the public could care less about Joyce after they invested so much emotion in praising Joyce, etc.  They certainly show no sign of having actually read Tolkien.  But, I digress.)It should be really obvious that RPG's need a bit more world building than fiction.  Every DM that ever drew a map engaged in enough world building to make Mr. Harrison question the psychology of you and your 'victims'.  But there is more to world building than drawing maps and computing travel times.Everyone that invented flora and fauna and set out to justify its role in the ecology or the physics of its body plan has engaged in world building.  Setting a gargantuan red dragon in a room with no gargantuan exits at the bottom of a dungeon of 5' corridors doesn't involve much world building, but creating a plausible food source and means of egress for the dragon does.  Thinking about consequences of dragons like bones, piles of dragon offal and dung, beetles crawling in the waste, and reeking dragon musk is more world building.  I dare say that DM's that didn't worry about the fact that the gargantuan red dragon had no means to leave the little lair he was in would be frowned on by most modern gamers if the game or story was meant to be taken seriously at all.Everyone that has ever described a history of how the society got to where it was has engaged in world building.  Everyone that has ever created a creation story and described a cosmology has engaged in world building.  Everyone that has ever invented a technology and made some attempt to make it seem plausible has engaged in world building.  Everyone that has spent time imagining what the impact of a particular technology might be on society has engaged in world building.Heck, everyone that has spent time researching before writing a story has engaged in world building.Science Fiction and Fantasy writers do this all the time, and a I dare say its on the whole a good thing to do, or least there are alot of good authors that have done so.But, try as you might to twist his words around, that's not what Mr. Harrison said.  Mr. Harrison didn't merely say that world building could be wasted effort or could when inserted without reason detract from the story and render it stale.  Mr. Harrison used much stronger language than that, and it is IMO more insulting to Mr. Harrison to assume that he did not at all say what he meant than it is to say that what he said was incorrect. I've already wrote alot about what I think about what he actually said, so I'll just stick with "Utter crap", and move on.  Researching Mr. Harrison though, I find he is famous for writing stories which are deliberately internally inconsistant, which deliberately break versimilitude, and which turn out to be settings about settings and stories about stories.  He writes stories in which the first assumption of the reader, namely that there is meaning to be found in the fiction, turns out to be false and that it is all revealed as merely fiction in the end.  In other words, Mr. Harrison's rant is entirely consistant with the philosophical position he's staking out in his works, and it is entirely consistant with what we know of the emotionalism of people who hold that political position that they would be frightened of the psychology of people who do not hold it.  So let's do Mr. Harrison at least the respect of taking him seriously and not pretending that he said something more easily defensible and comfortable to hear.</blockquote>

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