Worldbuilding from a Mechanic by Emily Short:

If you have mechanics, that means you have 

• An action/set of actions for the player to perform
• A world state that is affected by the actions

If the gameplay action is not tied to anything in the real world, though, we may need to invent a context that makes sense of it.

• Is the player the only person who can do this kind of action? Are there others who can do it?
• Is the action restricted to certain groups? If so, how does that affect the balance of power in this world? Are there prejudices around those people? Class structures, customs of inclusion or exclusi

Those sorts of questions lead us on to questions of economy:

• Can the action be used to supply basic needs like food, sleep, shelter, or sex? How does this work, and what are the effects on day-to-day living?
• Can the action kill, heal, transmit information at a distance, etc.? Are there reasons you might want a practitioner on the battlefield or in a hospital?

And of course, the action of the story can cause demand as well as supply:

• Does this action require inborn talent, training, magic, technology, economic advantage?
• What (if any) resources are required to enable the action? Where do those resources come from? Are they common or rare? Easy to create or difficult? How does this resource (and trade therein) affect the local economy?
• What might super-charge this ability? What if the user had much more than the average amount of talent, training, or resource? What might they be able to do then?

If we’ve got economy and politics, we should have history and philosophy, too:

• Was this type of action formerly more or less common than it is now, and if that changed, why? Was there a specific moment when it became possible? When it faded away?
• Have people intentionally tried to influence whether this action existed or ceased to exist?
• How do people explain how this action functions? Does it tie into their religious beliefs? Their science? How accurately are they able to record, measure, and study this action, and are they inclined to do so? Is this the basis of a meticulous technology, or a source of arcane and secret stories?

If this type of action is common in the game but not common in the real world:

• How does the world be different from our own to accommodate the prevalence of this ability?
• Is there anyone who might want to control or police this activity? Are they successful? Why or why not? (Possibly the action is controlled in some regions and not in others.)
• What makes the action more effective or less effective?
• Are there rules about who can do this action? Customs or etiquette?
• Are there people who lose the ability? People who might be expected to have it, but don’t?
• Can children do this action? If so, does this complicate childrearing? If children are born without the ability, at what point does the ability arise and how is that onset handled?

If the action is rare in the game:

• How might people react when they see it going on? Will it provoke fear, admiration, excitement? Jealousy, anger?
• Will people understand what they are seeing?
• Are there other known practitioners of this ability? Historical agents that had it? Is there mythology around this kind of person?
• Will this ability cause special problems in any particular setting?
• How might this action be used to circumvent what is socially normal?
• Can it be used for crime? If so, how might it be detected and who would be involved in policing it or using it in this way?

Meanwhile on the world state front:

• Why is the world set up the way it is to start with? (This is often a relevant question for things like platformers, if we want to take their narrative at all seriously: platforming settings are not sensibly designed for people to walk around normally, but why not?)
• Which aspects of world state are “real” from the perspective of fiction? Typically, for instance, a character’s score is not considered to belong to the world of the fiction, so other characters won’t notice and comment on it explicitly. But there are times when it’s interesting to play with state aspects that might otherwise be considered off limits and meta.

84. The Lens of the World

The world of your game is a thing that exist apart. Your game is a doorway to this magic place that exists only in the imagination of your players. To ensure your world has power and integrity, ask yourself these questions:

• How is my world better than the real world?
• Can there be multiple gateways to my world? How do they differ? How do they support each other?
• Is my world centred on a single story, or could many stories happen here?

A world that sticks in the public consciousness will become transmedia, making them powerful and valuable. What do they have in common?

• They tend to be rooted in a single medium
  • Transmedia world may have many mediums, but they tend to come from one, singular medium that they perform very well, and is at its strongest in its original medium
• They are intuitive
  • Rules and laws of the world don’t need to be explicitly said; they come as natural conclusions to the players. 
• They have a creative individual at their core
  • The majority of successful transmedia worlds come from the mind of a single person who are uncompromised in their vision
• They facilitate the telling of many stories
  • Successful transmedia worlds almost never have a singular plotline or revolve around a singular character; they interconnect with future stories and leave room for imagination
• They make sense through any of their gateways
  • The world must work outside of its intended medium in a way that will not be confusing to newcomers of the world
• They are often about discovery
  • A world about discovery visits from many gateways
• They are about wish fulfilment
  • Players will not imagine a fantasy world unless it satisfies a desire

Environmental Narrative: Telling Stories in Spaces Without Saying Anything Aloud by Laura E. Hall

Some dimensions of immersion

• Enjoyment
• Engagement (mental immersion)
• Spatial Presence
• Transportation (immersion in a narrative)

Challenge 1: Telling a story while people are under significant mental distress

• The atmosphere and engagement with puzzles causes the human brain to kick into survival mode
• The invisible gorilla experiment demonstrates how focused the mind becomes on a singular task
• The human mind also finds specific patterns. Sometimes they will miss international patterns chasing unintentional patterns
  • Eliminate red herrings and extra junk
  • Be mindful of how players are taking in information
  • Lean on worldbuilding

Challenge #2: Telling an engaging story in a physical space in a cinematic way

• Use a sense of anticipation to engage
• Use elements from architecture, LARP, theatre, film, to set the tone and design for specific emotions
• Avoid and eliminate frictions that yank people out of immersion

Why Do We Like Puzzles?

“People solve puzzles because they like pain, and they like being released from pain, and they like most of all that they find within themselves the power to release themselves of their own pain.” – Mike Selinker and Thomas Synder, Puzzle Craft

• Eg; grinding 

Challenge #3: Making A Good Puzzle:

• Tells you how to solve it, inherent in its design
• Doesn’t rely on outside knowledge
• Is also adjustable in difficulty by adding or reducing information
  • Use diagetic objects
  • Eliminate busywork only include puzzles that propel the plot forward
  • No friction

“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” – Arthur C. Clarke

Game Maker’s Toolkit: How Level Design Can Tell a Story 

To convey information about the world, designers use 3 principles: 

• Environmental Storytelling:
  • Staging player space with environmental properties that can be interpreted within the narrative of the game
  • Requires a level of deductive reasoning from the player and makes the player an active participant in the narrative
  • As it is mostly done through static objects it does not impede action 
• Level Design:
  • Architecture, layout, materials, and scale can tell us a lot about the people who use those spaces
  • Also provides gameplay hints when players use real-world knowledge to help orient themselves in the gamespace
  • One challenge is that to make a place 100% believable, you have to add a lot of detail. But game developers say that bending logic is fine so long as the level is credible; it’s a delicate balance
• World building:
  • Factions, major plot points, main players, and world history. These ideas should echo up through the other layers too. 

 Level Design Emotion:

• Scale, shape, and colour evoke certain feelings in the player
• Amelia Schatz, to create a feeling of triumph in Uncharted, had her levels start out in small, tight caves to put pressure and tension on the player. When the player finished the level, the cave opened out to a grand view of the environment 
• Break the level into a bunch of sections, decide what theme needs to be represented in each part, then decide the emotion the player should feel, and design the level around that. 
• Level design has to gel with the mechanic of the game 

Level Design Identity:

• The places you’re in should provide a context for the player’s identity
• The tasks the level asks you to do should fit thematically with the player character. The action of killing should be easy in some scenarios, difficult in others, etc
• Designing spaces is also designing rules of behaviour 

Portal by Valve

Portal is a game that contains a lot of narrative storytelling through level design, even though the levels themselves seem so bleak. The first half of the game takes place in a laboratory which is clean and sterile, while a computer voice, Glados, guides you through the game’s mechanics. Everything about the environment is strictly controlled, and so your actions feel very limited so what the test requires. Even the colour and lighting reflects this: white and blue colours, harsh lighting, nowhere to hide.

Halfway through the game, however, when you escape extermination by Glados’ hand, you also escape the testing rooms. The game opens up as you try and escape the rest of the facility, and becomes a lot more messy and detailed, showing exposed pipes and stations where employees once worked. The lighting and colour turn rusty orange that show danger, but also allow for deep shadows to hide in, and your movements, while still linear level design, feel less restrictive as you are now defying what Glados wants you do to. 

At the very end of the game, when you finally escape the facility, the game opens up to reveal the outside world, complete with natural lighting and a final, wide open space. This is designed for a sense of relief and triumph in the player. 

Reflection:

This week was all about worldbuilding, as before anything else you must have a world to build from. It especially helped me to understand how worldbuildings and mechanics intersect, as well as why worldbuilding is important from a marketing perspective. Finally, the level design aspect further inspired me – I wanted to make something where the world itself helped the player to learn through playing. I realised I’m tired of long-winded tutorials! This is not the kind of game I strive to make. Starting a game should be as satisfying as finishing one.

To view research on worldbuilding, please visit the research tab, or click here:

• Prison Design
• Panopticons