Recently, I've been Netflixing the DVDs of the James Burke's Connections series. If you're not familiar with them, the premise of the show is to illustrate how seemingly unrelated historical events and technological innovations create some of the most important things that you find in the modern world. One episode, for instance, shows how a test for the purity of gold is related to the development of atomic weapons, and another shows how an Arab caliph's sickness in the 8th Century led to modern mass production, and yet another shows how the Little Ice Age led to the development of aircraft.
Aside from being fascinating to watch on their own, this series of documentaries is extremely interesting to me in that it mirrors my thoughts about world building -- that each element of a fictional world should be interconnected to as many other elements of the world as possible, and that those connections should be considered very carefully when you're going through and building that world. This is something that I tend to argue about a fair bit on the Chatsubo, with regard to Eve Online and its storyline; my latest trouble has been with the given population on Seyllin I, the focus of the latest big patch day downtime news barrage.
Why does this bug me so much? I don't know. A deep and complex world has been a big selling point for me on RPGs, books, movies, TV series...pretty much everything. I think it's largely just personal preference -- some people really like well-developed characters or witty dialogue, I like well-developed settings. And, ever since I started writing, that's been a focus for my writing, possibly to my detriment, since I tend to focus on that almost above everything else a lot of the time. I would like to think that there's more to it, though.
In a way, Connections is a world building exercise that works in the opposite way an author usually works; whereas I say "okay, if we have this in the world, how did it come out about and what does that mean for the rest of the world," Burke says "we had this and this and this, and how did all those things come together to create a world in how we have that?"
I really feel like this sort of analytic approach is key, especially for creating a game setting. In a novel or movie, your viewpoint is generally limited -- for instance, if we look at something like Alien, we don't need to know much really about the state of the world outside the Nostromo, except as it affects the main characters in that movie. We know there's a corporation, and it hires these spacers to go around and haul this ore, and they can travel faster than light, and so on and so forth -- but we don't need to know what sort of government there is, or how many people live on Earth, or how many colonies they have, or anything like that. We only need to illuminate as much of that other world as the characters in that story see; if you think of it like a film set, actually, we don't need to construct a full-scale replica of the Nostromo, we only need to build the parts the camera is going to see. We should make those as detailed and lifelike as possible, but if it's out of the camera shot it's not really going to show in the final product. Yes, you can do it -- the attention Syd Mead paid to a lot of the elements of Blade Runner is an example -- but it is far less necessary.
In contrast, in a game setting, especially an RPG, where you are going to have people using it in all sorts of different ways, and have characters from all sorts of different backgrounds, and have all sorts of different adventures, the "camera shot" of the universe becomes far wider. You can't simply ignore a lot of this stuff because at some point, it may very well come into play. Obviously, you can constrain this somewhat; you don't need a 300 page sourcebook on medical technology if the game is not Space Doctors: The Healening, but you should at least give some mention of the general things that medical science can do if the characters are likely to have to deal with it at some point. John Ossoway has done something like this for Cthulhu Rising, for instance, in the Rough Guide.
And this is where I think I run into my issues with some of the things in the Eve storyline, especially over the last year or so. Where is the Rough Guide to Eve Online? As far as I can tell, there isn't really one; certainly, there's nothing really out there available to the public, which is frustrating for at least some of the players (I know it can't just be me). One of the things I really liked about Mass Effect is that they actually took the time to think about a lot of that stuff, even though, as a single player game where your "camera shot" is going to be a lot smaller than in a pen-and-paper RPG or MMORPG, most of it is not really necessary. While you could say this was all just wasted effort, I suspect the primary benefactor of the Codex was not the audience but the writing staff of the game. By writing down and setting that stuff in stone, now the writers can all work from the same assumptions about the game world and play off each other's ideas without making the setting seem schizophrenic and disjoint -- you don't have one part of the game where you're told everyone has personal rocketships and another part where everyone is living in abject poverty eating gruel three times a day.
I think it's the fact that that's dismissed as a backburner issue by a lot of people in the discussions I have about the Eve storyline is what frustrates me so much.
Aside from being fascinating to watch on their own, this series of documentaries is extremely interesting to me in that it mirrors my thoughts about world building -- that each element of a fictional world should be interconnected to as many other elements of the world as possible, and that those connections should be considered very carefully when you're going through and building that world. This is something that I tend to argue about a fair bit on the Chatsubo, with regard to Eve Online and its storyline; my latest trouble has been with the given population on Seyllin I, the focus of the latest big patch day downtime news barrage.
Why does this bug me so much? I don't know. A deep and complex world has been a big selling point for me on RPGs, books, movies, TV series...pretty much everything. I think it's largely just personal preference -- some people really like well-developed characters or witty dialogue, I like well-developed settings. And, ever since I started writing, that's been a focus for my writing, possibly to my detriment, since I tend to focus on that almost above everything else a lot of the time. I would like to think that there's more to it, though.
In a way, Connections is a world building exercise that works in the opposite way an author usually works; whereas I say "okay, if we have this in the world, how did it come out about and what does that mean for the rest of the world," Burke says "we had this and this and this, and how did all those things come together to create a world in how we have that?"
I really feel like this sort of analytic approach is key, especially for creating a game setting. In a novel or movie, your viewpoint is generally limited -- for instance, if we look at something like Alien, we don't need to know much really about the state of the world outside the Nostromo, except as it affects the main characters in that movie. We know there's a corporation, and it hires these spacers to go around and haul this ore, and they can travel faster than light, and so on and so forth -- but we don't need to know what sort of government there is, or how many people live on Earth, or how many colonies they have, or anything like that. We only need to illuminate as much of that other world as the characters in that story see; if you think of it like a film set, actually, we don't need to construct a full-scale replica of the Nostromo, we only need to build the parts the camera is going to see. We should make those as detailed and lifelike as possible, but if it's out of the camera shot it's not really going to show in the final product. Yes, you can do it -- the attention Syd Mead paid to a lot of the elements of Blade Runner is an example -- but it is far less necessary.
In contrast, in a game setting, especially an RPG, where you are going to have people using it in all sorts of different ways, and have characters from all sorts of different backgrounds, and have all sorts of different adventures, the "camera shot" of the universe becomes far wider. You can't simply ignore a lot of this stuff because at some point, it may very well come into play. Obviously, you can constrain this somewhat; you don't need a 300 page sourcebook on medical technology if the game is not Space Doctors: The Healening, but you should at least give some mention of the general things that medical science can do if the characters are likely to have to deal with it at some point. John Ossoway has done something like this for Cthulhu Rising, for instance, in the Rough Guide.
And this is where I think I run into my issues with some of the things in the Eve storyline, especially over the last year or so. Where is the Rough Guide to Eve Online? As far as I can tell, there isn't really one; certainly, there's nothing really out there available to the public, which is frustrating for at least some of the players (I know it can't just be me). One of the things I really liked about Mass Effect is that they actually took the time to think about a lot of that stuff, even though, as a single player game where your "camera shot" is going to be a lot smaller than in a pen-and-paper RPG or MMORPG, most of it is not really necessary. While you could say this was all just wasted effort, I suspect the primary benefactor of the Codex was not the audience but the writing staff of the game. By writing down and setting that stuff in stone, now the writers can all work from the same assumptions about the game world and play off each other's ideas without making the setting seem schizophrenic and disjoint -- you don't have one part of the game where you're told everyone has personal rocketships and another part where everyone is living in abject poverty eating gruel three times a day.
I think it's the fact that that's dismissed as a backburner issue by a lot of people in the discussions I have about the Eve storyline is what frustrates me so much.
This is a really important point, and something that I personally find pretty fascinating as well. To be super-timely, I think the fully-imagined world, with a full history and a clear sense of the chain reactions that led to how everything developed, was possibly the single most important and impressive aspect of Watchmen (the book—and you could definitely make a case that what made the film feel a little flat for a lot of people was that this was an aspect of the book that Zack Snyder didn't really "get").
A brief, vaguely illustrative story along these lines: After I graduated from school, I spent the summer working on a fairly major video project, intending to continue afterwards into more serious endeavors (alas, such designs were put on hold when I was hired by CCSO). I joined an email list targeted at people in C-U who were interested in making films, hoping to make some connections and find my next project. The first big pitch that I saw somebody make on it was for a movie about terrorists taking over the local Meijer and holding hostages and whatnot. The stupidity of this idea is apparent, but what was really funny was how the guy was completely unable to answer any question anybody asked him about the backstory—simple things like, "why would terrorists take over Meijer?" or "what are their demands?" or "what are they hoping to achieve?" It was clear that all he'd done was to contrive a situation that he thought would be cool, and considered his story-telling job complete. It's an extreme example, of course (and a really funny one, in my opinion) but what's sad about it is to think that there are a lot of movies (or games, or RPGs, or any other story-telling medium, probably) that actually get made (and make money) that probably have an equally small amount of thought put into them.