Entries tagged with “World Building” from Things You Don't Care About

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.

It's been almost two weeks since the last installment of the Caldari Dialogues, and I apologize for the delay.  This is the last installment of the original batch I had planned, so any further installments will probably be spun off of discussions about these articles and not from that original conversation with Yoshito and Kai (by the way, if you haven't seen Kai's new site yet, The Zion Chronicles, you should check it out).

In this part, I'll be talking about the other 10-20% of the Caldari population -- the people who, either by choice or by circumstance, have found themselves on the outside of the corporate system.  These are the people that have conventionally been the heroes (or antiheroes) of cyberpunk literature and RPGs.  They live in the shadows of the rest of society, living on their crumbs and cast offs, or trying to scramble back into the system that has left them behind.  So, without further adieu, let's get to the main event.

So a while back I said I wanted to have a discussion of what I thought about the concepts of background, metaplot, and narrative as it pertains to game writing, and why I think that CCP dropped the ball a bit when it comes to establishing those three things, and so here it is.  While I realize that this may seem a little pretentious -- let's face it, I am not exactly a "real" game writer (yet) and there's many other people out there far more qualified to articulate this kind of thing -- I'd like to think that I have a pretty good grasp of the concepts and that, at least to me, these aren't just the purview of published authors, but really everyone who's ever run an RPG.

The third article in this series will examine the lives of the average Caldari, the 80-90% of the population that makes up the wheels and gears of the Caldari State and its corporations.  This chapter is going to pull from many of the same sources as the previous one, as well as a few other books that highlight the situation on the ground, as it were.  The biggest example is the Sprawl Survival Guide, another excellent Shadowrun soucebook.  While most of that focuses more on the specifics of that universe, it also includes a great many good examples of how corporations stay in control over the populace.

The biggest thing to take from this chapter will be that for most people in the State, life is fairly good, at least to them.  This is not because the corporations are particularly generous, or even care that much about the people that work for them, but because the corporations have conducted a centuries-long marketing campaign to promote themselves as the friend of the average man or woman and maintain the level of discontent at a minimum.  After all, workers that despise their jobs or, at an extreme, believe that they have nothing to lose from a violent strike, do not do good jobs and cost companies millions or billions of ISK in lost productivity (or even deliberate sabotage).

So with that summary, let's move on to the real meat of the article.

For the second installment of the Caldari Dialogues, I'm going to be taking a look at the corporations of the Caldari State: where they came from, how they operate and compete, their objectives and how they work to accomplish them.  From here on out, we'll be talking about the modern Caldari State, at least as it was prior to May of this year; the events with Tibus Heth have been, in my opinion, rather contradictory to everything that came before, so I'm going to avoid talking about them.  This article series is, to be quite honest, intended to explain my problems with those events in terms of plausibility, so that shouldn't be too huge a surprise for anyone.

I'll be relying on a couple of sources for a lot of my references in this chapter.  The primary one is going to be Corporate Shadowfiles, the superb Shadowrun sourcebook written by the late Nigel Findley, one of my role models as a game designer and fiction writer.  This book includes a number of things that people interested in the State will find supremely useful, including a discussion how modern corporations are structured and operate, various methods of corporate competition, and a number of Shadowrun-specific notes on various incidents between megacorporations that can give a great deal of insight on what probably happens in a similar cyberpunk setting like we find in the State.  This book is an excellent primer on corporate capitalism that is not only extremely well-researched and informative, but an excellent and interesting read.

Other references and influences include the Mekong Dominion Leaguebook for Heavy Gear, a well written sourcebook about a society on Terra Nova structured very much like the Caldari State, Blade Runner, Max Headroom, the collected works of William Gibson (especially the Sprawl Trilogy and the Bridge Trilogy), and I'm sure a zillion other things I can't remember right now.  Basically, my ideas about the State are very rooted in the cyberpunk genre, which is something that I think CCP definitely had in mind when they were developing the State.

So without further adieu, let's move on.  The body of the article continues behind the cut.

This is going to be the first segment of what is intended as a multipart series discussing the way the I, as a writer and Caldari roleplayer in Eve Online, see the way the State and its people.  Recently, there has been a lot of headbutting about this on the Chatsubo, through which I suspect I have made few friends among the people at CCP who are in charge of the latest storyline leading up to the debut of Faction Warfare on 10 June.  I am posting these here mostly as a result of a discussion I had with the players of Kai Zion and Yoshito Sanders, who have been of the opinion that my rather scathing criticism of the storyline has been a bit premature.  Because that conversation seemed to at least enlighten them, I thought I would use that conversation (and a log which Kai so generously provided) as a springboard for a series of more in-depth articles on the topic.  I'll be interspersing bits of our conversation with my text, so you can see what happened there.  However, just a warning; these quotes are not in the chronological order from the discussion, but in relevance to the topic.  I'll include the timestamp though.

I won't just be discussing the Caldari per se, but I'll also be bringing in a lot of references that I think shaped the way I view Caldari society, and probably contributed to the thoughts of those people originally responsible for the idea of the Caldari when Eve was in its germination stages.  Where possible, I'll try to make sure I quote or link these sources, but sometimes that isn't going to be feasible; I'll try to include enough information about them that you can hunt them down on your own if you want, at the very least.

I'll be putting the bulk of these entries behind the cut -- they are going to run long, probably, so if I don't they are going to make the front page look a little weird.  As always, I invite comments, criticism, and analysis from anyone.  And with that, let's get to the first part of this discussion, where I'll discuss what I see are the foundations of Caldari thought, morality, and attitudes, and where they came from, both in Eve history and in reference to the real world.