Wordbuilding As Self-Organizing Systems
Part of the fun of engaging in pseudo-scholarly investigations into fictional worlds is the idea that by looking at the shape of things, for lack of a better term, you can almost see the missing pieces; much like the research into the timeframe of Neuromancer. The assembled known puzzle pieces suggest the shapes of the missing pieces, as it were. But in the act of worldbuilding on your own, the process continually builds upon itself, and sometimes one worries about getting too involved with the background over the story... but more often, the inspiration of story to background and back again helps evolve both.
I've discussed the text adventure game I've been working on; the original adventure, Colossal Cave, has little to no actual backstory involved, which holds true for most of the other early games. The first one to really have any sort of 'universe' was Zork, which the commercial version included a history of the world, a tourist's guide, and the portfolio of the largest corporation in the world; it was further expanded upon by six additional text adventure games and three graphic adventure games. Eventually, you even get to find out why there's an abandoned white house in the middle of the woods, why the Empire collapsed in the first place, and who that thief who kept stealing your treasures was.
I started with a white house, and threw in the brick wellhouse from Colossal Cave for good measure. From there, I started creating a background for the land - that it once was inhabited by an ancient race which, following fantasy tradition, would be elves. In a way, the game is post-apocalyptic, but not for humanity; humanity's borders have expanded into the former territory of the elves, whose civilization was destroyed by a terrible war. The treasure hunters - including the player - are the proverbial Vandals, picking over the ruins of Rome.
I wanted to seed a few 'false treasures' that the player could come across; one idea I drew from a roleplaying comic that had a group of adventurers in the Wild West shake down a ex-Confederate for his fortune, and to their chagrin his 'fortune' turned out to be all in worthless Confederate dollars. In creating that particular puzzle, that in turn led to the idea that the main human kingdom underwent a 'civil war'; something recent enough so that there were still people that fought in it and was passionate about how it ended. That further led to the 'plot' of a cabal of former members of the losing faction attempting to reverse their fortunes.
Finally, I should note that there's at least one easter egg related to Neuromancer in the game - the main bar in town is called "The Tea Urn", because the name of the bar from the beginning of the novel is "Chatsubo" - a type of tea urn in Japanese. That led to a puzzle involving a literal tea urn on display at the tavern as its namesake.
I've discussed the text adventure game I've been working on; the original adventure, Colossal Cave, has little to no actual backstory involved, which holds true for most of the other early games. The first one to really have any sort of 'universe' was Zork, which the commercial version included a history of the world, a tourist's guide, and the portfolio of the largest corporation in the world; it was further expanded upon by six additional text adventure games and three graphic adventure games. Eventually, you even get to find out why there's an abandoned white house in the middle of the woods, why the Empire collapsed in the first place, and who that thief who kept stealing your treasures was.
I started with a white house, and threw in the brick wellhouse from Colossal Cave for good measure. From there, I started creating a background for the land - that it once was inhabited by an ancient race which, following fantasy tradition, would be elves. In a way, the game is post-apocalyptic, but not for humanity; humanity's borders have expanded into the former territory of the elves, whose civilization was destroyed by a terrible war. The treasure hunters - including the player - are the proverbial Vandals, picking over the ruins of Rome.
I wanted to seed a few 'false treasures' that the player could come across; one idea I drew from a roleplaying comic that had a group of adventurers in the Wild West shake down a ex-Confederate for his fortune, and to their chagrin his 'fortune' turned out to be all in worthless Confederate dollars. In creating that particular puzzle, that in turn led to the idea that the main human kingdom underwent a 'civil war'; something recent enough so that there were still people that fought in it and was passionate about how it ended. That further led to the 'plot' of a cabal of former members of the losing faction attempting to reverse their fortunes.
Finally, I should note that there's at least one easter egg related to Neuromancer in the game - the main bar in town is called "The Tea Urn", because the name of the bar from the beginning of the novel is "Chatsubo" - a type of tea urn in Japanese. That led to a puzzle involving a literal tea urn on display at the tavern as its namesake.
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