On the Subject of Designing Game Worlds

Working on games like Labyrinth and Caduceus has forced me to think a great deal about what constitutes a compelling game world. Both of these worlds are wildly fantastic in their respective ways. The former is an underground cavern where monsters from another dimension run a pet food factory for nefarious purposes. The latter is a Victorian, “Age of Sail” fantasy where locomotives and dirigibles are powered by magic. In each case, the world is vivid enough to constitute its own character. And as with any character we create, it behooves us as designers to respect the coherence and internal consistency of our worlds.

Frank Espinosa, author of the comic book Rocketo, taught a class at MIT last semester on world-building and character design. In this class, Espinosa broke down worlds into three general character archetypes: heroic, villainous, and trickster. Heroic worlds, for example, would be like Nimbus Cumulon, the great flying city in Caduceus. Its elevated height evokes the great erudition and scientific achievement of its famous laboratories. Nimbus Cumulon is detached, literally, from the strata in which the rest of humanity resides, floating above the rampaging disease and panic of the world below. Villainous worlds, on the other hand, might be like Tatooine in Star Wars: A New Hope. The deserts of Tatooine offer only the barest sustenance and are dangerous, full of monstrous creatures. A variety of unsavory villains pass through the bars and trade outposts of Tatooine - gangsters, bounty hunters, and smugglers. It is a world from which Luke Skywalker longs to depart. The trickster's world, however, is definitely my favorite. Labyrinth is a great example of a tricky world. Nothing is as it first appears. For example, a sphinx works as the receptionist of the pet food factory, answering your questions with more questions. Locations you must find on maps are erased. Monsters demand specific amounts of food but refuse to tell you how much to serve. Trickster worlds are perverse and contrary, which makes them great environments for puzzle games.

The triad of heroic, villainous, and trickster archetypes is a helpful framework when first approaching world-building. Heroic stories usually have all three types of worlds in them, allowing the protagonist to journey through spaces that can reflect or antagonize her inner, emotional journey. Is the protagonist Frodo Baggins leaving the heroic city of Lothlorien and heading towards Mordor, the hotbed of villainy? Or is the protagonist Odysseus, being waylaid in the sorceress Circe's trickster island while striving to return home to Ithaca, which has become a vile place full of indolent suitors? The journey between worlds becomes an important part of their design, especially as we begin to imagine the narrative we plan to tell within that world. But having the archetype of your world is just the first step. Fleshing out the history and texture of a world is important to making it believable. As arbitrary as creating a “history” may seem at first glance, this step is actually guided by very specific logics.

A world, if it is a character, must be guided by some kind of organizing principle. That is, what is the major event that defines this world and its societies? Myths, according to Espinosa, offer a lot of insight into the principles that organize the way a society imagines its history. The Aztecs, for example, have a creation myth where the god of war destroys his brothers and sisters for the murder of their mother. The battle that ensues consumes much of the cosmos in fire and the heavens crumble, falling to the earth. In the smoking aftermath, humanity builds itself up again, worshiping the remaining deities to the end of its time. If we take the Aztec creation myth as the organizing principle of a world, then we might say that it is one defined by catastrophe. It is, in fact, a post-apocalyptic world. Its creation is one and the same as its destruction. With a principle such as destruction at the center of the world, we can begin to imagine the kinds of societies that might grow out of that event and the motifs that could be at the center of our story.

World-building, at its core, is more than just drawing maps of water sources and thinking about systems of economic exchange. It implies the attempt to unify the physical and historical surrounds of a world with thematic principles that will undergird how a character interacts with the world.