Worlding

[sus]

A world, in the world-building sense, being ~a game environment with a graphics card. A set of problems and conflicts; a set of special powers or tools (affordances) and enemies (obstacles); a unique physics; a set of character types; a unique look etc. Like entering a new ecosystem.

I think this helps explain why we describe everything from board games to novels to operating systems (eg Urbit) as worlds

"Drama" in the fiction/theater sense being the spectacle of players pursue conflicting goals ("gaming"), set against an environmental backdrop that bites back

There's a lot here to riff and chew on, but I gotta get some reading done today (Gaddis, Recognitions), so I'll open the thread up, quote some previous messages from the board, and come back later for more thoughts

 

[sus]

Then you have the fantasy genre. We talked about this in the 'Who Invented Elves' thread. The stock characters, the events, the worlds, are all fixed. There is no room for, no need for, no desire for any innovation. Computer games, cheap paperbacks, movies. All exactly the same world all exactly the same characters.

Computer games are great because they never present you an unfamiliar world. Everything is an iteration of already established tropes. Whether that be a post apocalyptic wasteland or a faux medieval fantasy world where dragons are born again. Every post apocalyptic wasteland is the same post apocalyptic wasteland. Each corporate-feudal cyberpunk world is the same corporate-feudal cyberpunk world.

The noir universe is another. The modernist city and its articulate shadows. It's cigarettes. It's femme fatales. It's bars and it's neon.

The Soho of seedy alcoholics like Francis Bacon is the down at heel, sordid counterpart to the New York you describe in the opening post. Without the vim. Without the zip. Without the pizzazz. Without the exoticism and the wealth. Without the drugs. Without the Jazz. Without the dancing.

Victorian Britain and its fantastic steampunk counterpart. Gas lamps. Horse and carriage. Fog of course. Industry. Jack the Ripper.

There is the sea. As in Conrad. As in Melville. As in adventure tales and pirate stories. Exploration. Adventure.

There is the white picket fence stuff of Lynch and Stepford wives.

Things where just a few cues will tell you instantly where you are and how you can expect the world to operate.

The American high school with its stock characters. Jocks and nerds. It's lockers of course, lined up in the hallways.

All the various different stage sets and the stock characters that act upon them.

 

[sus]

I'm enjoying [Virconium] so far - it seems to fit into the Dunsanian conception of fantasy as a series of arresting vignettes, possibly threaded together into a fairly loose narrative, rather than the post-Tolkein approach of an painstakingly constructed world where a tightly worked-out but fundamentally fairly mechanical plot takes place. I know he's written in the past about his hostility to "worldbuilding" as a practice. It reminds me a bit of Gene Wolf's New Sun stories in that respect, too.

obviously electronic music 'about a thing', with the intention of specifically constructing a novel, conceptually rich lexicon for itself isn't new. https://www.tinymixtapes.com/features/2018-against-worldbuilding … by nick scavo is a really great history of the notion of 'world building', from stockhausten to OPN

tbf, every city is described like that, very much including the Sprawl, and the various space locations (including the infamous Rasta space station)

everything is always a string of elliptical references

"Case at seventeen, a street boy with hooded eyes, silent combat in the rose glow of dawn on a rooftop beneath looming geodesics"

I read an interview with Gibson a long time where he said in the best science fiction casual, throwaway references imply a lot

specifically he took this throwaway line from Escape From New York "You flew the Gullfire over Leningrad" and built it out into a key part of Neuromancer

The worldbuilding [in Dune] was very cool, they did a great job of making it feel like a fully realized culture that was recognizably human but also deeply alien across the gulf of 10,000 years. Also a very solid job of conveying masses of information without tons of clunky exposition or whispered voice-over, like the Lynch version ("know then that is the year 10191..."). The ornithopters were cool. The shielded knife-fighting was mostly cool. The Sardaukaur throat-singing interlude was THE BEST.

(Re Viriconium...)

I enjoyed it, I think. I like the way that he uses the fantasy genre while simultaneously subverting a lot of it's expectations - so the worldbuilding is quite vague and deliberately inconsistent between novels, the heroes are not so much reluctant as sort-of resignedly playing a part, everything's just gradually falling into disorder and paralysis. But he still gets to play with these really fun settings and images and set pieces like backstreet swordfights and toxic wastelands and scalphunting automata.

I think that good party reports are basically worldbuilding, where you selectively curate reality & write the narrative of the scene, make it a "thing," pull together a constellation of signifiers (proper & improper nouns). If a scene flourishes and no one's there to write about it, did it ever really exist?

 

[Clinamenic]

Worlds can be immersive even if they are purely imaginary, i.e. not relying on sensory signals. Reading a novel involves sensory activity, but the effect is still imaginary; whereas with film or video games you can actually see the world, albeit a 2D analogue.

 

[sus]

Someone told me this is what the book/show Altered Carbon is about. Showing up on a new world with a new body and getting oriented. Like entering a new workplace, a new social scene, a new subculture. A set of likes a dislikes, a group canon of what's important and what's not, a group history & lore. Haven't read/watched yet though. But sounds like meta-commentary on sci-fi.

 

[sus]

Worlds can be immersive even if they are purely imaginary, i.e. not relying on sensory signals. Reading a novel involves sensory activity, but the effect is still imaginary; whereas with film or video games you can actually see the world, albeit a 2D analogue.

Yes our top-down projection abilities (cf Karl Friston?) do a lot of the work for us, same with the points Padraig makes in the quotes above about little throwaway lines helping inferentially build a greater picture, imply all that's out there out of view, on the other side of the horizon

 

[Clinamenic]

Yeah neither have I, but that makes it sound interesting.

 

[Clinamenic]

Yes our top-down projection abilities (cf Karl Friston?) do a lot of the work for us, same with the points Padraig makes in the quotes above about little throwaway lines helping inferentially build a greater picture, imply all that's out there out of view, on the other side of the horizon

One aspect of films or stories that I always though was a good worldbuilding technique, is when there are references made to other in-world events or characters that aren't covered by the narrative. It's as if the narrative then becomes a tour that the reader/viewer is taking, a partial tour of a more extensive world.

 

[Clinamenic]

And part of what makes our world so overwhelmingly real, in a way, is because there is just exponentially more content than you can appreciate in one tour.

 

[sus]

 

[sus]

Walking around - Walkabout, C3PO & Dusty Bin in Star Wars, the entirety of GoT, nearly every acid &/or mushroom experience as a teenager, computer games/virtual worlds I mean c’mon even COD is mostly just idling around a map. Maps help & hinder, even in the matrix.

The Campfire - Chaucer, Robin Hood & medieval themes, every western including Blood Meridian & Blazing Saddles with beans n gas, GoT’s, again (sorry). Light & illumination, social circles & bonding, boundaries, ritual eating, exclusion & incorporation, domestic vs wild, culture/nature, demarcations of “them vs us”.

Killing big things at the end of key points in a quest - Gilgamesh, film, The Sopranos, every comp game with a boss to smash.

Maybe these are just tropes & I’m not clever enough. The Mirror of the Marvelous is a decent read, even if the last quarter of the 20th century onward is missing due to time of writing. Fords, castles, mountains, labyrinths, gender, loss, sacrifice.

 

[Murphy]

played Goldeneye last week for the first time in yonks fucked on painkillers, weird memory palace of mnemonics, pathways, hidey-holes, the larger arc of missions too smoked loads of Russians

Age of Empires early days had its own invented language as audio clips, so it offered LAN network hysterics, “builden, acquilen, timberhoffvandy”, think Carthage had war elephants that were banned. Still fun for a closed ltd system

 

[Clinamenic]

Haven't played GoldenEye, but NightFire was my equivalent.

 

[luka]

Someone told me this is what the book/show Altered Carbon is about. Showing up on a new world with a new body and getting oriented. Like entering a new workplace, a new social scene, a new subculture. A set of likes a dislikes, a group canon of what's important and what's not, a group history & lore. Haven't read/watched yet though. But sounds like meta-commentary on sci-fi.

altered carbon was notable for being like the computer games i described. stitched together from pre-established tropes. nothing original. very scrupulous in that respect.

 

[luka]

music is an environment thats one of the important things to understand

 

[luka]

i woke up thinking about modding as a way to extend the game-world. fan fiction is similar. i'd been playing Skyrim the night before a world so all-absorbing a friend of mine dropped out of college just to focus on playing it full-time.

 

[luka]

people's attachment to their chosen worlds reminds me of what K-Punk said about weed smokers, they're only mellow till you threaten to take away their comfort blankie, then they turn vicious and feral in an eye-blink

 

[Murphy]

What did you fuckin say about weed? My weed? My weed is my weed, you come correct if you try and steal it. If you ask, I’ll share. Some of it, not all of it (blagging hippy). Who the fuck is anyone to say my weed blankie isn’t my weed and is just a blankie? I put fucking hours into tinctures. Hours. It’s a craft. You need skills. Skills that are (l)earned. What you fuckin say?

Something like that, @luka ?

 

[woops]

What did you fuckin say about weed? My weed? My weed is my weed, you come correct if you try and steal it. If you ask, I’ll share. Some of it, not all of it (blagging hippy). Who the fuck is anyone to say my weed blankie isn’t my weed and is just a blankie? I put fucking hours into tinctures. Hours. It’s a craft. You need skills. Skills that are (l)earned. What you fuckin say?

Something like that, @luka ?

i'm sure you are very nice and share freely @WashYourHands but what @luka is describing is I'd argue reflected in those stupid and lame rituals pass to the left hand side, all that bollocks,

more than one weed person has told me that they have to have weed around, all the time, not so they smoke all the time but so that there is a posssibility of having a smoke all the time.

 

[luka]

i was defintely like that for many years only i would actually smoke all the time which is why i needed it around all the time. in actual fact Mark was probably referring primarily to me.