Spoiler Alert: Most readers don’t prefer complex world building. Those that do tell their own stories within those worlds: tabletop gamers.
The more complex the world, the more page space is required to explicate it and the less tight the emotional narrative density is. The lower this density vis a vis exposition, the lower impact the cathartic moments are necessarily due to their sparsity. The Dunbar Number likely has an organization or tribal equivalent that nobody has yet named that’s far less than the 250 individuals humans can normally track without losing their sense of place and social importance into anonymity. I’ll can it the Reed Number and estimate that it’s four to six.
This is why the most complex seeming worlds only give us the illusion of complexity. Herbert gave us a massive seemingly complex universe in Dune, but only a handful of political entities actually duking (sorry!) it out on the page. Martin had five books and really only a dozen different political entities in play in SOIAF--which only began to sell in huge numbers after HBO laid it all bare (literally). I don’t think the mass audience came for the complexity there. Asimov and others, especially in sci-fi, do lay down bigger complexity and unintentionally shrink their audiences when there’s “too much” to track. Family saga novels and series (which you would expect to have high complexity) sell inversely proportional to their actual complexity in my anecdotal observation--not my usual jam, so I’ll admit that’s speculation.
Everyone else gives us four different houses, clans, tribes, species, factions, or whatever. Or the names or numbers of about a dozen states, with only two or three actually being visited or involved in the plot.
I’m sure some aspiring literary academic could make a thesis out of this. And maybe prove me wrong.
I mostly agree that people don't particularly want complex worldbuilding, but people obviously like stories set in the complex real world. The trick (indeed, the whole point of storytelling) is to reduce the complexity to something understandable, but the complexity of the world allows the author to draw new information from other sources and make the story more interesting. With fictional universes you can do the same: tell a reasonably simple story with a few characters while achieving the illusion of complexity by inventing a variety of world elements that get mentioned just in passing, but as I argue, that's difficult to do well and at a sufficiently large scale for the illusion to be coherent.
You talk about the time it takes to create a new world, but what about the time it takes to explore it?
Stories are always shorts compare to our human life. One human cant write the story of humanity since the beginnings of time. And one would die before finishing to read it.
Especially because we also took time to read about the fictional worlds. Some of us know the maps of video games better than the maps of our own town.
What is it with fiction that make us love it so much? Is it the simplicity? The neutrality? The concentration in short period of high emotions without the boring moment?
Yes I think the inevitable simplification of fictional maps and political entities makes them more comprehensible and therefore more attractive. Truly understanding all the political and geophysical ramifications of even a small country is a huge challenge, even more so if you add the historical dimension and require that It be comparatively understood across a long period of time. Being absorbed in a fictional history and map is infinitely more doable.
Inevitable pedantic comment: in the Song of Ice and Fire books, if you pay attention to the descriptions of environments and fauna, Westeros is definitely based on North America, not Europe. (Exhibit A: dire wolves, North American prehistoric megafauna.)
True, and the whole wild north trope seems much more North American than European, but that seems minor compared to everything European. As with most fantasy elements, Westeros is definitely a combination of inspirations!
I think geat worldbuilding starts with creating dynamic, flexible, realistic _rules_, then riffing on what could happen given those rules. It doesn't require filling out all the details — just creating "what-ifs" that proceed from a ruleset. It's why some of the most popular fictional universes (Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer, Cthulhu) have hundreds of published works from so many different authors.
Fiction is not meant to perfectly replicate the entire complexity of the real world - rather it takes a very particular subset of reality and distills into a story you can consume at your leisure. This is true for both fictional and non-fictional settings - no movie set during e.g. WW2 or the French Revolution actually conveys the whole complexity of the real world at the time. Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell?
The best worldbuilding is that which doesn't get into the way of telling a good story. This is why "remixing" is actually a storytelling virtue - GRR can point at Dorne and vaguely motion "bizarro Moorish Spain" and the reader will instantly get a better idea of what he's dealing with without having to read a 800-pager on Dornish culture and history.
> Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell?
Your question is rhetorical, but I'd like to answer a slightly altered version of it: I think a version of LotR in which "the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie" had somehow been part of the worldbuilding, even if they weren't shown much in the story, might actually be more enjoyable in some sense. You'd get a subtle feeling, as the characters do whatever they're doing for the plot, that the world they're traversing is fuller, richer, deeper.
Certainly it wouldn't be fun if the story stopped itself, Victor Hugo-style, for a dissertation on trade routes and exports from Eriador to Gondor, but that's not what I'm arguing for! I agree with you that worldbuilding shouldn't "get into the way of telling a good story", but assuming that, there can be varying degrees of worldbuilding quality and depth.
are you familiar with the video game disco elysium by any chance? it’s by far the most complex fictional world i’ve ever encountered, and i think the writers do it very well: they understand they can’t replicate the complexity of the real world, so there’s the obvious inspiration (like you mentioned in the article), and also they remove the “boring ordinary stuff” and instead magnify both the beauty and the horror of our everyday lives to communicate a message about the human condition. i don’t think i’ve had a piece of media impact me as much as that game has; i hope you check it out!
It's been a while since I've read him, but I remember Jack Vance doing a fantastic job of building worlds in his science fiction stories especially. One device I really liked was his use of footnotes to digress on the cultural or political mores of alien societies.
One of the worldbuilding strategies that I enjoy the most is when authors allude to something that’s happened in their world but offload a lot of the intermediate steps to the reader. In “Infinite Jest”, DFW drops little tidbits about how the US is catapulting all our garbage into Canada (sorry!) or how companies can buy the naming rights to calendar years. And the reader kinda has to try to interpolate how we would’ve gotten from here to that point. William Gibson does this too in some of his near future books. It seems to me like a way to “borrow from the real world’s complexity,” as you say, while being careful to not trigger the reader’s awareness of all the missing details.
The magic of LOTR and its siblings is that the world Tolkien built is just far enough from ours to be an absorbing alien landscape but at the same completely relatable. It’s a brilliant balance
Your point about the limits of intelligent design versus evolution echoes something I read today about Daoist thinking. The Daoists believed deliberate thought cannot supersede or keep up with natural intelligence
The first part about Europe interacting with the rest of the world and not being isolated made me think that for a long time they were very much isolated from the Americas. There are many fictional universe where there is a vast sea to the west with rumors of unknown lands, or maybe a precipice!
I remembered sailing west Golden Sun. I googled up the map of Golden Sun, got a little nostalgia rush, then continued reading the article. I was a bit confused when I saw the next image. What are the odds?
And that trope dates back at least to medieval Europe with the legends of lands like the Island of St. Brendan, if not to classical Greece and Plato's Atlantis.
Spoiler Alert: Most readers don’t prefer complex world building. Those that do tell their own stories within those worlds: tabletop gamers.
The more complex the world, the more page space is required to explicate it and the less tight the emotional narrative density is. The lower this density vis a vis exposition, the lower impact the cathartic moments are necessarily due to their sparsity. The Dunbar Number likely has an organization or tribal equivalent that nobody has yet named that’s far less than the 250 individuals humans can normally track without losing their sense of place and social importance into anonymity. I’ll can it the Reed Number and estimate that it’s four to six.
This is why the most complex seeming worlds only give us the illusion of complexity. Herbert gave us a massive seemingly complex universe in Dune, but only a handful of political entities actually duking (sorry!) it out on the page. Martin had five books and really only a dozen different political entities in play in SOIAF--which only began to sell in huge numbers after HBO laid it all bare (literally). I don’t think the mass audience came for the complexity there. Asimov and others, especially in sci-fi, do lay down bigger complexity and unintentionally shrink their audiences when there’s “too much” to track. Family saga novels and series (which you would expect to have high complexity) sell inversely proportional to their actual complexity in my anecdotal observation--not my usual jam, so I’ll admit that’s speculation.
Everyone else gives us four different houses, clans, tribes, species, factions, or whatever. Or the names or numbers of about a dozen states, with only two or three actually being visited or involved in the plot.
I’m sure some aspiring literary academic could make a thesis out of this. And maybe prove me wrong.
I mostly agree that people don't particularly want complex worldbuilding, but people obviously like stories set in the complex real world. The trick (indeed, the whole point of storytelling) is to reduce the complexity to something understandable, but the complexity of the world allows the author to draw new information from other sources and make the story more interesting. With fictional universes you can do the same: tell a reasonably simple story with a few characters while achieving the illusion of complexity by inventing a variety of world elements that get mentioned just in passing, but as I argue, that's difficult to do well and at a sufficiently large scale for the illusion to be coherent.
You talk about the time it takes to create a new world, but what about the time it takes to explore it?
Stories are always shorts compare to our human life. One human cant write the story of humanity since the beginnings of time. And one would die before finishing to read it.
Especially because we also took time to read about the fictional worlds. Some of us know the maps of video games better than the maps of our own town.
What is it with fiction that make us love it so much? Is it the simplicity? The neutrality? The concentration in short period of high emotions without the boring moment?
Yes I think the inevitable simplification of fictional maps and political entities makes them more comprehensible and therefore more attractive. Truly understanding all the political and geophysical ramifications of even a small country is a huge challenge, even more so if you add the historical dimension and require that It be comparatively understood across a long period of time. Being absorbed in a fictional history and map is infinitely more doable.
That last one, I think. They're like real stories except all the ordinary life stuff removed!
Inevitable pedantic comment: in the Song of Ice and Fire books, if you pay attention to the descriptions of environments and fauna, Westeros is definitely based on North America, not Europe. (Exhibit A: dire wolves, North American prehistoric megafauna.)
True, and the whole wild north trope seems much more North American than European, but that seems minor compared to everything European. As with most fantasy elements, Westeros is definitely a combination of inspirations!
I think geat worldbuilding starts with creating dynamic, flexible, realistic _rules_, then riffing on what could happen given those rules. It doesn't require filling out all the details — just creating "what-ifs" that proceed from a ruleset. It's why some of the most popular fictional universes (Star Wars, Star Trek, Warhammer, Cthulhu) have hundreds of published works from so many different authors.
This post got quite a lot visibility and comments on HN.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39175981
Oh god. Good visibility and comments, I hope.
...
Okay, it's the usual HN mix of pedantic criticism, misinterpretation, and the occasional actually enlightening comment. Could have been much worse!
Fiction is not meant to perfectly replicate the entire complexity of the real world - rather it takes a very particular subset of reality and distills into a story you can consume at your leisure. This is true for both fictional and non-fictional settings - no movie set during e.g. WW2 or the French Revolution actually conveys the whole complexity of the real world at the time. Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell?
The best worldbuilding is that which doesn't get into the way of telling a good story. This is why "remixing" is actually a storytelling virtue - GRR can point at Dorne and vaguely motion "bizarro Moorish Spain" and the reader will instantly get a better idea of what he's dealing with without having to read a 800-pager on Dornish culture and history.
> Can you imagine a version of LOTR that also had to convey the all the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie? Do you think that movie would be more enjoyable, or better at telling the story it wanted to tell?
Your question is rhetorical, but I'd like to answer a slightly altered version of it: I think a version of LotR in which "the socio-economic intricacies of trade routes between Gondor and Brie" had somehow been part of the worldbuilding, even if they weren't shown much in the story, might actually be more enjoyable in some sense. You'd get a subtle feeling, as the characters do whatever they're doing for the plot, that the world they're traversing is fuller, richer, deeper.
Certainly it wouldn't be fun if the story stopped itself, Victor Hugo-style, for a dissertation on trade routes and exports from Eriador to Gondor, but that's not what I'm arguing for! I agree with you that worldbuilding shouldn't "get into the way of telling a good story", but assuming that, there can be varying degrees of worldbuilding quality and depth.
are you familiar with the video game disco elysium by any chance? it’s by far the most complex fictional world i’ve ever encountered, and i think the writers do it very well: they understand they can’t replicate the complexity of the real world, so there’s the obvious inspiration (like you mentioned in the article), and also they remove the “boring ordinary stuff” and instead magnify both the beauty and the horror of our everyday lives to communicate a message about the human condition. i don’t think i’ve had a piece of media impact me as much as that game has; i hope you check it out!
I’ve heard of it! Haven’t played yet but I do think I will have to try it out at some point
come to think of it, you even share the main character’s last name 🤔 anyway lol i hope you enjoy it when you try it!
Huh cool! Alright I'll play that next when I quit being obsessed with Stardew Valley
It's been a while since I've read him, but I remember Jack Vance doing a fantastic job of building worlds in his science fiction stories especially. One device I really liked was his use of footnotes to digress on the cultural or political mores of alien societies.
One of the worldbuilding strategies that I enjoy the most is when authors allude to something that’s happened in their world but offload a lot of the intermediate steps to the reader. In “Infinite Jest”, DFW drops little tidbits about how the US is catapulting all our garbage into Canada (sorry!) or how companies can buy the naming rights to calendar years. And the reader kinda has to try to interpolate how we would’ve gotten from here to that point. William Gibson does this too in some of his near future books. It seems to me like a way to “borrow from the real world’s complexity,” as you say, while being careful to not trigger the reader’s awareness of all the missing details.
The magic of LOTR and its siblings is that the world Tolkien built is just far enough from ours to be an absorbing alien landscape but at the same completely relatable. It’s a brilliant balance
Your point about the limits of intelligent design versus evolution echoes something I read today about Daoist thinking. The Daoists believed deliberate thought cannot supersede or keep up with natural intelligence
From Zhuangzhi (basically second to the Tao Te Ching): https://iep.utm.edu/zhuangzi-chuang-tzu-chinese-philosopher/#SH3d
I wouldn't be surprised to find out I'm a daoist at heart
The first part about Europe interacting with the rest of the world and not being isolated made me think that for a long time they were very much isolated from the Americas. There are many fictional universe where there is a vast sea to the west with rumors of unknown lands, or maybe a precipice!
I remembered sailing west Golden Sun. I googled up the map of Golden Sun, got a little nostalgia rush, then continued reading the article. I was a bit confused when I saw the next image. What are the odds?
Haha fun! And yes the trope of unknown lands is a common one (and the lands are suspiciously often to the west lol)
And that trope dates back at least to medieval Europe with the legends of lands like the Island of St. Brendan, if not to classical Greece and Plato's Atlantis.