It’s been quiet around these parts lately, and will likely be for a while yet. February feels both like a mountain and a labyrinth, and I find myself having to both climb and untangle it to the point where I can get a great deal of opaque work done in a short amount of time, making it as transparent as possible to not only myself, but the various colleagues it affects. I can’t really be more specific than that just yet, except to say that it’s my first time through it, and I expect it’ll become easier next year.
Anyhow, I wanted to lay down some resonating fragments around the theme of worldbuilding, a term I first really absorbed a few years back. It’s everywhere now, to the extent that you may have seen this from Stephen King recently:
I’m most familiar with the term in the context of role-playing games but there are whole books on the subject for fantasy/sci-fi authors (some of which I own). You might have heard about it in the context of movie franchises like Avatar, Marvel, and/or Star Wars. It’s sometimes also called “lore,” and it’s used as kind of a shorthand for the creative work that’s done in addition to characters and narrative action. It denotes that quality of a work that renders it more immersive, that gives a body the sense of inhabiting a fully formed, detailed reality. When I talked a while back about reading David Peterson’s The Art of Language Invention, I didn’t mention that the subtitle of that book is “From Horse-Lords to Dark Elves, the Words Behind World-Building.” And that’s just the sort of thing that most people think about with respect to the term—it gives many people a great deal of pleasure to be able to learn Klingon or Elvish, or to be able to spot the easter eggs in a particular Marvel movie.
I don’t know that I quite have the language yet to describe this, but the triteness of the term, as King puts it, is the consequence of a shift in our media, with a heavy emphasis on world-building. Think about all of the television lately that hasn’t just been rebooting old properties but extending their universes. The popularity of franchise movie-making feels like it’s at an all time high, to the extent that the Marvel juggernaut now nests worlds within worlds.
It’s tempting to imagine worldbuilding as an act of intense elaboration, something that an author does over a long period of time (Tolkien, e.g.) or perhaps a large team of people does in concert (an MMORPG, for instance, or the Game of Thrones show). I think too of the various wikis devoted to these properties, as well as the various social media platforms and fan genres that orbit around them. Worldbuilding sounds like a grand undertaking, obviously.
I want to add a couple of things to that notion, and I don’t really have the time today to elaborate too much on them. But it’s something I hope to pick up later. First, I think that worldbuilding happens at different scales—I don’t disagree with King that the term has worn out, but I also think that it’s gone largely unexplored. Today’s newsletter from Robin Sloan reminded me that worldbuilding might operate through intensity rather than elaboration. He writes
I think this is the soul of “worldbuilding”—more important than any number of maps or genealogies. Or, to say it another way: you could draw all the maps you wanted and still find your story thin and unconvincing. Conversely, a “worldbuilding” that consisted of three gnomic phrases could feel perfectly thick and capacious, deployed amidst “the contingency of connectedness”.
You’ll have to visit the original to see the “this” referred to in the first sentence—there is really no good way to give a full sense of it in a single pull quote. But I pulled the piece I did because Sloan’s “three gnomic phrases” reminded me of a passage from Friedrich Nietzsche’s early book Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks:
This attempt to relate the history of the earlier Greek philosophers distinguishes itself from similar attempts by its brevity. This has been accomplished by mentioning but a small number of the doctrines of every philosopher, i.e., by incompleteness. Those doctrines, however, have been selected in which the personal element of the philosopher re-echoes most strongly; whereas a complete enumeration of all possible propositions handed down to us—as is the custom in text-books—merely brings about one thing, the absolute silencing of the personal element. It is through this that those records become so tedious; for in systems which have been refuted it is only this personal element that can still interest us, for this alone is eternally irrefutable. It is possible to shape the picture of a man out of three anecdotes. I endeavour to bring into relief three anecdotes out of every system and abandon the remainder.
Sorry for the long quote, but I’m really struck by the parallels here, which extend well beyond the number three. When I first read this book in graduate school, and later quoted this passage in my dissertation, I was struck by that idea, that three anecdotes (or three gnomic phrases) could be sufficient to capture the essence of a thinker or a world. I still don’t know what my three anecdotes would be, although it’s a puzzle that I’ve thought about a lot over the years.
But that’s what I mean when I say that there’s a scalar element to worldbuilding that isn’t captured by most people using the term. Encyclopedic elaboration vs an intensity that we could describe as gnomic, personal, or poetic—it’s personally tempting to me to see elaboration and intensity as two poles between which a vast spectrum of worldbuilding activities resides.
I think the concept is worth retaining, despite the exhaustion of the term, because it’s a specifically 21st century rhetorical practice, one that extends well beyond television, movies, novels, and games. And this will almost certainly become a chapter in the project I’m working on, so I’ll just suggest a few examples here. (And this is the second of the “couple of things” I mention above)
I think that what distinguishes influencers on YouTube, Twitch, Instagram, TikTok, etc. is the degree to which they engage in worldbuilding, whether they are conscious of the term (and its strategies) or not. So-called influence occurs across broadcast media, but its approach is far different in particular ways. Partly, this has to do with its constructed authenticity, and part of it is also a certain invitational style.
There’s a piece of worldbuilding that is necessarily anti-democratic, and I don’t say that because I think that authors or directors should be consulting us on their decisions. I say that because we can see many examples of worldbuilding as a conscious rhetorical strategy that operates (dangerously) within politics. One old example (that we have never quite confronted as a country and definitely not left behind) is the idea of the “reality-based community” that was attributed to an aide in the Bush White House in 2004:
The aide said that guys like me were 'in what we call the reality-based community,' which he defined as people who 'believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.' [...] 'That's not the way the world really works anymore,' he continued. 'We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.'
There are plenty of more recent examples, from the assault on Critical Race Theory to the cr*pto boom. Worldbuilding sounds innocuous when we’re talking about superheroes or Dothraki swear words, but those same strategies are being deployed on the regular for much more nefarious purposes.
For that matter, what is gaslighting but worldbuilding designed to intimidate, bully, harass, control, or abuse? Much of what we think of as misinformation is often not the deliberate spreading of falsehoods but selective emphasis guided by a vision of the world that a person, outlet, or organization wants to achieve. Like rhetoric itself, worldbuilding is a practice that can be put to broad range of possible outcomes, not all of which are especially desirable or positive.
It would take much more than a substack post for me to argue that this version of worldbuilding is distinct to our current moment or our current media ecology, but my hunch is that this is the case. Similarly, I think that the ubiquity of worldbuilding is a symptom of the larger problems that I’m hoping to get at, both on this site and in my larger project. And I say that as someone who’s always thought of his particular set of skills as a species of worldbuilding.
But that’ll have to wait for another day/week/month.
This is a really smart way to think about mis- and disinformation. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. I would be interested in reading more on this notion of world-building as a distinctive (postdigital?) rhetorical strategy.