Designers often gloss a game’s visual style, thematic elements, and gameplay mechanics with consistency and coherence. This process acts as worldbuilding, and serves to justify a game’s world while additionally captivating the player with detail and story. It is important to note that worldbuilding strives to reach internal consistency, not realism. For game design, internal consistency refers to how unfied a game presents it material. To evaluate internal consistency, consider if the game’s elements are similar across its many points. By emphasizing internal consistency through worldbuilding, designers can enhance the believability and impact of their games. Such worldbuilding can be achieved through a plethora of ways, and by understanding how games worldbuild, they can be more consciously savored.
Worldbuilding through dialogue
As a commonly used method to enhance realism of games, designers often include text in the form of diaries, conversations, or letters as worldbuilding mechanisms. These commonly optional resources easily share story, character development, and facts that enhance the game. Pokémon Emerald’s Hoen region incorporated a controversially large amount of water in its map design, with the latter half of the game’s towns only reachable via surfable expanses of ocean. To help the player appreciate the Hoen region’s strong ocean emphasis, designers added an Oceanic Museum that featured several thought-provoking facts about the sea. It displays ships, submarines, and barometers to help convey the science of ocean life, thereby enhancing believability with the player’s later journeys at sea. The museum’s facts are brief and optional, subsequently offering worldbuilding while not suffocating the player with required dialogue.
Worldbuilding through cutscenes
Cutscenes are another commonly utilized approach to generate realism, especially in games that play on more graphically powerful consoles. These often skippable and usually short cinematic moments artistically develop a game’s characters and world. Games that are strongly rooted in tight gameplay can additionally benefit from short cutscenes. The Wii’s boxing “hit” Punch Out! emphasizes tight combat mechanics. After an intense string of fights, the exhausted player can enjoy a brief cutscene of the game’s protagonist, Little Mac, training for the next title bout. The significance of these cutscenes revolves around their content. They show Little Mac training and preparing for upcoming gameplay. These behaviors fit the boxing-centered nature of Punch Out!, thereby maintaining the game’s emphasis on boxing. Little Mac’s training additionally justifies his ability to engage increasingly difficult opponents. The game’s world of boxing deepens because the player sees Little Mac beyond the boxing ring, thereby adding more to Punch Out!’s focused world of combat.
Direct worldbuilding through gameplay
While dialogue and cutscenes are commonly chosen approaches to add worldbuilding in games, they remove all interactivity from the experience. Games are intended to be engaged through gameplay, so gameplay is arguably the best method to worldbuild games. And gameplay varies in how directly it worldbuilds games. Some gameplay openly communicates worldbuilding to the player, while other games adopt gameplay that subtly hints at worldbuilding. The military combat strategy game Valkyria Chronicles 4 adopts gameplay that directly communicates its worldbuilding to help ensure the player recognizes its thematic shifts. At the start of the game, the player enters lush, green hills during battle. As the story progresses, however, the player travels into what is essentially the icy heart of Russia to overtake the enemy capital. The game visually communicates this shift with later fights taking place on snow-tipped mountains and ice-covered lakes. These visual elements are then directly engaged through gameplay. At one point, the player must use flamethrowers to burn a path through an icy wall. Thus, the game’s worldbuilding - in terms of its geography - affects gameplay. In other missions, the player can capitalize on increased cover due to snowstorms to sneak behind enemy lines. Once again, the game’s worldbuilding, this time through weather, clearly directs the player to enhance strategic gameplay.
Red Dead Redemption 2 incorporates similar, openly communicated worldbuilding through its memory system. Characters in the game recall the protagonist’s face. This simple system has rich implications for character-protagonist interaction. If the protagonist chooses to save a helpless civilian from a snake bite or bear trap, that civilian might later spot the protagonist in town and offer to pay for a new gun or clothing item. Alternatively, if the protagonist is unmasked and robs a civilian, that civilian might later call the police or attack the protagonist upon a second meeting. In addition to adding weight to morality, Red Dead Redemption 2’s memory system adds a pervasiveness to the game’s world. Characters can recognize the protagonist in a variety of far-reaching locales, thereby influencing how the player interacts with the game’s world through gameplay. Here, worldbuilding through character recognition unifies the player’s actions with outcomes of praise or punishment.
Subtle player-enacted worldbuilding
In the previous examples, game mechanics directly interacted with the player to synthesize a consistent experience though gameplay. Other games, however, adopt a subtler approach to worldbuilding through gameplay. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, for example, nails this process through its player-created storytelling. In this largely open-ended game, many stories, characters, and histories are hinted at, yet never directly unraveled. For example, how could a beast as massive as the Moldugas exist in the game’s varied environments, what destroyed this long-abandoned town, and what force could destroy all of the guardians outside Fort Hateno? Upon first reaching the locations that evoke these questions, no immediate answer exists. Because Breath of the Wild provides no direct - or at least immediate - answer, it sparks curiosity in the player. This curiosity generates potential explanations, which in turn synthesizes a potential story. Thus, the game ingeniously grants storytelling to the player. The world’s ambiguous and thought-provoking elements combine to enable worldbuilding that the player creates.
Flower is another example of how a game subtly grants worldbuilding onto the player. As part of this creative game, the player controls the wind as it blooms flowers to beautify the world. As the game progresses, the player additionally destroys large metal obstructions to enable nature’s growth. No introduction or explanation accompanies this gameplay; instead, the player blooms flowers and clears debris because of this gameplay’s intrinsically satisfying nature. Particularly in the game’s climax, the player retakes a city that has become overwhelmed by metal obstructions. As the player clears this destruction, he/she injects color into this abandoned city. Music grows as more of the urban landscape returns to its natural beginning. Along this process, the player wonders what happened to this place while enjoying his/her journey of animating this lost land. Thus, the player builds the world as he/she desires. Worldbuilding in terms of beautifying the land is placed on the player’s shoulders, but by not telling the player so, this responsibility does not come across as a burden.
Conclusion
As a way to enhance the impact games hold on the player, worldbuilding unifies mechanics for a cohesive, and subsequently believable, gaming experience. And this sense of believability from consistent elements can result from many worldbuilding approaches. Game designers can incorporate the variety of these worldbuilding techniques to seamlessly and holistically add life into their work. And that is what worldbuilding is all about: adding life to a game so that it can be better enjoyed by the player. This sense of life does not have to exist in only peripheral game features, such as score and visual design, it can be sewn into the game’s core gameplay mechanics for a continually worldbuilding-driven experience. Game designers pour their souls into their art, and worldbuilding is one method to help the player appreciate such effort by enjoying the game on a deeper level.
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