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For the past several weeks, I've been writing a series of blog posts on the topic of worldbuilding, inspired by Chris Dahlen's (Save the Robot) recent series of posts on the same subject. I'm a couple entires into my own series now, but since I haven't been to Bitmob in a few months (and might I say, I LOVE what you've done with the place), I thought these posts might be a good way to re-introduce myself to ju vonderful people!
Worldbuilding has always been a favorite subject (and hobby) of mine. I even took a class on the it in college. The result of that endeavor was an exercise in confused mediocrity; a Pokemon-esque MMORPG set in a world based on my very shaky and ignorant understanding of mutation, evolution and symbiosis. A fairly solid concept, if I do say so, that I needlessly burdened with pirates, mages and jack-booted totalitarian armies. Hey, it was only my second attempt at the craft (no need to delve into the knot of convoluted fantasy tropes that was my first).
Dahlen has investigated worlds from various media and real life, mostly analyzing their details and dissecting their successes and failures. If you haven’t read them, you really should — they're awesome reads and offer a lot of insight. He also got me thinking about some of my favorite game worlds and, naturally, wanting to write about them.
In the interest of not simply copying a much better writer than myself, I’m going to take a slightly different approach. I’m going to come up with a theme and investigate seemingly contrasting worlds that fit that theme (or maybe some that fail to). Then, I’m going to try to analyze how these disparate examples come together.
I’m going to attempt something dangerous: express my own subjective experience and then back it up with objective analysis…or maybe it’ll be subjective analysis, I don’t know, we’ll see. It’s an adventure! Basically, where Dahlen dissected whole bodies, I’m dissecting individual organs.
I hope you guys will get into it, too. I'd love to hear your own examples on the same themes! I'll be posting the first entry later. I just wanted to make this intro a separate piece since the first real post is already a bit lengthy.