Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds

By Edwin McRae

Game worlds differ from traditional fictional worlds. While literary and cinematic worlds are written to host character arcs and plots, game worlds need to be designed to host game mechanics. While Princess Leia, Mad Max and Daenerys Targaryen may leave their marks on their fictional worlds, it is YOU, the player, who will carve your personal experience into the digital firmament of every game world you inhabit.  

 

In this accessible book full of practical tips and examples, games industry veteran Edwin McRae will guide you through the evergreen principles of player-centric game world design.   

 

How do you create game-based environments and cultures that resonate with reality? This senior narrative designer will share a range of field-tested techniques that will help you design instead of derive.  

 

How do you organise all that lore? This is a common pain point for world builders and Edwin will offer tools and tactics that keep game bibles scoped, searchable and sensible.   

 

How do you make your game world fun? Through the player-centric perspective, you'll see how storytelling can be used to support and enrich game play and achieve that Shangri-La of gaming experience... ludo-narrative harmony!  

 

Play is what we do. Story is why we do it. And the game world is where it all happens. 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Narrative
• Release date: Apr 30, 2024
• ISBN: 9780473710477

Book preview

Narrative Worldbuilding

NARRATIVE WORLDBUILDING

A PLAYER CENTRIC APPROACH TO DESIGNING STORY RICH GAME WORLDS

EDWIN MCRAE

Copyright © 2024 by Edwin McRae. All rights reserved.

First published in 2024 by Narrative Limited.

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the author, except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

Disclaimer: The content of this book is for educational purposes only and is not intended to disparage nor endorse any of the intellectual properties, businesses and individuals mentioned.

Editor: Rachel Rees

Cover & Typesetting: Rachel Rees

ISBN:

D2D: 9798224827312

Paperback: 9780473710460

Epub: 9780473710477

Kindle: 9780473710484

CONTENTS

Introduction

YOU Are the Centre of the World

Chapter 1

Laying Down the Lore

Chapter 2

Keeping It Real

Chapter 3

Swings, Slides and Story

Chapter 4

Sizing Up Your Game World

Chapter 5

Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Chapter 6

A World that Speaks for Itself

Chapter 7

Bending the Rules

Final Thoughts

Featured Games by Chapter

About the Author

Also by Edwin McRae

CONTENTS

Introduction

YOU Are the Centre of the World

Chapter 1

Laying Down the Lore

Chapter 2

Keeping It Real

Chapter 3

Swings, Slides and Story

Chapter 4

Sizing Up Your Game World

Chapter 5

Dreaming of Electric Sheep

Chapter 6

A World that Speaks for Itself

Chapter 7

Bending the Rules

Final Thoughts

Featured Games by Chapter

About the Author

Also by Edwin McRae

INTRODUCTION

Science-fiction and fantasy writers have been building worlds for centuries. Tolkien brought Middle Earth to life in 1937 with The Hobbit. Bram Stoker gave us a darkly fantastical version of Transylvania in 1897. H. G. Wells invented the subterranean land of Morlocks in 1895. Jules Verne imagined his Centre of the Earth in 1864. Mary Shelley fashioned Frankenstein’s laboratory and the pseudo-science of reanimation in 1818. Johanthan Swift carried us with Gulliver to the tiny world of Liliput in 1726.

Of course, before the writers came the shamans and priests with their legends and myths. From many hundreds of years ago, Maui and his brothers fished New Zealand’s North Island up out of the Pacific; Odin and his brothers hacked a giant to death to create Scandinavia, and the Egyptian world emerged from an infinite, lifeless sea when the sun rose for the first time.

Whether for spiritual enlightenment or stirring entertainment, theories of the human condition or thrills by the campfire, story worlds have been invented for as long as humanity has had language.

Yet before the rise of interactive storytelling, first in theatre, then in game books, and most recently in video games, worlds were invented for the telling. Fictional worlds were setting for stories. Now they can be the settings for quite a different experience. The game.

Like Mary Shelley did before me, I welcome you to Frankenstein’s workshop, where Promethean acts of creation are committed. Yes, we make monsters, and we make so much more. We stitch together the worlds in which the monsters, creatures, NPCs, and player characters reside. We make the ruins and the realms, the wild places and the pinnacles of speculative civilisation.

Earthman, the planet you lived on was commissioned, paid for, and run by mice. It was destroyed five minutes before the completion of the purpose for which it was built, and we’ve got to build another one.

— Douglas Adams

Yup, here’s where we become Adams’ world-building mice.

Feel strange about that? Well, I’m not sorry to say that things are about to get stranger.

As Robert A. Heinlein might’ve asked: What is it like to be a stranger in a strange land? The answer is… a gamer!

Whenever we enter a game world for the first time, we are literally Heinlein’s stranger in a strange land. More so even than we, as a tourist, might experience when we travel to a country we’ve never visited before.

As a New Zealander travelling to Thailand, I experienced culture shock. Language, food, mannerisms—all are strikingly different from the kiwi’s comfy classics of the English language, pies, and saying sorry a lot. I loved the entire experience because of these refreshing differences, but it certainly made it easier to ground myself with a few familiar things: Earth’s gravity, breathable air, and globalised standards like airport architecture and grid-pattern streets. It’s also nice when hotels have navigable foyers and accept VISA.

No such norms need apply when entering a fantastical alien world. All bets are off, which is why a narrative designer building a world needs to answer this question foremost:

How strange do we want the player to feel?

I’ll let that rather important question follow you around like an intoxicating smell as you explore this humble little workshop of mine. As you navigate through its ink and paper rooms, you’ll encounter tools and techniques, processes and blueprints that I hope will help you in your own worldbuilding endeavours. They’ve all been tested in the field upon actual games and real gamers.

So welcome! Let’s learn how to build game worlds together.

YOU ARE THE CENTRE OF THE WORLD

Okay, don’t let it go to your head. By YOU, I mean you as a player—as a gamer—like in the old Fighting Fantasy books where YOU become the Hero. While such a perspective would be deeply concerning if held in the real world, when playing a game, the world literally revolves around YOU, the player. It’s been built to enable YOU to experience what it’s like to be a pirate, a town planner, a Jedi, a taxi-driving counsellor, a sorcerer, a racing snail or any other role the player wants to try on for size. The game world hosts YOU, interacts with YOU, and changes because of YOU.

It’s about Perspective

Let’s flip back to the perspective of the narrative designer who is envisioning this world for the YOU perspective. It’s our job to consider the player, the YOU, at every twist and turn in the worldbuilding process. How do we do that?

Cue: traumatic flashback from my childhood.

When I was a lad of six years, I visited my first carnival sideshow with my cousins. Being notoriously mischievous, these older boys decided it’d be a great lark to lead their wee cuz into a haunted house complete with dark corridors, neon spiders and those spinning pad gateways that, as an adult you know you can squeeze comfortably through, but to a child seem like a sure way to get yourself pulped.

I’m sure you can guess what happens next. Yes, they left me to find my way out. After much crying and stumbling around in the dark, I made it to the spinning pads of doom. It was pure terror and desperation that drove me to submit to the great machine and be rolled back out into the blissfully familiar world once more.

I like to think that my cousins got a bollocking and a clip on the ear, it being the 1980s. But I suspect that’s wishful remembering, such was their masterful deviousness.

It took me many years to work up the courage to enter another haunted house. Nowadays, they’re my favourite attraction, mainly because they’ve become so familiar. Even the most extreme examples, where zombified actors chase you through a forest with chainsaws, have a weird sort of comfort to them. I understand the conventions of horror and I enjoy their frightful delights knowing that I will come to no personal harm. A jump scare is fun because I’m expecting it’ll happen, and won’t happen until I’ve calmed down first. Such is good haunted house design.

When designing a game world, consider the perspective of your player—in this example, that six-year-old Edwin at the carnival. You probably don’t want your player stumbling and crying in the dark like a traumatised child. If you do, then that’s a very niche market you’re going for.

In narrative design terms, we call this player-centric design: building your world from the player’s perspective. The YOU. We start from your player’s first step and walk the journey in their shoes, robotic combat boots or soft-padded paws. And along that journey, we’re going to ask a lot of questions.

What is this place called?

Why is it called that?

Why does the place look like this?

Who are these people?

What are their names?

Why do they talk and behave like that?

Why is this place so dangerous/puzzling/delightful?

What made it that way?

What are these creatures that populate this area?

Why do they live here?

How do these creatures survive?

Why do these creatures want to kill/challenge/obstruct/hinder me?

At first, the answers to those questions shouldn’t be too hard to find. The Hollywood Special—the Hero’s Journey served with a side of fries—kicks off with the Ordinary