“Making Worlds into Games – A Methodology” (World-Builders on World-Building 4)

This essay (by Clara Fernández-Vara and Matthew Weise) in the World-Builders on World-Building collection presents a world-building method that’s designed to support narrative in games, including video games.

Notes

• The method is to consider a genre or a world, then put together a short list of verbs. These verbs represent actions that characters can take within the game.
• The authors recommend thinking broadly about the possible verbs – many games focus on physical actions even characters in the genre frequently use other types of actions, such as social actions or responding to emotional states.
• In the narrative game design exercise taught by the authors, students are asked to select four verbs that capture the dramatic possibilities of the game. Then they build a prototype game in which those four verbs become four actions that can be taken by the characters in the game

Reflections

I wonder if it would be fun to reverse the process: Choose four random verbs from a list of evocative options and think about what sort of world (or part of a world) would suit a story in which those are the most important actions taken by the main characters.

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