Saved by Keely Adler and
Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 1
Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin once grouped worldbuilders into two types: architects and gardeners. These days, there seem to be fewer gardeners (Martin considers himself one), creators who allow a world to organically bloom. Most franchise worlds are architected to market-researched perfection. These efforts are not exclusive to the e... See more
Dirt • Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 1
The world will include many things, but it needs one in particular: purpose. Inside the world, it needs to be really obvious what our goals are, and why we want our push our system into a new state. You fill your world with familiar storylines and tension and characters, highlighted or re-framed compared to the real world, that give everyone a real... See more
Alex Danco • World Building
In his 1947 essay “On Fairy Stories,” J.R.R. Tolkien wrote that a creator should “hope that he is drawing on reality,” to shape the qualities of his world.
Dirt • Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 2
In this decade, worldbuilding is not just an imaginative exercise with purely artistic aims. The writer-reader relationship has been supplanted by a creator-consumer dynamic. As a thinly veiled commercial endeavor, its purpose is to oil the wheels of major fan-favorite franchises. Worldbuilding provides grist for expansion. The wider the world, the... See more