Dirt: Worldbuilding, Pt. 1

One question I had is whether you can build giant fictional worlds this way. Right now the NFT market is full of speculators hoping to flip their acquisitions for a quick profit. There is more than a little of the mania that fueled this winter’s meme stock enthusiasm to be found on the crypto Discords. (More than a little cynicism among the investo... See more

The more complex or valuable is whatever you’re trying to sell, the more important it is for you to build a world around that idea, where other people can walk in, explore, and hang out – without you having to be there with them the whole time. You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’... See more

In World Building, Danco argued that yes, everything is sales, but sales isn’t enough. You need to build worlds. In a world of “abundant narrative and complex choices… You need to build a world so rich and captivating that others will want to spend time in it, even if you’re not there.”

In movies, TV, and video games: cinematic universes. Studios have finally figured out that once audiences fall in love with fictional worlds, they want to spend lots of time in them.

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