Dead Worlds: Worldbuilding, Consumption, and Capitalism
trading cards, cigarettes, and worldbuilding beyond capitalism
Here’s a high-level question: when you’re building a world, what is your end goal? What do you want your users — your readers, players, viewers, or whatever you call the people who interact with your world — to experience, feel, and come away with? And why is that what you want?
I recently read this article, “Ethical Worldbuilding in Games,” by Anne Reid, a narrative director at Massive. Reid made many of the same points I do: that worldbuilders should take care in the way they portray fictional societies, think deeply about the histories from which they take inspiration, and question their perspective whenever possible. Good stuff to say, especially in the AAA game industry where worldbuilding is so often cliched and offensive.
But it was this quote that stopped me cold on the page:
As you can see, worldbuilding can potentially involve a lot of work, a lot of thought, and a lot of depth. This rich thinking can give us worlds that are so interesting and deep that consumers want to continue to experience them for themselves. If you’ve got a rich and varied world, people, our consumers – want to revisit it again and again and again.
I often struggle to describe the people who experience my worlds. But the word comes so easily here: they are consumers. This article unsettled me: I thought, is this what I’m doing here? Encouraging people to consume?
This quote haunted me once again a couple weeks ago, while I was listening to an episode of the podcast Behind the Bastards about the cigarette industry. The host, Robert Evans, argues that trading cards can be traced back to cigarettes: in the 19th century, cigarette companies would include a small painted card with every pack, depicting anything from hot women to US Presidents to the simplicities of daily life. Consumers — and especially children — were drawn to buy more packs in order to collect all of the cards. The cohost quips that Pokémon owes its existence to cigarettes.
Trading cards and contemporary worldbuilding are inextricably connected. Many contemporary media worlds — Pokémon not least among them — feature trading cards prominently. And as Japanese cultural critic Ōtsuka Eiji notes, collectible cards create the feeling of entering a world: each card serves as a glimpse into something bigger, which we can only understand by obtaining all of the cards (or so the people selling them claim). I would even argue that the impulse by worldbuilders to make worlds that people “want to revisit it again and again and again” is inherited in part from trading cards. Which in turn come from selling cigarettes to children.
Yikes.
I’m not trying to cancel worldbuilding — or trading cards, for that matter. But I have long taken this impulse towards immersive and revisitable worlds for granted — as something that I should want as a creator. Perhaps you have, too. But when you make a world so immersive that it becomes addictive, who benefits? What powers and processes are you serving? What are you encouraging people to actually do, other than consume without end? What are we doing here?
I want to imagine worlds beyond capitalism and consumption. I want to imagine worlds that show us a way through the innumerable crises of our time. And building worlds with the fundamental goal of drawing and keeping people in… it feels like moving in the opposite direction.
So what would an alternative look like? What does it mean to build worlds without the goal of immersion, or with the opposite goal — of letting people leave our world, changed, but released from obligation? What do we need to do as creators to create this kind of world?
From a process perspective, I don’t know yet. But I often think of what tabletop designer Avery Alder once wrote about roleplaying games:
Roleplaying games/story games create experiences. We live them for a moment, they die as we return to our actual selves, and we promptly bury them without ceremony. These are phantoms that have existed for us alone, and the joy of it all is two-fold. We owe them nothing. We can take from them what we want to.
Maybe we can start by thinking of our worlds this way: as phantoms, experienced momentarily and then buried. I often describe my worlds as “vivid,” as somehow alive. Perhaps what we need now, though, are not living worlds that beckon us back — but dead worlds that we can leave behind.
i think there's nothing wrong with inviting game explorers to immerse in worlds designed to support their courage for social change IRL outside the games. many people are interested in game creation and game experiencing outside of a consumer-based paradigm. people enter game worlds to satisfy needs for play, creativity, experimentation with alternate concepts, etc. worlds they're not addicted to staying in is an important design consideration, but rather than creating experiences that we just understand as dying or becoming phantoms, we can also imagine them as practice zones, spaces that can serve needs for practicing alternatives and bolstering our skills. if our game world practices can support "show[ing] us a way through the innumerable crises of our time" we can carry from this what's useful, instead of only considering the experiences as things to let perish and move on from.
could game worlds also be practice spaces to try things that support our moves IRL for social change, practice zones that we learn from and can move on from but while carrying the experience benefits with us, instead of just considering them as material to let perish and leave behind?