Soft and Hard Worldbuilding

TL;DR - Worldbuilding is the gluing agent necessary to bring consistency to your story, its setting, and its characters. Hard Worldbuilding is seen in games where different aspects of a world are methodically laid out to give the player a clear understanding of the world model. Alternatively, Soft Worldbuilding

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Filling the Potholes In Your Game

If you've ever found yourself wondering:

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You can likely attribute this lack of clarity to a gap somewhere in your worldbuilding.

People have a natural tendency to think of worldbuilding as the visuals, environments, and structures, but these are vehicles to facilitate the authenticity of a world, as dictated by its worldbuilding proponents: atmosphere, tone, and mood.

Defining your world in this manner gives way to be able to contextualize:

• the different characters inhabiting the world
• how these characters see the world and their own place within it
• how the surrounding environment and its structures give way to the ecological, social, and economical dynamics

From here, we then want to consider how "hard" or "soft" we intend our worldbuilding to be, as that will impact every aspect of your game.

• https://medium.com/@soramirr/hard-vs-soft-worldbuilding-a-brief-glance-ffd1ad3785da

• https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/hard-vs-soft-worldbuilding-games-jannick-hynding-lund/

• https://medium.com/@ReelTalk/worldbuilding-how-to-make-an-engaging-world-1452115763a0 (good point on mixing soft and hard worldbuilding)

• https://www.the-enchanted-scribe.com/post/the-art-of-worldbuilding-hard-vs-soft-approaches-and-finding-your-perfect-balance

• https://stephhuddleston.com/2020/08/29/what-to-consider-when-worldbuilding/

• https://medium.com/@kathrynthies

• https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/hard-and-soft-choices-and-their-roles-in-game-design (not worldbuilding specifically, but instead more impact on quest design with soft and hard choices)

• https://alldeadgenerations.blogspot.com/ (useful to consider this for worldbuilding, as the high level conflict suggest what may influence things)

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Hard Worldbuilding for Grounded Realism

For better or for worse, you'll easily recognize games that fall into the category of Hard Worldbuilding -- they're the ones that spend a considerable amount of time explaining how everything in the world works, from the factions, technology, culture, etc. They do this because everything needs to make sense within the logic of the world.

Hard Worldbuilding can involve meticulously detailed structures as Seen with J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle earth, or something historically accurate as seen in Europe Universalis 4. A benefit of this kind of worldbuilding is that it can provide a familiar understanding of a world.

This does not prevent the game though from diverging; the player still ends up with their own distinctive story loosely based on real events, but it is influenced by the player's choices, etc.

Examples of Hard Worldbuilding in games include:

• Red Dead Redemption 2
• Mass Effect
• Cyberpunk 2077
• Skyrim
• Disco Elysium
• Dragon Age
• Fallout
• Subnautica
• Bioshock

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Soft Worldbuilding for Narrative Freedom

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Examples of Hard Worldbuilding in games include:

• CONTROL
• Dark Souls / Elden Ring
• Journey
• Shadow fo the Colossus
• Outer Wilds
• Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• ICO
• Death Stranding

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Combining Hard and Soft Worldbuilding

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Examples of Combined Hard and Soft Worldbuilding in games include:

• Death Stranding
• Outer Wilds
• NieR: Automata
• Shadow fo the Colossus
• Outer Wilds
• Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• ICO
• Death Stranding

If you find yourself unsure about how a character should respond, or an activity that should take place, or how an environment should be arranged, it's likely you're missing the consistency in your worldbuilding which should give you clarity here.

Game Developers and Designers have a tendency to

When writing a book or the script for a film, it is common practice to start with the end in mind and work your way back to the beginning.

This makes sense in the context of books and films because you are the author of the story and the relationship with your audience is that of passive consumption.

Games, while also entertainment-centric, is different however with regard to (1) where to start and (2) the author's relationship with its audience.

The experience in a game is created through the co-authorship of the world the author has created, the actions the author has made available, and the player's agency within that world using the skills available to them.

This then begs the question: if the experience of a game is co-authored with the player, what do we, as the originating author, target for our prototype to explore the concept of our game?

The TL;DR is "in the middle", but that itself doesn't explain much, so let's dive in.

(the play space is a game is a co-created space; assume the player has been playing the game for an hour; familiar with the core and base mechanics (we also want to show and introduce new stuff); gear the prototype around the 1-2 hour mark)

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Game Ideation starts with IP

We've previously written about the [role and significance of authenticity] in games, but this requires an IP to exist which you, the designer, can be authentic towards.

Fortunately, this is the natural process all of us exercise when we consider creating a new game. We begin with our intuition of a theme we find interesting and a set of activities within that theme to support the gameplay.

Let's imagine we're building a new game. We would start by jotting down a few game concepts, like so:

• best seamstress
• parasite that has to reunite with its original host
• (another idea)
• (another idea)

This seed of an IP is all we need to get started. From here, we can move to the next step of deciding the actions we should make available to the player to fulfill the fantasy of our game.

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Authenticity Requires Consistency in Verbs

The complexity of creating a one-off experience pales in comparison to crossing the chasm necessary to create a full blown game.

IP alone is not enough and, we would posit, that the over-reliance on IP and the "experience" is a clear canary in the coal mine signaling a high probability of a game's failure (not to mention more financial overhead in time and cost).

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Meeting in the Middle

world building (not the level itself, but instead the activities, atmosphere, mood, tone); even if we take the game of sonic, which is largely a single-verb game, the world building is necessary to understand the activities this verb will take place in -- is Sonic climbing mountains? is Sonic escaping a Volcano? is Sonic in a high speed chase trying to catch some bad guys? The intention here is to make clear the context of how the verbs for the game will be used, and ensure the implementation of those verbs contributes to the authenticity we're striving to achieve.

When thinking about

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