It seems that experimental Sandbox Worldbuilding is becoming more relevant in mainstream Storytelling. I guess that is a good thing.
Some weeks ago, I picked up an interesting thought from Liam Young^[liamyoung.org] in a Near Future Laboratory Podcast^[Near Future Laboratory Podcast Interview by Julian Bleecker with Liam Young]. Drawing from his projects in Filmmaking and Architecture, he mentioned that the practice of Worldbuilding had become more important for fictional storytelling with the rise of Streaming content, because the medium would require more holistic atmosphere to be developed. I think that is a relevant line of thought, as Streaming gains more and more influence in big budget storytelling.
Obviously, investments in have a bigger return of investment when you are using the world you build not only for one feature-film length story, but for many, arching even across several seasons of material. Each episode can add new details to the construction of the world and as you can usually expect viewers to watch serialized content in the intended order, each following episode benefits from the compound Worldbuilding of past episodes. This comes in handy for content providers who brought themselves in a financially inconvenient position, struggling to make the same profits they used to make with classic Cinema. Saving efforts on your storytelling by recycling worldbuilding done in past seasons seems like a reasonable tactic in this context.
To make this a worthwhile note, I think it makes sense to sharpen the definition of Worldbuilding a bit. Beyond the obvious (Worldbuilding = the craft of designing a fictional world as a supporting setting for storytelling) one might differentiate Worldbuilding into two practices^[see TV Tropes on Worldbuilding for reference]:
- Worldbuilding closely aligned to the actual scenes of a story - the fictional backdrop needed to make plotpoints in the script work (I thinkt this version has big overlaps with Production Design, Costume & make-Up etc.)
- Worldbuilding loosely (or not at all) aligned to the actual scenes of a story - an experimental sandbox for experimentation with characters and story arcs
The latter definition^[„Strictly speaking, anything that happens in that universe “builds” it, so “worldbuilding” is only used to describe the invention of fictional details for some reason other than the convenience of a currently ongoing story, up to and including simply engaging in worldbuilding for its own sake.“
Definition of Worldbuilding by TV Tropes] - Worldbuilding as the craft of building an experimental sandbox for storytelling - seems to be the more relevant one for my understanding here. Both kind of large content providers, the ones with big established storytelling franchises and the ones without, seem to be interested in experimental exploration of the possibilities there fictional worlds provide. Disney tries to harvest every lore fiction corner of the Star Wars universe with a dedicated series (with very mixed results), while Netflix explores new world settings with often obscure premises. At the same time, cheaper CGI and virtual production workflows promise to make fictional worlds feasible for storytelling that used to be too large and complex to touch. In some cases this worked great (see Dune by Villeneuve), in others I think it did not work out even with todays possibilities (see the Foundation TV Series on Apple+).
Besides all criticism towards the current developments in big budget storytelling, I think it is a positive development, that the design of and experimentation with fictional worlds gets more attention and support. On another note, I also think, Sandbox Worldbuilding will recieve even more relevance and attention in the context of AI Generation and the the rising influence of Gaming on fictional Storytelling.
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Last updated: 2023-08-11
%%posted: 2023-08-11%%