Games and Writing: Shared Worldbuilding
We all know how last year went: disasters, pandemic, and global lockdown. Like a lot of my peers, it turned out to be the year when writing was, deserving of capitalization, Very Difficult. Storytelling felt frivolous at times, frustrating at others. And being a writer, I turned that frustration on myself. Clearly, something was broken in my process.
I’d come off a particularly productive year as a writer. I’d had three full-length novels published in 2019, and hit deadlines for a pair of projects in the first quarter of 2020. When the lockdown hit, I said I’d give myself a little break. Not my best decision.
While we were all trapped at home, I offered to teach anyone who wanted to learn how to play tabletop roleplaying games. It was a mental break from the grind of the lockdown. For the uninitiated, tabletop roleplaying games are games in which the players take on the role of a character, while one person usually helps guide the story along. The lead writer and the cast, in a way. Pre-pandemic a few friends had asked me to show them how to play the arguably most famous of these games, Dungeons & Dragons, and we’d been meeting maybe once a month the previous year to have a few drinks. It’s essentially playing pretend, a shared storytelling experience, with a bit of sloppy math and snacks mixed in.
Suddenly I found myself teaching almost two-dozen people to play during a pandemic.
The thing about these games is they have to take place somewhere. It might be an established setting – you’ll find games to play in everything from Frank Herbert’s Dune or Tolkein’s Lord of the Rings to a Buffy the Vampire Slayer game and even games set in Jane Austen’s literary world and more. In other games, the people playing build their own world to explore as they go. As an author, worldbuilding is part of what I do anyway, so I started piecing together a setting for these faces on Zoom and the characters they wanted to explore that world with.
I’ll admit, I’m an obnoxiously solitary writer. I don’t collaborate well when it comes to the actual writing. I accept edits easily, having been an editor for years myself. The first draft, though, that one I need to do by myself.
In my pandemic-induced sense of writer’s block, though, something strange happened. The players – many of whom are writers. or artists, or game designers, or photographers, or even musicians – would ask questions about the world they were playing in, and I would not have the answers they sought.
I was forced to make it up. And when you’re building a world that is shared with others, unlike when you’re writing alone in a vacuum, once you make something up it becomes real. Those other creators you’re sharing this consensual hallucination of a world with count on the things you’ve made up together to take shape, to become real. They can invest in that world with you and place themselves in it.
I might have been the lead architect, but we were worldbuilding together, one session at a time. Things would only exist in this world when they needed them to. What’s beyond those mountains? Let’s find out. What is this creature’s behavior like? Let’s make something up. How does magic work here? Let’s find out together.
Almost a year into the pandemic, most of the players are still showing up, still building and investing in this shared work of fiction we’ve designed from the ground up. And something funny happened recently. James, an artist from New York who takes part in one of the regular game sessions, started posting his notes from the past year from every game. It reads a bit like a novel, a bit like a travel log, and as I read through it, I was struck by two things: the improvisational nature of the storytelling and how we’d course correct or change paths entirely to meet with the story and the players needed; and that while we weren’t writing a novel or a script, we were telling a lovingly hand-crafted story, the group of us, built on the bones of simply asking why, how, when, where, and who.
Funnier still, the elements of fiction these sessions have woven have also started to appear in my work. Not all of it, and not exactly as it happens – the shared worldbuilding and games are somewhere between sketch comedy and a rough draft rather than a finished manuscript – but I’m able to pick and choose the parts needed to tell a formal story. I know where the mountains are in this world, and what monsters go bump in the night, the names of towns and rivers. I suddenly find myself with the building blocks I was missing before.
As a writer who works alone, I have to admit this has been a wonderful shift of process and perspective. I’ll still write alone, I think. But building a world? This is something I think I’ll keep sharing long after the lockdown is over.
