#worldbuilding video games

[prokopetz]

The principal difficulty of having a Pokémon pick up your groceries for you isn’t getting it to understand the concept of a grocery list, but getting it to understand the concept of capitalism.

One might assume that Meowth is the exception, given that Meowth is literally the capitalism Pokémon; the trouble here is that, while Meowth does understand capitalism, Meowth also understands shoplifting.

[honourablejester]

I’m realising as I browse around that I really love lore when it comes to ttrpgs, games and game worlds. And by that I don’t mean I like to obsessively learn lists of dates and wars, and the names of leaders of factions, I mean …

I like learning weird, juicy details about the worlds of games. I like finding little nuggets that say things about the set-up and culture and assumptions of the world. I like finding fragments of ideas to hang whole story and character concepts off.

I love that in D&D 5e’s Spelljammer, the Astral Sea is full of the corpses of dead gods that you can fully sail up to in your ship. Just. Floating out there. Waiting for you to rock up to them.

I love that in Sunless Sea, the king of the drowned is the way he is because he fell in love with an eldritch sea urchin from space, and successfully married it. His niece is an angry sentient floating mountain whose mother is a goddess-mountain and whose father is a face-stealing humanoid abomination. This is fine and normal.

I love that in Starfinder, there are mysterious bubble cities in the surface of the sun that the church of the sun goddess discovered and cheerfully occupied despite having no idea who the hell built them or for what purpose.

I love that in Dishonored, the entire industrial revolution that has built the empire we’re in the midst of saving or destroying was built on the properties of whale oil harvested from eldritch tentacled whales that live half in the oceans and half in an eldritch void personified in the form of a weird-ass black-eyed shit-stirrer of a deity who was formed from a murdered and sacrificed child. And this is largely a background detail.

I love in the Elder Scrolls that the dwarves up and fucking vanished, as a race, at some point in history and absolutely nobody has any clue what happened to them or where they went, but their technology is so insane that ideas like ‘they time-travelled’ or ‘they erased themselves from existence’ are absolutely on the table.

I love that in Numenera, so many incredibly advanced civilisations have risen and fallen on this world that it’s absolutely littered with bonkers science fiction artefacts that have caused the current medieval-esque society built over top of them to develop in bizarre ways, and also you can find a mysterious artefact that absolutely baffles and delights your character, but that you the player will fully recognise as a slightly-more-advanced thermos flask.

I love that in Fallout, an irradiated post-nuclear apolocalypic hellscape, there’s a cult that worships the god of radiation as they have come to understand it, and they are mysteriously immune to radiation with absolutely no explanation whatsoever. They’re not ghouls, the usual result of fatally irradiated humans with some resistance, they’re perfectly normal humans who can somehow just tank rads all damn day. It could be a mutation, but Lovecraftian gods apparently do also fully exist in this setting, so it’s also possible that maybe they were on to something with this Atom thing.

I love that in Heart The City Beneath, there’s a mass transit train system that they tried to hook up to the eldritch beating god-thing buried under the city so that they could metaphysically chain the stations together more easily, which went horrifically and metaphysically wrong in entirely predictable fashion, and now there’s a whole order of train-knights who have to keep people safe from the extradimensional weirdness magnet the network has become.

That, and all the fantastic little details you can stumble across. There’s a biotech augmentation in Starfinder called an angler’s light that gives you a little angler-fish bioluminescent antenna on your forehead, and it was developed by asteroid miners who needed light but also both hands free for work. In Dishonored there’s a festival that everyone pretends is outside of time so nothing you do during it can be held against you. There’s a god of snuffed candles mentioned in a single line from Heart The City Beneath who has pacifist cannibal priests, and that is literally all the information you get on him.

While things like the history and geography and timeline of a world do also fascinate me, I’m not really here to memorise stuff like that. I’m here to find weird little nuggets of information and worldbuilding and delight in them. Give me funerary customs and weird myths and oddly specific circumstances and baffling little objects and absolutely bonkers cosmological implications. Give me the corpses of dead gods, and aesthetic movements with highly specific backstories, and bureaucratic fuck-ups of titanic scale, and mysterious things that seem to break all other rules of your setting with absolutely no explanation because people in-universe have no fucking clue how they work either. Why are the Children of Atom immune to radiation without ghoulifying? Not a clue, but Confessor Cromwell has been cheerfully standing in that irradiated pond that kills the player character with about 10 minutes of exposure for the last year and he’s still absolutely fine.

I just. I really love lore. I like my settings to have some meat in them, some juicy details to dig into, some inexplicable elements to have fun trying to explain. Particularly that last bit. I feel like a lot of people when building worlds feel like the rules have to be absolute and everything has to have an explanation, but nah. Putting some weird shit in makes everything immediately feel bigger, more real, because we don’t have even half an idea of how our world truly works, there’s always something we just don’t fully understand yet, and you can put that in a fictional world too. Some mysteries, some contradictions, some randomness, some weirdness. There’s a line, obviously, this depends on execution, but a little bit of mystery really does help.

Lore is awesome. And weird lore is even more so. Heh.

[xccentriktigress]

Drawings From the Edges of Pentiment Pages: Dogs and Cats

[bedrockfactory]

Imagine the world if there was a game where you build and lead a tovoxran mining colony on an alien planet, where every game month you must pay an ore/raw material tax (send some amount of refined ore) to the empire or else you get consequences

[groundrunner100]

For those wondering why Star Trek is not on this list, check my previous poll for the unofficial Science-Fiction Franchise With The Best Lore.

You’ll understand my reasoning.

[troythecatfish]

[spitblaze]

You ever see something that is meant to be like...an overgeneralized statement for the sake of entertainment or comedy and not at all serious but it's about YOUR special interest and you are just sitting there trying not to explode with an entire explanation of why it's such an overgeneralized statement and the depth of the topic

[amorphousbl0b]

Thinking about Environmental Storytelling (for absolutely no overly sarcastic reason) lately.

I know the big cliche of video game environmental storytelling is carefully arranged bodies, but one of my favorite examples of this is in the first Halo game.

Firefights reshape the landscape in the first Halo more than any subsequent game — and frankly, more than most games in its genre. Corpses don't despawn and the arena is covered in significant amounts of blood.

This makes the game’s environmental storytelling uniquely natural. Even though every aftermath you discover throughout is pre-designed, it looks like something your own actions could’ve left behind, and it creates the feeling that you’re not the only force affecting the world. Like the Marines and Covenant fighting across Installation 04 are truly acting just out of your sight.

And the content of those bloody aftermaths reveals something disturbing.

As you travel you’re constantly encountering human bodies scattered around, which in gameplay terms just diegetically justify ammo refills for your assault rifle but in terms of the story communicate something very important: that the crew of the Pillar of Autumn is fighting for its life on every corner of the Halo, and that humanity is FUCKED without the Master Chief. There are no Covenant bodies, no blue bloodstains. The levels are filled with more and more enemies and fewer and fewer living allies. These Marines are being butchered without much chance and you are the only thing that can save them.

And when you start finding Covenant corpses and blue blood all over the place during a spooky abandoned level midway through the game, if you've been paying attention you immediately know that the Marines could never have done this. Something else is out there.

[icewindandboringhorror]

................ he 

[shitpostingkats]

Twewy is such a hard game to pitch people on.

"So there's this world of poetic symbolism and death gods and magic."

"Ooh, do I get to play as one of the death gods, and unravel the mystery of the afterlife?"

"No. You play as group of depressed teenagers who have to deal with all this crap."

[aroaessidhe]

2024 reads / storygraph

The Sword of Kaigen

standalone fantasy set in a rural mountain village at the edge of an empire that still holds traditional values, with families of powerful water/ice magic warriors

follows a powerful young heir who begins to question his beliefs about the empire when a new boy comes to his village from the city

and his mother, a housewife who has tried to forget her youth as a warrior and vigilante in the city since she moved back home to a loveless marriage

when there’s a violent attack on their village that they’re unprepared for, everything changes, and she has to embrace her old skills to protect her family and people

[prokopetz]

It's been seven years and I still can't get over the fact that Nintendo's writers were like "the next Zelda game is going to re-imagine Hyrule as a post-apocalyptic high fantasy setting in the mode of Middle-earth, but that means we need a clear 'high elf' analogue, which is something that Zelda games haven't historically had", and they decided to resolve this problem by putting the fish on top of a mountain.

[delta-orionis]

Spent my commute this morning speculating wildly about the astronomy of rain world and how it ties into the things we know from the canon, if at all

[aphel1on]

its almost impossible to peer pressure me into watching a thing until at least 2+ calendar years have gone by from its peak of popularity but we are about to pass that threshold with dunmeshi i fear

[rustybottlecap]

That Polygon Unraveled video about Fallout may have ruined that aspect of the games for me. When I play one of the games I want so bad to hear stuff like that. The video is an amazing worldbuilding experiment too.

also can I even tag this as just polygon without it being confused with cr*pt*shit and getting spambots

[fights4users]

The sounds of Tron-

Something that is often looked over is the fact that Tron not only has a connection with early computing but with early gaming as well. Not just because one of the characters makes games and runs a arcade, video games are absolutely integral to the world. In fact they make up a good portion of how the system looks and functions!

For example most of the transport, ships, and weapons we see come from video games, mainly Flynn’s but extends into encoms catalog. In the vernacular it’s common to mention it as well “video game warriors” “Gonna make you play video games” “video game simulation” etc. but you didn’t need me to tell you this.

The way video games impacted and shaped the digital world of Tron absolutely plays a hand in how seamless it translates into the two tie in Arcade cabinets. Though heavy on the grid bugs they’re beautifully decorated and similar to the games as we see them on screen/would translate in real life. The music stings come straight from Wendy Carlos’s work for the film, to the extent the game contains the entirety of Anthem. [Listen]

Sound cue’s and combat-

Part of what makes the sound and style of the game so accurate to the movie is the sound design. Like in old games there is a sound for everything. Every movement has its own sound, it sounds silly as things in real life also have noise but if you’ve ever played any retro game you know what I’m talking about.

One of the best examples of this is when Flynn is tossed into the cell and stumbles around, there’s a metallic echo to his footsteps. In combat it’s the same thing —very distinct sounds to go with every action. A lot of what older games are is pattern recognition- both visual and audio, certain music loops or sound cues help you get better at the game. Another good example is Tron casting his disc, blocking throws etc- if you know what a disc sounds like you can better dodge etc. I also like how they have almost a ceramic sound when Ram plays with his.

Nothing is more video game than De-resolution itself! The death cry and slowly breaking into bits before getting reabsorbed. You can hear the noise off screen and know what happened, game over.

Apart from video game comparisons I do have such a genuine love for the sound design of the film and how much it fleshes out the world. The blips and bloops of energy flowing through the system. The sounds of a working computer. There’s a dial up esc noise when Flynn is beamed in and judging by the guards reactions it’s not different from a how a regular program would enter/travel between systems. Programs get to make funky little computer noises in my heart 💕(another inhuman attribute I think they deserve, they’re like us in so many ways but then… aren’t.)

I know it’s probably just because it’s older recording equipment but occasionally programs will get a grainy feedback/radio style grain to their voice. I’d like to think it’s intentional- especially considering Legacy does this too (going so far for it to be what some sound like all the time)

The way sound is utilized in the movie is a incredibly underrated aspect of what makes the movie so good.