1. INTRODUCTION
The definition of worldbuilding is broad and varied. Semantically, the term often mutates from user to user, discipline to discipline: worldbuilding, worldmaking, worlding, and world-sharing are all loosely interchangeable. At its most vaguely colloquial the term refers to a vibe, synonymous with style or atmosphere. In this sense, worldbuilding is curating a constellation of details that trigger an intuition of connections: a world.1 Good worldbuilding-as-vibe is about evoking a place in time pregnant with possibility.
In his book “Literature and the Brain”, literary critic Norman Holland, drawing from the field of psychology, claims worldbuilding is innate to humans. His work postulates that we have evolved distinct cognitive systems specifically enabling us to conjure and participate in imaginary worlds. Importantly, these systems also allow us to decouple imaginary experiences from actual ones.2 In early childhood, psychologists call this world-play, naming those worlds invented by young children paracosms.3
Holland's theories, when extended from childhood to adulthood, suggest that worldbuilding activities naturally continue to develop beyond their initial roots, evolving into diverse forms across cultures and disciplines. This essay examines two of those disciplinary containers: game studies and speculative design. By anchoring definitional similarities and differences of worldbuilding between the two, It also explores the implications and potential applications of future research blending domains.
2. GAME STUDIES
Game studies is an interdisciplinary academic field that studies games, players, and the context between the two. Given the diversity of situations in which we find games and their players, game studies reaches across media, politics, economics, and culture. In consideration of such breadth, this essay builds from a broad foundation of games as defined by Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman in “Rules of Play”:
“A game is a system in which players engage in an artificial conflict, defined by rules, that results in a quantifiable outcome.”4
Jesper Juul further complements Salen and Zimmerman’s definition with this useful diagram illustrating examples that fit both within and without this broad definition of games5:
Johan Huizinga, a key progenitor of game studies, anchors our definition of play as:
“A voluntary activity or occupation executed within certain fixed limits of time and place, according to rules freely accepted but absolutely binding, having its aim in itself and accompanied by a feeling of tension, joy, and the consciousness that is different from ordinary life.”6
Finally, Bernard Suits, in his influential 1978 book "The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia," connects these definitions of play and games by defining the playful engagement with a game as follows:
“To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the rules prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude].”7
Through these definitional frameworks, this essay applies games study scholarship to examine how humans engage with rules and structures that simplify and clarify the obscure complexity of the primary world, especially through the invention of gameworlds.
2.1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF GAME STUDIES’ EVOLUTION
The study of games is a relatively new academic field, having been formalized as a collective discipline in the twentieth century. Johan Huizinga’s 1938 book “Homo Ludens” was an important milestone, laying groundwork for game studies through its articulation of the importance of play in human life. Building upon Huizinga's ideas, subsequent scholars have explored the ways in which these activities shape our social interactions, cultural practices, and cognitive development, arguing that play and games are not merely peripheral diversions but rather essential components of the human condition.8
Anthropologist Roger Caillois made important early contributions to the field through the publication of “Man, Play, and Games” in 1958. In it, he offered a comprehensive model for organizing different play modes, including ones that do not fit neatly into our definition of a game such as the make-believe play of theater. Caillois called that form of play Mimicry/simulation and situated it alongside Agon/competition, Alea/chance, and Ilinx/vertigo in his framework.
The communal formalization of game studies emerged through different cultural vectors. One early group, the National American Simulation and Gaming Association, grew out of a community of war game enthusiasts and created the oldest ongoing publication in the field, "Simulation & Gaming," in 1970. Shortly after this publication began, a separate community formed around the study of play, eventually becoming The Association for the Study of Play and produced their own journals and gatherings.9 The central axis for the third wave of game studies emerged as an offshoot of computer science studies, formalizing as an academic field synchronously with the publication of Game Studies, the international journal of computer game research that’s been ongoing since 2001.10
2.2 WORLD BUILDING IN GAMES
Worldbuilding scholarship in game studies has its roots in the academic fields of literary studies and media studies, with significant contributions from scholars such as Marie-Laure Ryan and Mark J.P. Wolf.11 They anchor worldbuilding in the concept of storyworlds, a term coined by literary theorist David Herman to describe mental models of situations depicted in a narrative.12 While not all games are inherently designed to tell stories, storyworlds can exist in games regardless of the designer's intent. This notion is exemplified by Janet Murray's infamous interpretation of Tetris (Alexey Pajitnov, 1985) as an enactment of overcrowded American lives.13 This fueled a debate at the turn of the twenty-first, leading to what Henry Jenkins described as a blood feud between ludologists and narratologists attempting to define the essence of the game medium.14
The ludology versus narratology debate generated productive discourse in the field of game studies, motivated in part by the historically fragmented nature of games as a topic of study across disciplines. The term ludology emerged from within this tension, connoting the study of play as distinct from other modes of engagement with media.15 Games are primarily designed to be touched, and it is only when they are consumed passively (such as watching a football match or a Twitch stream) that they achieve a fixed coherence like other narrative forms. As a result, game studies scholars often focus on the possibility spaces created by the interactive nature of games, as opposed to the linear action chains found in traditional literary narratives.
2.2.1 PRESCRIPTIVE WORLDBUILDING
"Game designers don't simply tell stories; they design worlds and sculpt spaces."16
This quote comes from Henry Jenkins’ influential essay “Game Design as Narrative Architecture” that attempted to provide a middle ground in the early twenty-first century game studies debate between ludologists and narratologists. His essay claims that the history of game design is rooted in a history of designing spaces, whether that be a stone maze, a paper dungeon, or a digital arena. Games are a form of narrative media and emerge from a tradition of environmental stories that center spatialized worldbuilding over plot or character development. Jenkins observes how this is one of the reasons literature from science fiction, fantasy, horror, and war genres translate more fluidly into games than other more canonical works of great literature since they often feature richly detailed worlds that readily lend themselves to exploration. For example, Tarn Adams, the designer of Dwarf Fortress (Bay 12, 2006), has noted how his own worldbuilding leverages audience familiarity with these genres:
“Even with a healthy set of connected mechanics and a strong game loop in which the player is constantly faced with interesting choices, the amazing ability of players to fill in details and make coherent stories from imperfect information does not necessarily happen in a way that will allow them to tell their stories to other players and the outside world. What elements of your game are familiar and relatable? Which would other people understand, even people that will never play the game? Dwarf Fortress relies on widely understood fantasy tropes. Because it is your player building the story, you can use what the player brings to the game beforehand.”17
Since Lin Carter’s “Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy” was first published in 1973, a steady flow of how-to worldbuilding pedagogy has been produced offering a diverse array of prescriptive frameworks for literary worldbuilders.18 In recent years this discourse has extended into the realm of game scholarship, providing insight into what some scholars consider to be the hallmark of worldbuilding for games. Two recent books that approach this subject from an instructional perspective illustrate this: Trent Hergenrader’s “Collaborative Worldbuilding for Writers and Gamers” and Kaitlin Tremblay’s “Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games”.
Hergenrader's worldbuilding pedagogy focuses on its collaborative aspects, offering step-by-step guidance for readers to build their own games. His framework conceives of games as story-generators, suggesting that good worldbuilding leverages database technologies to maintain world-consistency across multiple possible viewpoints. Tremblay's approach echoes many of Hergenrader’s contributions, underscoring the role of worldbuilding as a job discipline. In a rhetorical move that minimizes the potential complexity of interpretations of this practice, Tremblay defines worldbuilding as:
“…just a series of defined and interlocking systems that cascade and conflict in dynamic ways. What elements you include in the system is a direct result of the world, and how those systems respond to player’s choice and action in turn creates the texture and feel of the world.”19
In their scholarship, both Tremblay and Hergenrader draw heavily from existing literary frameworks for worldbuilding to offer narrative-oriented world-as-construct perspectives on worldbuilding in video games. However, as the ludology versus narratology discourse pointed out to the field of game studies, there is another side of this coin that emphasizes different world structures in games.
2.2.2 MINIATURE GARDENS
In his 2003 Master’s Thesis, “Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds”, designer Chaim Gingold builds on the spatial definition of gameworlds highlighted by Jenkins, sharpening its application around the metaphor of a garden:
“Gardens are dynamic living systems, full of secrets, autonomous agents, transformation, and emergent behaviors. A garden has an inner life all its own. It is a world which goes on without you. Pre-digital games require human agency to animate them, but digital games are animated with the breath of computation, so garden is a tidy metaphor for self-animating systems. Not only are they dynamic, but gardens are reactive to human touch in a variety of ways, just like computers.”20
Gingold's metaphor underscores several qualities of gameworlds that allow them to flourish independently from narrative-first worldbuilding. By embracing the spatial nature of a world, designers can create structures that continue evolving even in the absence of an audience’s narrativization of them. This quality of emergence can give rise to outcomes that neither the designer nor the audience would have predicted. Through this lens, the game designer's role is to create fertile conditions for emergence rather than specifying narrative goals in advance which risks placing audiences in the role of custodians tending to a preordained chain of consequences. Gameworlds can be deeply reactive to player input through which players become active participants in the world's unfolding, experiencing a sense of consequentiality that derives from more open-ended forms of play.
2.2.3 GAMEWORLDS AS PROCESS
Gingold, Tremblay, and Hergenrader all constrain their definitions of worldbuilding to considerations of world-as-construct: a recognition of the invented nature of the work in material form, consequently focusing specifically on that which is in the imaginary world. The world-as-process dimension of worldbuilding, on the other hand, is one in which creators engage the larger context around these constructs to examine the processual way they influence and are influenced by that context. Gingold, Tremblay, and Hergenrader argue that bracketing out the contextual process around worldbuilding allows designers to explore the space, story, or game within a world more neatly.21 However, this is not always so.
In his thesis, Gingold quotes game designer Will Wright, well known for his god games such as The Sims (Maxis, 2000), who points out how while people play games they build a mental model in their head: 22
“So what we’re trying to do as designers is build up these mental models in the player. The computer is just an incremental step, an intermediate model to the model in the player’s head.”23
In other words, Wright considers world-as-process to be an important component of worldbuilding for designers. He sees the game design practice as one that operates more broadly than the design of the physical game itself: the game starts being played as soon as a player looks at the box art in a game store or sees an ad for it. The mental dimension of the process also doesn’t stop there. Gameworlds, like other imaginary worlds, leverage the double-sided nature of fiction where audiences are invited to imaginatively inhabit an imaginary world as if they were real while simultaneously recognizing their artificial, constructed nature. Designers shape the component game materials through abstraction and rules, but a larger world emerges through active engagement by audiences that cause it to outreach the bounds of its creator.
The Sims is a transmedia franchise that extends far beyond the confines of any single game. Wright and his team approached its design process with its audience’s mental model in mind - ones that are shaped not just by direct gameplay experiences, but by a vast web of media including expansion packs, sequels, player-created content, online forums, videos, and more. All these elements work together to shape the overall world experience and players' conceptions of what is possible within that world. An individually designed game provides a limited simulational model while the cultural constellation surrounding the game fleshes out a much richer imaginary world. Players draw upon broader contextual knowledge to fill in gaps and imagine a deeper world than what is directly represented in the games themselves.
While individual The Sims games offer carefully constrained garden-worlds and story-generators in the aforementioned construct-focused sense adopted by Gingold, Tremblay, and Hergenrader, the overall franchise operates as an expansive worldbuilding process actively shaping the players themselves across multiple media touchpoints over time. Designed systems of abstraction play important roles but are situated within larger cultural feedback loops that designers shape too.
Studying gameworlds through this process-oriented transmedial lens reveals how they can take on lives of their own, evolving in complex symbiosis with their player communities. The core interactive systems serve as generative engines catalyzing emergent player practices that in turn transform the gameworld in sometimes unexpected ways. Understanding worldbuilding in games thus requires looking beyond material design models to examine how they dynamically develop through social engagement as well.
3. SPECULATIVE DESIGN
Speculative design is a discursive practice that uses models and prototypes derived from imaginary worlds as social instigators.24 The field of speculative design is rooted in the idea that by creating and exploring alternative futures or parallel realities, citizens can better understand and critique their actual world. As defined by designers Anthony Dunne and Fiona Raby:
"This form of design thrives on imagination and aims to open up new perspectives on what are sometimes called wicked problems25, to create spaces for discussion and debate about alternative ways of being, and to inspire and encourage people’s imaginations to flow freely. Design speculations can act as a catalyst for collectively redefining our relationship to reality.”26
As per the scope of this essay, speculation is defined as a process of contemplation around a subject. Speculation can be a private endeavor, but its communicative dimension is most pertinent to speculative designers’ conception of it. In this way, the act of speculating brings new ideas into a discourse, exposing qualities of the present moment through the introduction of newly imagined component features and contexts. Speculation engages people in a thought experiment, encouraging them to imagine “what if”.
I broadly define design in this context as a process of envisaging the solution to a problem through the creation of objects or systems in a considered arrangement of their components.27 It is a form of problem-solving that can take on both functional and aesthetic dimensions. Germane to this essay is design’s relationship to the commercial sector. Design is often considered a job that serves the needs of businesses, focusing on creating products and services that are profitable and marketable. Speculative design intentionally removes those commercial constraints, attempting to expand the possibility space of designers’ output towards more philosophical, critical, and exploratory ends.
This practice operates along two related vectors, one focusing on influencing social imaginations of the future (speculative futures) and one focusing on the present (alternative presents). Speculative futures extrapolate contemporary paradigms toward the fabrication of prototype products, plans, and services. The goal of this work is to test out ideas before they exist in a pervasive manner. Alternative presents, on the other hand, apply counterfactual thinking to the current moment. This practice aims at developing artifacts that suggest alternative histories and dominant ideologies, probing audience assumptions through speculative fabrications.
3.1 A BRIEF HISTORY OF SPECULATIVE DESIGN’S EVOLUTION
The origins of speculative design as a distinct field can be traced back to the Royal College of Art in the mid-nineties. Drawing from the Radical Design movement of the sixties,28 Dunne and Raby positioned design as a tool for questioning the status quo and exploring the social, cultural, and ethical implications of emerging technologies.29 They initially called this approach critical design, illustrating it through projects that took the form of semi-functional prototypes frequently exhibited in gallery contexts to spark audience reflection and debate.30
The term speculative design eventually gained traction as the label for Dunne and Raby’s critical approach towards design. Their 2013 book "Speculative Everything" became a seminal work in this field, codifying key principles through a multitude of documented examples. It positioned speculative design as a means of using design to open new perspectives on complex societal challenges and stimulate collective action towards preferable futures. This book catalyzed an expansion of the field, particularly in academic circles, with designers and researchers exploring potential applications of its principles across various domains including product design, architecture, urban planning, and public policy.
Today, speculative design serves as an umbrella term for a range of like-minded design disciplines such as critical design, design fiction, design foresight, and transition design. These practices share a common goal of using design as a tool for questioning assumptions, envisioning alternative futures, and fostering critical discourse about the role of technology and design in shaping society.
3.2 CONCEPTIONS OF WORLDBUILDING IN SPECULATIVE DESIGN
Speculative designers adopt a world-as-process approach to worldbuilding, harnessing the power of imaginary worlds to pose thought-provoking questions about the actual world. Drawing inspiration from literary science fiction's tradition of creating immersive scenarios that encourage audiences to ask, "what if?", speculative designers aim to challenge dominant ideologies in the primary world. Unlike traditional science fiction approaches to worldbuilding, which often perpetuate current technological paradigms, speculative designers explicitly question technological norms.31
By leveraging the cultural feedback loops surrounding imaginary worlds, speculative designers engage the interplay between world-internal and world-external perspectives to generate ideas for secondary worlds. The world-internal view treats the fictional world as a plausible reality, while the world-external view acknowledges the world as an artificial construct and considers the work in its material form. Both perspectives are crucially interconnected in the experience of speculative design, allowing designers to stimulate critical thinking about actual issues.
The practice of production designer Alex McDowell serves as a dynamic illustration of this paradigm.32 In 1999 he was asked by Steven Spielberg to design the world of Philip K. Dick’s dystopian science fiction story “Minority Report” for a cinematic adaptation. Spielberg saw in Dick’s literary world the opportunity to develop a credible future filmworld that extrapolated current contemporary paradigms to make his film feel plausible. As McDowell recalled it:
“We were engaged by Steven Spielberg to create a future reality, and not a science fiction reality. Therefore, we were empowered to go out into the world and research in much more detail what the future might really hold. We talked to the right people, the futurists, the scientists and people who were tracking the trends. The decisions we made were relatively expensive production decisions, like transparent touch screens that could not be fed a real signal. You couldn’t put real media into the pieces of Plexiglas we had people holding. The kind of touch-screen technology that we were imagining allowed us not to be bound by 1990s technology. We were able to imagine the technology that now exists, because we were being told by the scientists that this is the technology that is going to exist in a few years and we didn’t really have anything at our disposal to make it happen. But CGI can do anything, so once we could set our imaginations in that direction and extrapolate forward into what we know now about the web or media at the time, hardware, etc., we could apply it to this realistic future and most of these things are coming true.”33
McDowell's speculative design approach for cinematic worldbuilding placed Spielberg's film at the source of over a hundred patents for primary world inventions.34 Through speculative design, science fiction ideas materialized as objects that circulated between secondary world and primary world. “Minority Report” provided important context and meaning to its world’s fictional objects, helping them slip outside the imaginary and into a world many people now conceive of as actual reality.
3.2.1 DESIGN FICTION
In 2005, renowned science fiction author Bruce Sterling introduced the concept of design fiction which he continues to develop and refine today. This neologism encapsulates his approach to the literary genre, aiming to bridge the gap between the speculative realm of science fiction and the wicked problems plaguing contemporary society.35 His conceptualization of design fiction represents a significant departure from traditional science fiction worldbuilding, advocating for an approach that grapples with the immediate consequences of technological advancements and their impact on humans today. He challenges the notion of science fiction as a purely imaginative endeavor separate from the primary world, and instead argues for a symbiotic relationship between fiction and reality in which the speculation of science fiction directly informs the development of the actual future. This reciprocal exchange between the imaginary and the real is at the heart of Sterling's approach, seeking to harness the power of fiction to drive tangible societal change in a material format designed to “tell worlds rather than stories.”36
Julian Bleeker further developed this concept in his influential 2009 essay "Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact and Fiction", introducing the popular conception of design fiction in which the fabrication of diegetic prototypes is a core component. For Bleeker, like Sterling, science fiction texts and science fiction toasters share a common ability to create storyworlds. These diegetic objects both need to provide sufficient detail to promote what Mark J.P. Wolf calls world gestalten, where audiences fill in the gaps of an implied world structure based on their primary world defaults.37 According to scholar Frederic Jameson, science fiction holds a particular power to leverage world gestalten to “defamiliarize and restructure our experience of our own present”38 through world-estranging novums.39 Like science fiction, design fiction aims to leverage the literary concept of defamiliarization to productively examine new possibilities for an imagined future.40 By creating world artifacts that imply uncomfortable futures, it seeks to elicit critical reflections from its audience to conceive alternatives to the familiar.
3.2.2 FUTURE WORLDS
In the commercial sector, one common application of speculative design is called design foresight, defined as a practice that leverages:
“…the ability to create and sustain a variety of high quality images and understandings about futures and apply these in a range of socially useful ways; for example, to develop policy, guide strategy, avoid or mitigate disasters and pursue social innovations.”41
Design foresight engages the possible worlds theory of analytic philosophy as a framework for loosening audiences' grip on their conceptions of reality, targeting their imaginations through the idea of multiple plausible futures. The roots of this type of work extend back to the seventies when the energy company Royal Dutch Shell developed techniques of scenario planning aimed at simulating near future scenarios to make informed decisions in the face of hard-to-predict global economic and political shifts. Rather than attempting to predict the future with precision, they modeled possible futures with the goal of targeting a range of plausible ones as contingency plans to succeed in an environment of uncertainty.
Design foresight emerges from a similar spirit as design fiction whose genesis claim by its progenitor, Bruce Sterling, was that it:
“… makes more sense on the page than science fiction does. Science fiction wants to invoke the grandeur and credibility of science for its own hand-waving hocus-pocus, but design fiction can be more practical, more hands-on. It sacrifices some sense of the miraculous, but it moves much closer to the glowing heat of technosocial conflict.”42
Science fiction worlds are teeming with technologies from an imagined future. For practitioners of foresight design, their aim is to temper the secondariness of their imaginary worlds to fit inside their audience’s conception of the primary world. This type of believability engineering has been occurring in the production of science fiction worlds for over a century. In fact, early twentieth century American film studios regularly hired scientists to harness their explanatory power to help them engineer fantastical storylines with higher levels of believability. This is the same logic that undergirded the production of “Minority Report” in the nineties. According to Alex McDowell:
“Spielberg gets seduced by certain ideas and runs with them, but at some point he says the audience is not going to get it, or whatever it is that is motivating a particular aspect of a story. Then it just gets [moves his hand across his throat], regardless ofwhether it is accurate or real. Despite his original request for reality he will cut anything that he thinks will confuse the audience.”43
Spielberg’s attentiveness to believability helped his filmworld get reimagined by its audiences, contributing to the wide-scale adoption of so many of its technologies in the actual world. This attentiveness to audience comprehension and their varied understanding of the future is what foresight designers harness when worldbuilding. Their process often involves extensive research and analysis in collaboration with experts from other fields, grounding their imaginary worlds in scientific data that audiences can perceive as trustworthy while they navigate the inherent uncertainty of the unknown.
Transition design, a sub-discipline of speculative design related to foresight design, aims to invert the relationship between science and fiction as characterized by the film industry’s employment of scientists to broker conceptions of plausible imaginary worlds. Practitioners of this approach use worldbuilding to argue for the necessity of societal transitions towards more sustainable primary world futures. Transition designers address design problems at various spatiotemporal scales, aiming to tackle complex challenges by drawing from diverse knowledge sectors across the sciences and humanities. This sub-discipline seeks to push the boundaries of what is considered possible in these individual knowledge sectors, drawing from practices established in fictional worldbuilding across media to do so.
In her 2017 master’s thesis “Building Brave New Worlds: Science Fiction and Transition Design”, Leah Zaidi outlines the value of worldbuilding to provide systemic viewpoints into a world with insight into preferred futures. Effective worldbuilding, for Zaidi, is a storytelling practice that extends beyond individual narratives, characters, and technologies to engage a more expansive worldview that exploits its audience’s sense of reality to reveal previously unconsidered perspectives. Zaidi claims:
“If worldbuilding is approached as an act of design that can allow us to envision sustainable futures, then learning how authors engage in the worldbuilding process might aid in real-world design. Moreover, because narratives are powerful and processed differently than other forms of information, borrowing from the principles and foundations of storytelling (such as worldbuilding) may allow us to create and disseminate emotionally resonant images of sustainable futures throughout society. After all, it is through science fiction that society receives its images of the future, and leveraging worldbuilding practices to envision and bring about change may catalyze our efforts.”44
Zaidi’s thesis outlines a prescriptive framework for transition design worldbuilding, borrowing tactics from science fiction and fantasy worldbuilders across media including Ursula K. Le Guin, George R.R. Martin, and J.R.R. Tolkien. Unlike the prescriptive worldbuilding frameworks found in game studies, Zaidi’s approach negotiates between world-as-construct and world-as-process models, considering how worldbuilding constructs catalyze and adapt to changing conditions in the primary world. She proposes a multi-layered approach to transition design worldbuilding that begins with a broad, long-term perspective at the level of an entire civilization across multiple generations. Her framework brings designers through a series of considerations from the societal level to the individual level, at each stage prompting the development of a world construct. In aggregate, her multi-layered worldbuilding framework accounts for the interplay between multiple realities with the goal of encouraging designers to consider both short-term and long-term consequences of their worldbuilding decisions and to maintain an image of the system as a whole. This, according to Zaidi, helps designers identify leverage points to enact change through trial-and-error applications of worldbuilding towards actual problems.
4. WORLDBUILDING COMPARISONS
While worldbuilding in game studies and speculative design share some common alignments, the conception between fields has key differences as well. The following section compares disciplinary uses of the concept across three vectors: construct versus process; fantasy and escapism; and commercial influence.
4.1 CONSTRUCT / PROCESS
As Zaidi’s work demonstrates, the field of science fiction can be readily mapped onto speculative design in that they both speculate on systems and ask their audiences to work towards ideas with distinguishable consequences. The logic of science fiction also resembles a game as defined by Salen and Zimmerman. Both games and science fiction work through systems in which an agent engages in conflict defined by rules, resulting in quantifiable outcomes. Returning to Bernard Suits’ definition of playing a game, the lusory attitude in which playing a game invests that situation with special meaning is key to both practices. Huizinga coined his own term for this situation offering us a spatial metaphor: the magic circle. For Huizinga, the magic circle of a game ascribes a special boundary with an imaginary authority. How permeable is that boundary, though?
This question continues to animate game studies scholarship, as many experimental gameworlds traffic in the ambiguity of world boundaries.45 Pertinent to our comparison of speculative design and game studies, however, is the distinction between open systems and closed systems. As defined by communication theorist Stephen W. Littlejohn:
“A closed system has no interchange with its environment. An open system receives matter and energy from its environment and passes matter and energy to its environment.”46
For some game designers, as demonstrated by the narrative worldbuilding frameworks of Kaitlin Tremblay and Kurt Hergenrader, gameworlds can thrive as closed systems: self-contained realms isolated from the potential incoherence latent in the primary world. Other game designers, like Will Wright, design open systems that adapt through exchanges beyond the frame of gameworld abstraction. For speculative designers, imaginary worlds thrive only in open systems, highlighting the double exposure of primary and secondary worlds in their designs. Speculative designers invite audiences to engage with worlds imaginatively while also enabling them to reconcile with their artificiality, to reflect on the fact that these designs are real-world constructs made with a purpose.
4.2 FANTASY
Dunne and Raby stress the importance of speculative designers maintaining a lucid connection between primary and secondary worlds in their approach to worldbuilding. To illustrate this, they use a temporal taxonomy known as a futures cone to illustrate the bounds of their field's imaginative zone of interest. Developed in 1994 by Trevor Hancock and Clement Bezold, based on Charles Taylor's research for the United States military, this taxonomy classifies alternative futures into probable, plausible, and possible realms.47 Speculative design, according to Dunne and Raby, draws its most speculative boundaries at the edge of the possible:
“Beyond this lies the zone of fantasy, an area we have little interest in. Fantasy exists in its own world, with very few if any links to the world we live in. It is of course valuable, especially as a form of entertainment, but for us, it is too removed from how the world is. This is the space of fairy tales, goblins, superheroes, and space opera.”48
While speculative design intermingles with a range of media practices and approaches, Dunne and Raby apply limits at the bounds of scientific possibility. On the contrary, in the field of game studies a more robust engagement with fantasy worlds is often deemed fruitful. To parse this contrast, it is helpful to address fantasy not strictly as a genre, but as a mode of engagement. According to Ursula K. Le Guin:
"Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don't we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the know-nothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we're partisans of liberty, then it's our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can."49
Le Guin believed that engaging with fantasy presents a more expansive view of the primary world compared to a plausible mode of engagement, challenging the limits of what is conventionally acceptable to imagine. She argued that fantasy is not strictly an escape from reality but rather a mode of liberation from the constraints of the status quo, allowing creators and audiences to explore the spiritual journey of humanity.50
Game studies, as a field, often builds upon this strictly world-internal perspective, with scholars and designers engaging with the medium of games and the act of play in diverse ways. In contrast, speculative design takes a more focused approach, always maintaining interplay between world-internal and world-external perspectives. This focus on the double exposure of worldbuilding allows an imaginary world to be perceived as both a plausible reality and an artificial construct simultaneously, deliberately crafted as a tangible invention. By intertwining these two perspectives, speculative designers encourage a more critical examination of the relationship between the imaginary and the real, inviting audiences to question the assumptions and norms that shape our understanding of the primary world while remaining psychologically embedded in them.
4.3 ENTERTAINMENT
“Although extraordinarily detailed, gameworlds tend to focus on the setting, geography, and environment more than ideology, and their purpose is primarily escape and entertainment. There is, however, a growing number of artist- and activist-designed games that aim to challenge assumptions about game design, their social and cultural uses, and encourage social change.”51
This quote from “Speculative Everything” points at a middle-road between game studies and speculative design. While game studios are often driven by commercial entertainment goals, speculative design projects are more likely to be situated within institutional or research contexts. Game studies as a discipline, however, often emerges from research institutions and is situated at a fruitful nexus between speculative design and commercial entertainment. Critical Game Design, the hybrid theory and practice extension of the Games and Simulation Arts and Sciences program at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute for whom I first drafted this essay, is a design-focused program aimed at bridging that gap. This program focuses on game sub-genres such as games for change, serious games, and impact games - inscribing the young academic field of game studies with an evolving conception of how critical games might function in a broader culture both inside and outside the entertainment industry.
While commercial entertainment is a significant driver of the game industry, game studies scholars also explore the potential of imaginary worlds as vehicles for pedagogy, commentary, and critique. And while a practice-based research sub-field of game studies exists, it is still quite young and lacks the same level of scholarship seen in the speculative design field of practice-based research. The emergence of critical game design as a hybrid theory and practice discipline bridging game studies and speculative design suggests a growing recognition of the transformative potential of games as a medium for worldbuilding. By combining the immersive and interactive qualities of games with the critical ethos of speculative design, critical game designers stand to push the boundaries of what is possible in both fields, creating imaginary worlds that not only entertain but also challenge and provoke the status quo.
5. CONCLUSIONS
This essay has outlined the concept of worldbuilding in relation to the fields of game studies and speculative design, attempting to pin down overlaps and divergences in their two approaches. Both fields are relatively young and many of the ideas explored here stand to mutate and grow as future practitioners engage with their methods. As such, I want to end with a look at a project that points at a potential future of these fields: a cross-pollination of disciplines.
5.1 MUTUAL WORLDS
This winter I visited the Museum of Modern art in New York to play a game in one of their galleries. The museum’s provocation to conjure audience interest was simply:
“How can we dream of a world that is ecologically just and rooted in equity for all human and nonhuman life?”52
Vague statements like this were consistent with how other Art institutions were selling their content in 2023 - dry and polysyllabic with a touch of progressive dreaming. I was intrigued. The artists Sarah Rothberg and Marina Zurkow were presenting a worldbuilding game called “More & More Future” consisting of a deck of cards, two live facilitators, some markers, and a pile of blank paper.
Over the course of ninety minutes, I joined a group of twenty or so museum-goers at five well-designed wooden tables in a second-floor gallery and responded to the facilitators’ question:
“If what is on the card is true, what else must be true?”53
Through spontaneous writing, improvisatory sketches, and discussions with my tablemates we conjured an absurd underwater world of hybrid monstrosities living communally by Marxists principle in trash-plastic domes. This experience wasn’t exactly a game as most game scholars would define it - it lacked the conflict inherent to Salen and Zimmerman’s definition of the form and while I did end the experience with a fully-scribbled-on piece of paper, it remained unclear whether that was the quantifiable outcome the game was designed to produce. It reminded me of playing surrealist parlor games like “The Exquisite Corpse” and “Thought for a Day” designed in the early twentieth century and employed by artists in the surrealist movement to free themselves from conscious constraints.54
Surrealism was the first historical movement I learned about as a child that felt like a personal invitation to join a new world - one that, as an artist, I am still part of today. I was captivated by the strange forms painted by Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy - intrigued by their countercultural politics. Through games, play, and operations of chance they subverted normative academic and scientific modes of inquiry towards the production of fantastic world fragments that I could never puzzle together completely. They fabricated a distinct mode of research through an embrace of the unknown and absurd. The games they designed were intended to break up the order of rational worlds, adding dream logic and stochastic frameworks to a rules-based format that leveraged the lusory attitude brought into focus through structured play. Their games fit into Johan Huizinga’s magic circle and at the same time spilled out of that circle in the form of Art. The surrealist movement stands as a unique phenomenon in the political history of the twentieth century, seamlessly blending revolutionary ideas with transformational thinking in art and poetry. They sought to challenge and subvert established social norms and conventional thinking across multiple domains by subjecting them to playful interrogations.
In an era inflected by discourse around wicked problems, I look towards projects like “More & More Futures” to continue speculating around a future where we embrace the homo ludens aspect of human nature. I look back at how the surrealists once did this as a means of societal transformation, defamiliarizing the present through new imaginary worlds that provoke new ways of being in a world. This legacy of surrealism and the emergence of speculative worldbuilding practices points to a method for addressing the wicked problems of our time, and it may not lie in the domain of rational analysis. By creating imaginary worlds that embrace the unknown and fantastical we may cultivate a more resilient, adaptable, and imaginative society in an uncertain future – one that encourages us to keep playing.
6. REFERENCE
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24. Gill, Bart R., and Marie Brennan, eds. Eighth Day Genesis: A Worldbuilding Codex. Alliteration Ink, 2012.
25. Gingold, Chaim. Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2016.
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31. Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955.
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33. Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118-130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004.
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48. Morrow, Stephanie. “How to Get to Know Your Story’s World with Worldbuilding Questions.” The Writer’s Cookbook, 2018.
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50. Roine, Hanna-Riikka. Imaginative, Immersive and Interactive Engagements: The Rhetoric of Worldbuilding in Contemporary Speculative Fiction. Tampere: Tampere University Press, 2016.
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63. Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977.
64. Taylor, C.W. Creating Strategic Visions. Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 1990.
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Nelson Goodman’s articulation of his interest in worldbuilding from his book “Ways of Worldmaking” establishes a foundation for this essay’s consideration of a world: “The many stuffs - matter, energy, waves, phenomena - that worlds are made of are made along with the worlds. But made from what? Not from nothing, after all, but from other worlds. Worldmaking as we know it always starts from worlds already on hand; the making is a remaking. Anthropology and developmental psychology may study social and individual histories of such world-building, but the search for a universal or necessary beginning is best left to theology. My interest here is rather with the processes involved in building a world out of others.” (Goodman, Nelson. Ways of Worldmaking. Sussex: The Harvester Press, 1981. P.6)
(Holland, Norman. Literature and the Brain. Gainesville, FL: The PsyArt Foundation, 2009. P, 327–328)
(Root-Bernstein, Michele. “Imaginary Worldplay as an Indicator of Creative Giftedness.” In International Handbook on Giftedness, edited by L. V. Shavinina. Dordrecht: Springer Science + Business Media B.V., 2009. Accessed September 23, 2011. http://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/1035/imaginaryworldplay-indicator-creative-giftedness.pdf. P. 599)
(Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. P. 80)
Even though certain forms of media like hypertext fiction don’t fit into Juul’s definition of a game, those forms are still important to games studies as they inhabit a blurry boundary that has been historically productive for game scholars to interrogate in the field.
(Huizinga, Johan. Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture. Boston: Beacon Press, 1955. P.29)
In “The Grashopper: Games, Life, and Utopia” Suits uses the term “prelusory goal” to denote the specific outcome a player aims for while playing a game. This objective exists independently of the game's rules. For example, in a game of poker, the prelusory goal is to take the opposing players’ chips. His term “lusory means” refers to what actions are permitted by the game rules to achieve the prelusory goal. This includes only the specific ways players may interact with game elements to make progress. In poker, lusory means include betting and raising hand values. Suits further distinguished the concept of a “lusory attitude” referring to the mindset players adopt when they engage with a game. It suggests an acceptance of game rules despite the fact that they may make it harder to achieve the prelusory goal. A lusory attitude is adopted by players, according to Suits, because it makes the game stimulating.
(Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. P. 32)
(Mäyrä, Frans. An Introduction to Game Studies: Games in Culture. London: Sage Publications Ltd, 2008. P. 7)
“Third wave” is the term Jesper Juul used to describe his generation of game scholars in issue #1 of the Game Studies Journal (Juul, Jesper. "The Repeatedly Lost Art of Studying Games." Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001). Accessed May 22, 2024. https://www.gamestudies.org/0101/juul-review/.)
Marie-Laure Ryan has made important contributions to this field through the publication of works such as “Narrative Across Media: The Languages of Storytelling” and “Avatars of Story: Narrative Modes in Old and New Media”. Mark J.P. Wolf has significantly contributed to the understanding of worldbuilding in video games with books like “The Medium of the Video Game” and “Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation”.
“Storyworlds are mental models of who did what to and with whom, when, where, why, and in what fashion in the world to which recipients relocate—or make a deictic shift—as they work to comprehend a narrative….I here use the term world (and storyworld) in a manner more or less analogous with linguists’ use of the term discourse model. A discourse model can be defined as a global mental representation enabling interlocutors to draw inferences about items and occurrences either explicitly or implicitly included in a discourse By the same token, and like Jahn’s cognitive frames, storyworlds—or models for understanding narrative discourse —function in both a top-down and bottom-up way during narrative comprehension. They guide readers to assume that jets, cell phones, and plasma guns do not exist in the world of Madame Bovary. But they are also subject to being updated, revised, or even abandoned with the accretion of textual cues, as when the reader of John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure (1996) gradually realizes that the storyworld is not at all the way its narrator, a homicidal gourmand, says it is.” (Herman, David. Story Logic: Problems and Possibilities of Narrative. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004. P. 5-6)
In an essay entitled “The Gaming Situation” in issue #1 of the Games Studies Journal, Markku Eskelinen quoted Janet Murray in a defense of ludology-oriented interpretations of games over narratology-oriented ones, writing: “She's quite content to interpret this Soviet game as ‘a perfect enactment of the over tasked lives of Americans in the 1990s - of the constant bombardment of tasks that demand our attention and that we must somehow fit into our overcrowded schedules and clear off our desks in order to make room for the next onslaught.’ It would be equally far beside the point if someone interpreted chess as a perfect American game because there's a constant struggle between hierarchically organized white and black communities, genders are not equal, and there's no health care for the stricken pieces. Of course, there's one crucial difference: after this kind of analysis you'd have no intellectual future in the chess-playing community. Instead of studying the actual game Murray tries to interpret its supposed content, or better yet, project her favourite content on it; consequently we don't learn anything of the features that make Tetris a game. The explanation for this interpretative violence seems to be equally horrid: the determination to find or forge a story at any cost, as games can't be games because if they were, they apparently couldn't be studied at all.” (Eskelinen, Markku. "The Gaming Situation." Game Studies 1, no. 1 (July 2001). Accessed May 22, 2024. https://www.gamestudies.org/0101/eskelinen/.)
(Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118-130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004)
(Frasca, Gonzalo. "Ludology Meets Narratology: Similitude and Differences Between (Video)Games and Narrative." Ludology.org, 1999. Accessed May 22, 2024. https://ludology.typepad.com/weblog/articles/ludology.htm.)
(Jenkins, Henry. “Game Design as Narrative Architecture.” In First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game, edited by Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Pat Harrigan, 118-130. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004)
(Short, Tanya X., and Tarn Adams, eds. Procedural Storytelling in Game Design. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2019. P. 154)
My personal collection includes dozens of books with titles such as “The Tough Guide to Fantasyland”, “Eighth Day Genesis”, “How to Get to Know Your Story’s World with Worldbuilding Questions”, and “Wonderbook”.
(Tremblay, Kaitlin. Collaborative Worldbuilding for Video Games. Boca Raton: CRC Press, 2023. P. 43)
(Gingold, Chaim. Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2016. P. 20-21)
(Gingold, Chaim. Miniature Gardens & Magic Crayons: Games, Spaces, & Worlds. Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2016. P. 2)
God games are a subgenre of simulation video games where players assume control over the development of a world. These games often focus on the creation, management, and manipulation of terrain, resources, and populations, rather than offering direct control over individual characters.
(Pearce, Celia. “Sims, BattleBots, Cellular Automata, God and Go: A Conversation with Will Wright.” Game Studies 2, no. 1, July 2002.)
(Auger, James. "Speculative Design: Crafting the Speculation." Digital Creativity 24, no. 1 (2013): 11-18.)
These wicked problems, as defined by Dunne and Raby include overpopulation, water shortages, and climate change. These problems are difficult to address because there is no single way to approach them and their roots are often difficult to parse. Dunne and Raby have observed how many designers want to address these problems through a design framework of quantifying and solving issues. Their belief is that the only way designers can overcome the challenge of these wicked problems is to change the beliefs and behaviors motivating societies of people to perpetuate these problems.
(Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. P. 2)
(Cross, Nigel. Designerly Ways of Knowing. London: Springer, 2006.)
Dunne and Raby were particularly influenced by the work of architectural design studios from the sixties and seventies such as Superstudio, Ant Farm, Archigram, and Haus-Rucker-Co who created provocative, often dystopian, proposals to critique the excesses of consumer culture and imagine new futures.
(Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. P. 6)
(Dunne, Anthony. Hertzian Tales: Electronic Products, Aesthetic Experience, and Critical Design. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.)
(Sterling, Bruce. "Design Fiction." Interactions 21, no. 5 (2014): 22-23.)
In addition to his work as a production designer, McDowell founded the Worldbuilding Institute at the University of Southern California, a media lab that develops projects ranging from an encyclopedia geared towards solving the water scarcity crisis in Lago, Nigeria to augmented reality experiences starring a floating whale.
(Gallagher, Brian. "Alex McDowell on Creating the Exciting World of Minority Report." 2010. Accessed May 22, 2024. https://movieweb.com/exclusive-alex-mcdowell-on-creating-the-exciting-world-of-minority-report/.)
(Fairs, Marcus. "Minority Report Made Today’s Technology Possible, Say Production Designer Alex McDowell." Dezeen, November 6, 2015. Accessed April 28, 2024. https://www.dezeen.com/2015/11/06/minority-report-sci-fi-movie-steven-spielberg-future-of-technology-predictions-possible-production-designer-alex-mcdowell/.)
(Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005.)
(Bosch, Torie. “Sci-Fi Writer Bruce Sterling Explains the Intriguing New Concept of Design Fiction.” Slate blog, March 2, 2012. Accessed December 24, 2012.)
(Bleeker, Julian. "Design Fiction: A Short Essay on Design, Science, Fact, and Fiction." Accessed May 1, 2024. P. 7)
(Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005. P. 156)
A novum, as defined by Darko Suvin, is a plausible innovation distinguishing a fictional world from our own reality, serving as a "mediating category whose explicative potency springs from its rare bridging of literary and extraliterary, fictional and empirical, formal and ideological domains." (Suvin, Darko. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction: On the Poetics and History of a Literary Genre. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977. P. 64) For example, In "Minority Report", the PreCrime system - a technology that uses the precognitive abilities of psychics to predict and prevent crimes before they occur - serves as a novum. It sets the story apart from our reality while raising questions about the nature of justice, the misuse of predictive technology, and the consequences of relying on such systems to maintain social order.
Defamiliarization is a term coined by Russian Formalist Viktor Shklovsky to describe literary techniques of making a story feel less cliché and more present. According to Shklovsky, “The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects 'unfamiliar', to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.” (Lemon, Lee T., and Marion J. Reis. 2012. Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.)
(Foresight International. FAQS. Accessed May 22, 2024. https://foresightinternational.com.au/?page_id=34.)
(Sterling, Bruce. Shaping Things. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005. P. 30)
(Kirby, David. Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists, and Cinema. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2011. P. 151)
(Zaidi, Leah. Building Brave New Worlds. Ontario College of Art and Design, 2017. P. 19)
One notable genre of games that explore the permeability of these boundaries is called Alternate Reality Games (ARGs). See: Stewart, Sean. "Alternate Reality Games." Accessed September 9, 2006. https://web.archive.org/web/20060909092010/http://www.seanstewart.org/interactive/args/.
(Salen, Katie, and Eric Zimmerman. Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004. P. 53)
(Hancock, Trevor, and Clement Bezold. “Possible Futures, Preferable Futures.” The Healthcare Forum Journal 37, no. 2 (1994): 23-29.); (Taylor, C.W. Creating Strategic Visions. Carlisle Barracks, Carlisle, PA: Strategic Studies Institute, US Army War College, 1990.)
(Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. P. 4)
(Le Guin, Ursula K. The Language of the Night: Essays on Fantasy and Science Fiction. New York: Putnam, 1979. P. 205)
Here, Le Guin is building her defense escapism in fantasy from J.R.R. Tolkien influential essay “On Fairy-Stories” which states: “In using Escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.” (Tolkien, J.R.R. “On Fairy-Stories.” In The Monsters and the Critics and Other Essays, edited by Christopher Tolkien, 109–161. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1983. P. 140)
(Dunne, Anthony, and Fiona Raby. Speculative Everything: Design, Fiction, and Social Dreaming. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013. P. 71)
Museum of Modern Art. “Creativity Lab”. Accessed May 1, 2024. https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/5633.
Museum of Modern Art. "What If? Visualization." Accessed May 1, 2024. https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/337/4445.
(Brotchie, Alistair. A Book of Surrealist Games. London: Shambhala, 1991.)