May 28, 2024

Narrative Worldbuilding

A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds

Edwin McRae and Rachel Rees

Hosted by Rudolf Thomas Inderst

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Summary

Game worlds differ from traditional fictional worlds. While literary and cinematic worlds are written to host character arcs and plots, game worlds need to be designed to host game mechanics. While Princess Leia, Mad Max and Daenerys Targaryen may leave their marks on their fictional worlds, it is YOU, the player, who will carve your personal experience into the digital firmament of every game world you inhabit.

In Narrative Worldbuilding: A Player Centric Approach to Designing Story Rich Game Worlds (Narrative, 2024), games industry veteran Edwin McRae will guide you through the evergreen principles of player-centric game world design.

How do you create game-based environments and cultures that resonate with reality? This senior narrative designer will share a range of field-tested techniques that will help you design instead of derive.

How do you organise all that lore? This is a common pain point for world builders and Edwin will offer tools and tactics that keep game bibles scoped, searchable and sensible.

How do you make your game world fun? Through the player-centric perspective, you’ll see how storytelling can be used to support and enrich game play and achieve that Shangri-La of gaming experience... ludo-narrative harmony!

Play is what we do. Story is why we do it. And the game world is where it all happens.

Rudolf Inderst is a professor of Game Design with a focus on Digital Game Studies at the IU International University of Applied Science, department lead for Games at Swiss culture magazine Nahaufnahmen.ch, editor of “DiGRA D-A-CH Game Studies Watchlist”, a weekly messenger newsletter about Game Culture and curator of @gamestudies at tiktok.