todd

On Fictional Location and World Building

Like most of my blog entries I tend to ramble. You can skip a lot of my reasoning (rambling) and jump straight to my ideas at the line (----)...

The aftermath of the mobile m eeting got me thinking about some of my favorite books. They've popped up in discussion before, but they either reflect or have influenced why I've chosen to pursue interactivity. The subject is world building, the texts are: The Codex Seraphinianus and the Borges short story "Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius".

The Codex Seraphinianus is, quite frankly, a book I wish I had created. It is an encyclopedia created by surrealist artist Luigi Serafini. The encyclopedia is not only of an alien (although eerily familiar) world, but is written in an alien, perhaps undecipherable language itself. Only its structure betrays the book's identity as an encyclopedia. The book clearly has page numbers, contents, diagrams, there are chapters on botany, zoology, language and text (a very intruiging chapter), anthropology (of a sort), and architecture. I have a copy of the book, and may bring it to the next meeting if this sounds like a promising direction to others in the mobile group.

Borge's story details another invented world, and a character's tangential knowledge of it. The world of Tlon is strange enough, but at the edges we find the narrator only knows about the text from strange, possibily coincedental circumstances. He first finds out about it from a friend who has read about it in a doctored encyclopedia (someone added a section at the end, making it appear as part of the original, authentic encyclopedia). Indeed, the whole invented world and text about it seems to be part of an urban legend.

It should also be noted that Serafini and Borges' worlds serve purposes beyond simply existing, they act as part of the larger goal. Serafini uses the world to examine our own, and how we classify existing objects. Borges' uses the world of Tlon to show that an invented world is easier to understand than our existing one, no matter how "alien" it may be, as it would come from a human author or authors.

These issues may very well leak into our discussion. I'm finding the idea of a strange world, overlaid on top of our own, and accessible to different devices to have potential. Ordinary, if not downright mundane places could happen to be the location of a very interesting space in an authored, "virtual" layer. The attributes of the world, and the reason for interacting with it could be numerous. Here are a few ideas:

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Archaeology: The users search for artifacts of a world past. I have a (possibly morbid) fascination with entropy. Abandoned buildings offer a large amount of intrigue for me, and I find myself making up stories about what happened in their walls. Archaeology is, in many ways, a Rorsharch test, stories and theories being built from incomplete evidence. This could certainly make an engaging narrative.

Spectator: I was going to say "voyeur", but that may be starting on the wrong foot. The idea is to have a persistent, somewhat autonomous world. A limited (or not so limited) AI or AL system could be set in place, generating life, cities, and happenings. Authors could control a lot of it, but I think a lot of the excitment would come from even the designers being surprised. The world would function in a location-based "layer", and again often ordinary spots could be very extraordinary in this paralell world. Exploitive and cynical people alike could see some sinister potential for this ("the cool stuff happens to be on the site of a chain frachise store..."), but just because it can doesn't mean it has to.

Time Shift: Historically recreating a place in time have been talked about, and has it's own possibilities, but this is something a little different: Imagine the paralell world is exactly the same size as Earth, has the same orbit, etc, but has a day that's only half as long. This puts the "migratory points" idea to a larger scale, as every point would travel across the network. Virtual locations could only be accessed at certain times, much like astronomical events in the sky. There could be a sort of "time zone" difference as well. This could also ensure that your neighborhood content wouldn't go stale, or that you wouldn't move because your cousin in the next town has cooler things happening in his neck of the virtual woods.

Communication: Having the users somehow interact with the world kinda goes without saying (what's the name of our department again?), and this category kinda overlays on top of just about any other I can think of, but the issue of a user can influence a paralell world is of great concern. Being able to send messages to inhabitants of this other world (as well as other users, they'll be on cell phones or similar devices, after all) offers a great and very challenging dimension to the mobile system. Scavenging artifacts and using/trading them is a bit of a no-brainer, but can still be interesting and immersive.

I think that the world, however the details will work out, should have a larger theme driving it. If we go for an archaeological slant, the theme would be somber, perhaps the tragedy of a lost civillazation that fell from greatness (Ozymandias, anyone?). Even classical dramatic themes of love, courage, hubris, dilemma and other things that enhance fictional characters (and dominate real ones) can and should be integrated. The themes of commerce and technology are going to be there anyway, and I think we could do something a little different besides.