World-building is the process of creating a world, the overall setting and background, of a fictional universe for novels, games, movies, or any sort of media/entertainment that the audience will be able to either view or interact with. When it comes to games, specifically when the world is everything, it influences the mechanics and how the player interacts with what is within it. It is important to make sure you limit how much control you have over the story within the world, as well as how much the player the has in order for the experience to be the most immersed, and satisfactory. Games, being an interactive medium, are being explored more frequently now for a way to tell a story, to get an idea across (however be sure to not limit yourself to using only games), and the main way to do this giving a player choice, and that that choice has lasting consequence. I believe Joao Beraldo’s opinion in World-building for a better game experience is phrased the best in this quote:
“And what I learned during all this time is that the story you got to tell will never be as powerful as he story players will experience.”
Why I Agree with This
You can’t influence a story reading a book, you cannot influence a movie while watching it, however people sometimes like feeling a sense of control and games over that. We are placed in a protagonist position, and what we hope for most is that we can make the story go in the direction we want it to, and feel a moment of satisfaction that even if the consequence is negative, we made the choice ourselves and that makes the experience much more valuable. Rather than just going through a virtual space and just watching as the game happens in front of you, YOU are making the story move forward, YOU are creating this experience mainly, not the developer, not the game.
“If you want to empower players with choice, why not weave story into it? Why not allow them to take meaningful choices before each battle? Why not give them a world where choice and consequence are a fact of life?”
If you don’t do this, sure the game may still be interesting, but this adds another sense of depth to the user experience, which is very important. User experience sells games, if your audience is not enjoying the product, it is possible the user had a negative experience with the product. For there may of been too many choices, too few choices, the writing is terrible, the world just isn’t detail enough. Taking all this into consideration is what makes great games, when the designs go that extra mile to make sure that they know enough about the world they made that every choice you make actually feels like it has some weight on its shoulders. Be it a combat decision, a political decision, a companion decision. Decisions drives players to become invested, challenge in any kind of decision with consequence even makes it more appealing towards any player. However make sure the decisions scale with the difficulty the player chose, so that it doesn’t feel to weak, or in turn feel too hard.
World-building is such a key component to making some of the best games, from the culture of a fiction race, to the layout of a city, to the structure of the world’s government, to even the design of a characters house. That all has to do with world-building and that also influences choices and consequence of maximizing the experience.
World Conception 