October 27, 2022 8:31 AM (EDT)
Terry Nguyen, Dirt’s senior staff writer, on “worldbuilding” as the new brand-building.
The concept of worldbuilding, while not exactly the term itself, is likely familiar to any reader of science fiction or fantasy. As an ardent C.S. Lewis reader growing up, I was so bewitched by his mythical world that I often dreamt the closets in my house contained hidden doors. That’s the magic of effective worldbuilding: The audience, immersed in the fantasy, is eager for more. It’s a strategy employed by entertainment companies to oil the wheels of major fan-favorite franchises. But more recently, worldbuilding seems to have permeated across popular culture, harnessed by celebrities, brands, and all kinds of content creators.
It’s the latest marketing development for our content-congested landscape. Everything has to be a holistic story, even a product or an advertisement. A character with a singular narrative has limited branding potential. A world, by contrast, offers infinite possibilities. This essay explores the literary traditions of worldbuilding and considers how the 20th-century rise of trademarked intellectual property contributes to today’s world-expansion frenzy. Subscribe to Dirt for the upcoming second half, which dives into how video games and Web3 provide spaces for user-driven worldbuilding.
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Illustration by Carlos Sanchez
What is it with our obsession with building? For a country in the midst of a housing-construction crisis, our common usage of the verb “build” is curiously metaphorical, often employed to signal an act of abstract creation. Marketers preach the importance of “building a brand.” Content creators harness influence by “building a following.” Tech founders declare their intent to “build the future.” In his nebulously titled 2020 missive, “It’s Time To Build,” the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen remarked upon the urgency of building during a crisis. (It’s uncertain exactly what should be built.)
More recently, the concept of “worldbuilding” has come to the fore. The term describes the creation of fictional worlds with unique settings, histories, aesthetics, and characters. Our franchise-dominated media environment is rife with worlds and extended universes, straddling the physical and the virtual, the fictional and the real. There is a palpable desire to manifest “reality,” however skewed or insular, from one’s own imagination. Kanye West recently unveiled his plans to construct a physical “Yecosystem,” a series of mini campus-like cities across the US. At this year’s Paris Fashion Week, Ye collaborator and stylist Christine Centenera alluded to Vogue that “he’s building a world” with his collections. Ye affirmed this sentiment at the show’s start. “I see myself more as a George Lucas,” he said, referring to the filmmaker behind the Star Wars and Indiana Jones narrative universes.
This worldbuilding urge is reflected in the publicity strategy of musicians like Taylor Swift, who has created an experiential “virtual universe” for her latest album release; Travis Scott, whose one-day Astroworld festival was an ode to a shuttered amusement park of the same name; and Janelle Monae, whose Afrofuturistic Dirty Computer project consists of a music album, short story collection, and narrative film.
To no surprise, billionaire technologists have embraced worldbuilding with dystopic verve: Peter Thiel and Marc Lore harbor fantasies of constructing their own off-the-grid, techno-societies, and Elon Musk has a quest to colonize Mars by 2050. What are these if not fantasy worlds? NFT designers and game developers, too, have launched independent worldbuilding projects that depend on community participation. Luxury fashion houses like Louis Vuitton have launched spin-off clothing collections and shows set in different cities, which “reinforces and builds on the previous show” — a holistic, self-referential storytelling exercise.
But worldbuilding doesn’t always require money, power, or social buy-in for it to be successful or fulfilling. Anyone, in theory, can conjure up a fantasy world. There’s even a MasterClass on the subject. The subreddit r/worldbuilding consists of more than a million amateur worldbuilders with their own personal projects. There, users share tips or discuss topics like map-making, aesthetics, plot development, and naming conventions — mechanics borrowed from worldbuilding’s literary origins. In Steering the Craft, a 1998 nonfiction book on writing, the novelist Ursula K. Le Guin described “world-making” as a collaboration between the writer and reader. “The world of the story must be created and explained within the story,” Le Guin wrote. “It’s a tricky business.” Today, this tricky business is essential for not only novelists, but also artists, filmmakers, designers, programmers, and all kinds of content creators.
In this decade, worldbuilding is not just an imaginative exercise with purely artistic aims. The writer-reader relationship has been supplanted by a creator-consumer dynamic. As a thinly veiled commercial endeavor, its purpose is to oil the wheels of major fan-favorite franchises. Worldbuilding provides grist for expansion. The wider the world, the more spin-offs it can contain. See: the Marvel Cinematic Universe, Pokémon, Star Wars, Harry Potter, Super Mario, and many many more.
What once was the job of a lone creator — developing characters, aesthetics, story arcs, historical lore, and laws that govern a universe — has been rendered into a production model, one that prioritizes efficiency and profit over ingenuity. Game of Thrones creator George R. R. Martin once grouped worldbuilders into two types: architects and gardeners. These days, there seem to be fewer gardeners (Martin considers himself one), creators who allow a world to organically bloom. Most franchise worlds are architected to market-researched perfection. These efforts are not exclusive to the entertainment industry. Consumer brands, from the iconic (Nike, LEGO, The Coca-Cola Company) to the newly emergent (Duolingo, Ruby Hibiscus Water, Poolsuite), are equally invested in developing product-oriented worlds. It’s the latest evolution in the ubiquitous pursuit of branding. “Brands” — agglomerations of logos, slogans, and signature aesthetics — are limiting, while “worlds” are immersive and interactive. Branding, then, is just the flimsy precursor to worldbuilding.
To contend with our ever-slimming attention spans, even advertisements are concocting persistent storylines with fictional characters and backstories to compel consumers into caring. Jake from State Farm has a mini-series on TikTok, where he performs “good neighbor deeds.” If a story becomes exhausted, a franchise can simply explore more of its setting. A character with a singular narrative has limited branding potential. A world, by contrast, offers infinite possibilities.