In the third week of this course, world-building was an aspect that really shaped my understanding of the pivotal components of a video game. I was so interested in this topic that I looked up the different effects that world-building can bring about, other than in-game. It was then that I came across Nuren Iftekhar’s article, “Learning worldbuilding from video games”. In this article, the author talks about world-building and how it could compare to literature. Iftekhar states, “Literature builds up the atmosphere through worldbuilding alone whereas video games have graphical and audio stimuli to go with it” (3). When analyzing this quote, I realized that video games can be considered a form of a book or story. The only difference is the luxury of having graphics and audio to help form the image of the world. With the help of these two components, video games allow for people to put an image towards understanding what something possibly looks like. Likewise, this means that if authors want to be truly successful, they need to work really hard on describing the setting they want their readers to imagine. To bring in another point, some people may be better verbal learners than visual learners. To me, visually understanding a world is the easiest approach here. Think about describing our real world. No matter what people may write, our world is too complex to be fully communicated to another solely over words. The closest form we can get towards imagining something so extensive is through graphics.

Another point of this article is that little details that sometimes go unnoticed actually play a crucial role in games. Iftekhar puts it as, “It can be a poster on the wall with information that would seem mundane otherwise, the ramblings of a non-playable character about his day-to-day life, the terrain with all its vegetations and inhabitants, the currency that sets the tone for the world, the clothing that tells you more than you need to about how well off their economy is or perhaps about the weather” (5). As we can see, there is a chance that throughout your gaming career, you could have missed some of the signs that these little details were trying to tell you about the fictional world you were engaged in. I know I have. Having read this article, I plan to look at the finer parts of the world’s where games are based upon. By doing this, I truly believe that I stand a better chance of understanding the time period a game is based upon and an overall purpose of the characters and how they interact with their environment.

Lastly, when looking at the article “Learning worldbuilding from video games”, I think that we can establish some connections with one of the assigned readings for this course, Mark Wolf’s, “BioShock Infinite: World-building”. Iftekhar’s article surfaces more on the ideas of literature and video games, while Wolf’s work is more about narration and how the real world compares to imaginary worlds in games. For example, Wolf states, “BioShock Infinite demonstrates that video games not only tell engaging stories and can introduce us to immensely detailed imaginary worlds but also invite us to reflect on our own world. Even when the worlds depicted are overtly fantastic and unrealistic, they can nevertheless create desires in their audiences, cravings for new technologies such as flying cars…” (80). With this quote, we can say that some may look at a game’s environment and compare it to what they want to see in real life. This forms a direct correlation between video games and literature, which is arguably Iftekhar’s purpose. This means that people can reflect on the real world as they read as well. Although it may be harder to envision, people can have fantasies about what they want to see in our world vs the world in a book.

To sum it all up, I think that people should become aware of how important a game’s environment really is to the overall message and story of the game. We can even draw a connection to video games and literature. Either way, both writers and video game creators have a tough task at hand. That task is making the environment/setting clear to their audiences. And with us as the receivers, how we choose to put meaning towards the environment/setting is completely voluntary.

-Andy Kissoon