Myst and the connection of worlds and games

I thought I’d start out talking about more of my philosophy of this blog. To me, the thing I’m most interested in is not just writing, but about immersion.

I suppose this seems really obvious, but sometimes when I read a story, I don’t feel immersed, and I wonder if that’s maybe because the author wasn’t himself immersed enough to experience the world, and think about the details of daily life in that world. If an author isn't interested enough to immerse himself in his own world, how can I as a reader be immersed?

I'm a fan of the world of the adventure game series (and later novel series) of Myst. The world, I think paints such a wonderful picture of writing and world building.

For those maybe not familiar with Myst, it was a graphical adventure game on CD (one of the very first) in the early 90s. The story of the world centers on special books called “linking books”. A person writes a book and can create a world [1] and then “link” to that world and walk around and explore it. This is fairly obvious as a metaphor for world-creation so it was probably meant to be (after all, it was itself a world that was designed).

In my writing I don't merely want to describe the places, people, things and events but I want to explore it, see what it is like to actually live in those worlds, experience it for myself. Of course, we can’t really build worlds, but there are other ways.

One way I do this is through simply the way I write. I love writing in a first person”in character” point of view from inside the world. It helps me think about how the characters see themselves and others inside their world.

Another way is through games and online tools we can break some of the barriers to experience to open the world. I sometimes role-play (more like play-acting since there are no stats or dice) as a character from one of my worlds on a 3D chart room program called Second Life. I’ve also built things on the same program from the world, such as a house. It’s pretty cool to see a “object” represented in 3D space that I can move through, and even though I still can’t actually touch, I can interact with it as my “avatar” proxy and it is at least one more step towards real.

Another way writers can connect with other people, and experience their own world is through games. It seems now a days creating games is easier than before with simple programs and good documentation. You don’t really need a big budget to make a game. Some games don’t even need graphics at all, and but the world can be described by text. [2]

Immersion is proof that there is something that is "clicking together" in your world and that people will connect with the world you created, and there are a lot of great tools out there for you to connect to your own world, and allow others to connect with your world. Also it's a lot of fun!

[1] Or, linking to one of an infinite number of worlds that also happen to exist already that are exactly as described by the books. Both theories are argued (hotly) by the characters in the novels, and no one way is shown to be right, though I think I would favor the world-creation theorem myself.

[2] If you're interested in doing this, you might want to check out MUDs (Multi-User Dungeons) which are basically multilayer text adventures. If you want to see what one is like, Midevia is a fairly large one with I beleive 10,000 players.
Also there is BYOND (build your own net dream) which is a graphical program for designing online games. It has a good online framework, and pretty good support and documentation. It has a coding-based system (based on the language C) which while maybe a little harder to use than a cookie-cutter script system like in programs like Construct (another pretty good game design program I use), I think it can do much more as is worth learning. (I don't think learning a program language is as hard as it seems).