Belated as ever, I know, but the first of our weekly-to-monthly updates of the year is here! Happy New Year and welcome back, Video Game Academy readers. Welcome… to the Year of Worldbuilding.
(Whole articles could–and shall!–be written on the use of ellipses in JRPGs… the old oratorical flourish of a dramatic pause is the least of it. The thoughtful facial expression, the pensive self-forgetting, the grim determination, the speechless sorrow–so many ways this little trinity (give or take) of punctuation gets deployed…)
We are never done tinkering with myth in games, of course, but the time has come to turn our attention to a related key theme in the overlapping fields of video game studies and the humanities. Worldbuilding is the task before every would-be author of speculative fiction, which is to say everyone who has ever enjoyed a book or video game set in a (sub)created world and wondered if they could make one someday. Kudos to all those who do make the attempt! And all encouragement to those who, like us, wish that we might!
It’s well worth watching the Gottliebs’ presentation about their experience. The insight that sticks with me is the twofold, bidirectional nature of the worldbuilding impulse which they elaborate together: how we as players are imaginatively involved in evoking the images and story of the game, particularly when it is retro in presentation, much like we do with the text of a written story; and how we are inspired to put ourselves in the place of the developer, to imagine how we might want to go about things if we were to make our own game.
Ever since Tolkien mused on “other minds and hands” in his famous letter to Milton Waldman, the full spectrum of fandom, from fanfiction followers to transparent imitators to anxiety-of-influence-laden latecomers and romantic originators of new classics, has been lured out into the open, though it feels like every day the flywheel of content creation and consumption spins faster, and its deleterious effect on whatever real world we still share becomes more lurid. Worldbuilding is just the sort of preliminary, lore-bearing activity we mostly carve out time for studying here, somewhat to our own chagrin, when all the cool philosophers and game studies kids prefer to say with Marx that after all the goal is not just to interpret the world, but to “change it.” Still, we prefer to stay with Rilke’s speaking image of the great, shattered beauty and listen when it says: “you must change your life.”
Why worldbuilding, though? Shouldn’t we start with building something on a slightly smaller scale, perhaps a school–or school of thought–or a neighborhood, or a home, or a steady devotion to some even smaller upbuilding practice of service or mentorship, reading or writing, meditation or prayer? Preposterously enough, the intuition that drives this whole quixotic project tells me that when we are at work in any of these vital ways, we are always also worldbuilding, and that by zooming out and seeing that largest possible framework, trying to get a glimpse of what sort of world we are in the process of fashioning, we might be able to better grasp all the day-to-day upbuilding efforts that we are about.
So, thank you for being here with us at the Video Game Academy for another year of reading, writing, playing, teaching, learning, working on languages and practicing music, or whatever your resolutions might entail.
While it’s still roughly the right time of year, I’m bound to share, like I seem to do every year, this obscure one from Sufjan Stevens–and wishing you once again all the best this 2026!
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