A World Not Desperate to Explain Itself

Hey everyone, thanks so much for indulging with me on this one! This one is certainly more meditative than bound to a single game, so forgive me as I wander about. A few quick things I forgot: - Definitely check out the full Q&A with the Wildermyth team here -> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzYbn_w5FJw - I made an editing oopsies around the 09:30 mark for about 15 seconds, so if you can imagine some KILLER AWESOME EDITING SKILLS instead of what I give you, that'd be really great. Hopefully it doesn't detract from the flow. - I try to respond to every comment I get, so please do leave one!

"I've seen your kind, time and time again. Every fleeing man must be caught. Every secret must be unearthed. Such is the conceit of the self-proclaimed seeker of truth. But in the end, you lack the stomach. For the agony you'll bring upon yourself." -Vilhelm, Dark Souls 3

And then you get Morrowind, where you get so much lore that it actually begins to contradict itself and you notice that a lot of the sources and people you get this info from are telling it in a way that pushes a certain agenda, or is so ancient that even the certain phrasing of a sentence can create a dichotomy between factions hundreds of year later, that you have no idea what IS right or wrong, and that you more or less have to choose for yourself what to believe.

I get this vibe heavily from Dishonored. There's frequent mention of an exotic continent named Pandyssia. The game features a plague that was said to have originated there, and in the sequel, we see Pandyssian insects infesting homes. Aside from that, there are some unfinished journals from expeditions into the continent, all of which end abruptly. There's also the largely unexplained history of whales being the source of magic, and their ties to a god-like figure known as the Outsider. Nothing is really explained. The game is absolutely dripping with lyrical worldbuilding.

I see this in D&D and similar games a lot. The DM gets so enamored of their own worldbuilding, with languages and history and so on, that they get caught in a sort of sunk cost situation, where they NEED to tell the players What's Really Going On, and Where It All Came From. I love worldbuilding as much as anyone, but as a DM I've cultivated being okay with the players not knowing, not finding, not fully understanding, and even sometimes not even seeing all the stuff I built for them. I want the players to feel like the world is deeper than they can see, and older than their adventuring lifespans, and part of that is keeping things out of reach, unless they seek them out. At which point they truly DISCOVER something that's already there.

This is exactly why I love the Mad Max series. Each movie after the first feels like a myth played out on screen, a story that is both canon and apocryphal. It all happens, none of it happens, who cares; it’s part of the legend. The wasteland can only be anecdotal and because of that partially unknowable

this video cured me of self-doubt, acrimony, and the feeling that I am doomed to disappoint anyone who believes in me. thank you.

I'm so glad I finally had this explained in a way that clicked with me. You always hear "show don't tell" "don't overexplain everything". But something about the phrase "A World Not Desperate to Explain Itself" just hits different and really has me rethinking a lot of my exposition dumps in my novel. I realize that the deep worldbuilding and lore I've built up will be far more interesting to the reader, and certainly more fun for me to write if I keep secrets to myself or keep mysteries even from myself. Keeps the imagination flowing without putting in a ton of work just to cheapen my world with answers.

This is something I had to learn myself, to get over my anxiety, to be unapologetic about being me. To be "a person not desperate to explain themself".

that's why i love adventure time so much, everything being so vague makes it feel so real

“Closure…. It’s like a drug.” -David Lynch It’s not to bash frustrated people who want answers but “can’t” have them. It’s about reminding ourselves that we don’t have to, and shouldn’t, stop wondering about mysteries because of lack of information. Especially in fiction. Like, it’s understandable, but also really strange when someone is quicker to attribute a lack of information to be the cause of no explanation, and therefore lazy, instead of there being a mundane, true answer, where the ideas you come up with are probably more fascinating than the thing itself. Like finding a machine in Sable, as you mentioned. When I ask “I wonder how that works?”, I imagine like three different possibilities for how little mechanisms could take shape inside the machine. For others, they don’t do that, they ask “I wonder how that works?” but then imagine no further than the question, and where to find an answer, instead of the machine itself. Again—totally understandable, but it boggles me. It comes off as, you’re missing out on yourself.

I think that this is part of the beauty of Ghibli films, like Spirited Away. They aren't afraid to have distant mountains

I'm suprised shadow of the colossus wasn't mentionned here, it's so vague about everything but it really sticks with me for some reason

You have no idea how much this helped me regain my writing confidence.

This is my favorite type of world building. Where there is no pages of lore explaining the history of every little thing, just small exerpts of 2-3 sentences. Really allows the imagination to flow

I feel like every question that you answer in the world should only raise more, to create that urge to want to know more. A compulsion.

Another really good example of over-explaining is Baldor in LotR, the body they find on the Path of the Dead outside the locked door that Aragorn makes a big deal of how they'll never know what's beyond that door. It freaked me out as a kid because I wondered what dark force was beyond there that they didn't even want to speculate what it was. Then I learned Tokien said in one of his essays that Baldor had been trying to break into some dark temple when he was ambushed and his legs broken. While it's still horrifying and there's plenty of mystery, it just turned the moment into something so mundane for me. It's fun to know the truth or intent of something, but the mystery and wonder has its own allure as long as it's not over-used or trying to patch bad writing Wildermyth really fed that for me, with stories that refused to give you a conclusion so you can make it yourself. The flame shrine felt good because you really don't know what you're getting into letting a flame spirit possess your character, all you see is the result of your character slowly being burned away by flame and if that's good or bad (non-mechanically) is entirely up to you. Is it giving them power? Stealing theirs? I don't know, and it's great to wonder how all this will end up once the story ends. Tangent: Thanks for listing where the game footage came from, I was going mad trying to track down The Pathless because the visuals looked cool and had no luck until I saw it in your notes. I've also been pronouncing Wildermyth as Will-der-myth not Wild-er-myth and now I'm revaluating my life choices lol

Some modern Star Wars fans would do well to not the difference between “I don’t know what happened, it is better if there is some left out, just like real history” and “it is just a story, stop taking it seriously, it doesn’t matter”

Wildermyth is the height of collaborative storytelling with the audience's imagination. The studio has just finished content for the game and I desperately hope they are about to keep up this sort of evocative and emergent storytelling with a future endeavor.

This video is very comforting for my own worldbuilding. I’ve had quite a big dilemma for a while with my own worldbuilding when there are things I don’t want to explain, and I’d rather just say “I don’t know what happened”, but I felt obligated to come up with a concrete answer. But now I can confidently write I don’t know what happened