In recent years a much wider part of the population has become cognizant of the concept of worldbuilding than used to be the case. Long the refuge of individuals absorbed in certain fiction genres and tabletop games, worldbuilding is one of those more specialized concerns (like “beats” in screenwriting, or “shipping” in fan communities) that have spread into wider consciousness, and constitute organs of the Intellectual Property behemoth. Even when an instance of IP is, strictly speaking, supposed to operate in the real world, the narratives require a continuity, a wholeness, to their brands. Every cinematic universe is an alternate world.
Worldbuilding, I think, entails two fundamental things. One is the proposition of a virtual space that differs from conventional representations of our reality. The other involves rules allowing for both order and variation. Virtualization and gamification make the alternate world a compelling one: press Reset, load up a new and simplified set of instructions.
The rules are reductive at first. For instance, role-playing games can feature entire races of beings that are “good” or “evil” or “neutral.” In Harry Potter, the four houses separate different personality types. Such distillations provide onlookers with useful shorthand. (And, sometimes they whisper: “pay no attention to the phrenology or racism behind the curtain!”) You can have classifications and stats and grammar for fictional languages; there are so many possible generative limitations.
From this simplified order arises complexity, in time, just as starting positions in chess or Go offer practically infinite permutations. The complexity itself can then be a selling point and a comfort. TV shows (like Game of Thrones) may be difficult to follow for novice viewers because of the scope and labyrinthine plotting. For big, convoluted, complex worlds and stories, there are explainers and reaction videos and fan “theories” debating the finer points of “canon.” Some commentators have celebrated this development as a sign of increasing cognitive gains. (I disagree.)
If it was once a niche, introverted, perhaps disreputable activity to be absorbed with the exact mutant power levels of a superhero team or the sixteen sub-races of elves in an RPG, it is now a pretty common topic of everyday conversation and a tether of online profile self-fashioning. (“My fandoms are X, Y, and Z. I ship characters A and B.”) Brand-worlds like Marvel, Harry Potter, Disney, Game of Thrones, Warcraft, Fortnite, etc., have come to dominate culture. In all of these cases, worldbuilding is merged with the needs of maintaining and growing the brand image.
The IP world always looks “back,” i.e., to the library of content, to the archive, to the readymade audience. The IP world also looks “forward,” to expansions, renewals, revisions, and reiterations. It wipes the slate clean. (But residue always remains.)
But aren’t these popular genres the expressions of the people? Aren’t superheroes “our modern mythology”? Even when the content is corporate, isn’t fandom itself a “site of contestation”?
Detached from subcultural friction, mainstream media fandoms, frankly, feel airless and lifeless given that IP is so dominant. Consuming and talking about corporate entertainment is not, itself, countercultural! The reason this obvious truth is not so obvious to many, right now, is because the IP worldbuilding behemoth is very good at promoting its newest iterations as solutions to the inadequacies of its own past. Consider the stellar branding job that, say, Marvel has done on a significant portion of the population to get them to believe that celebrating its movies and TV shows is the most effective and virtuous way to promote racial, ethnic, and sexual diversity in media. Some people really seem to believe this! Mind-boggling.
I’m reminded of Ivan Illich on modernity’s rise of “disabling professions,” which referred to the phenomenon in which domains of knowledge are asserted as the exclusive purview of special professional classes, so that people are no longer authorities on their own lives or capabilities, but instead are detached from the means to take care of themselves. These professionals mediate public life with their expertise on the good, and benefit from this status, as well.
“When a craftsman, such as a gunmaker, was called into court as an expert to reveal to the jury the secrets of his trade, he apprenticed on the spot the jury to his craft. He demonstrated visibly his limited and circumscribed expertise and enabled the jury to decide for themselves from which barrel the bullet might have come. Today, most experts play a different role. The dominant professional provides jury or legislature with his own and fellow-initiates’ global opinion, rather than with factual self-limiting evidence and specific skill. Armed with an aura of divine authority, he calls for a suspension of the hearsay rule and inevitably undermines the rule of law. Thus, one sees how democratic power is subverted by an unquestioned assumption of an all-embracing professionalism.”
This is partly what I think of when I see the rubberstamped discourses about mainstream media and representation
Though a IP brand is durable and visible, its iterations may not be—so spin-offs, sequels, prequels, remakes, and reboots are all expected to keep the brand top-of-mind. The short-shelf-life reboot phenomenon, in particular, seems to be an especially fascinating/maddening example of IP-world iterability. So we have a new, “paradigm-shifting” Batman or Spider-Man every few years.
I think the IP-world, if it could, would try to colonize the imaginative capacity of the spectator itself, and immobilize the spectator’s ability to ever dream “otherwise”—in short, to ever dream at all.
In Finite and Infinite Games, James P. Carse distinguishes between a finite game, which is played to be won, and an infinite game, which is played in order to continue playing. The infinite game, in a way, is the only one there is, and is even synonymous with being. The need for content in this IP-dominant era suggests that companies and creators are always hoping to keep unfurling their products, i.e., to gesture toward the infinite game so that they can keep playing. Audiences will keep watching, speculating, buying, and enjoying. I do wonder if there are some cracks in the structure, foretelling the eventual demise of IP as we know it. IP is actually a finite game that strives, poignantly, toward infinite game status.
Why is it a finite game? Well, variations and iterations don’t make something infinite. Possibilities go away; dark and empty spaces for the imagination to fill out become unavailable. When you are in control of your IP and constantly trying to say every quiet part out loud, you illuminate too much sooner or later. You take up all the resources because you have not allowed some to be left over. This unsaid surplus is why fanfic, slash fiction, etc., come into existence at all, when they read lovingly against the grain, or in expansion of it, to deliberately alter or queer IPs by doing what the originals wouldn’t or couldn’t: they’re aiming to bend the beloved world back into a shape that is usable because it allows for dreaming.
The Navigator: A Medieval Odyssey (Vincent Ward, 1988) follows a group of medieval English villagers as they attempt to cast a cross that they can erect on a church steeple, to please God and ward off the plague. When the adventurers exit the tunnels through which they’ve journeyed, they enter the twentieth century. But they assimilate this encounter into their own understanding of the world: they don’t entertain the possibility of time travel because the strangeness of cars and tall buildings is a spatial one, to them, not temporal. They’ve simply traveled to a great city and this must be what those look like. For so much of the world, over so much of history, it has seemed completely natural to people that one lived much like one’s ancestors, and later generations would live much like the present one did. Simple awareness of this orientation to time and the world seems like a significant feat of empathic imagination in contrast to the novelty-fracking we see more often today.