This is an opinion piece where I’m going to quickly rant about worldbuilding. I won’t delay too much.
This opinion piece is very ranty and kinda angry because I wrote it after getting insanely frustrated. This was following an attempt on my part to get back into making my own world. I realized that doing so with the tools available was painful. At some point I’m going to re-write this (or at least make it a bit more polished) but I don’t know when that’ll be.
I’ve had issues with how worldbuilding is presented online for a long while now. In fact, the early life of this wiki was filled with me trying to figure out how to criticize big names like Artifexian and Jan Misali (though the latter is conlang-focused).
I never really got to that, but I do kinda plan to at some point. This’ll basically be a taste.
The big issue is a focus on realism rather than plausibility. Artifexian and his ilk tend to recommend going full-on realistic worldbuilding: define a star system, then the continental plates, then build up like that…etc.
There are several issues with this approach:
The first point is the one that matters most and directly feeds into the second point. I’m someone who adapted some of Artifexian’s hints partially and found that it would still take hours to make an island smaller than Switzerland. This when I’m wanting to create at least four Eurasia-style continents.
Obviously: no. That’s bad.
The third point is related to something I’d call “worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding” which is something that could be talked about more, but I’ll try to keep it brief. Worldbuilding for the sake of worldbuilding is mostly pointless because worldbuilding is meant to serve some other purpose – story/game/whatever.
Though I would differentiate this from worldbuilding as a hobby (like what Tolkien did).
The online community surrounding worldbuilding seems to favor this kind of pointless worldbuilding whose only purpose is to brag about online and, in those cases, it really isn’t surprising that there’s a prioritization on what is/isn’t ‘realistic’.
Basically, my issue is that the online community is focused around worldbuiding as a hobby for the purposes of bragging – rather than looking at worldbuilding as a tool meant to help the craft of storytelling. Due to this, all the major tips for worldbuilding are focused around realism, which results in processes that are extremely inefficient.
That inefficiency then manifests as wasted time and effort.
The tools available for worldbuilding are laughably and frustratingly unsuitable for the process, which is also related to the above cultural issues.
In fact, the reason I’m writing this is because I had the urge to work on one of my worlds only to remember why I stopped working on it actively.
When it comes to mapping tools you, as a worldbuilder, only have a few options and none of them are good.
First of all are the generators. None of these are suitable because they generate randomly and never allow you to import your own map (where you draw a coastline by itself for example). Exports are also hit or miss.
That isn’t even getting into all the other issues with random generators.
Second are the dedicated mapping tools. In general, all of these are garbage due to lacking many critical features. The one I’ll use as an example is Wonderdraft, which I paid for. Wonderdraft is just a bitmap-based mapping tool which doesn’t support layers (as far as I can tell) and is very very limited in features. If you want to create something in a pre-picked style: Wonderdraft is perfect. For everything else it just isn’t good.
Now, if you don’t want to deal with that you could totally just install a GIS-based mapping tool. And while I’ve been considering it, I don’t recommend it due to the insane complexity of these kinds of tools.
So at this point you’d end up with the third option: professional art programs. You can pick whichever one you want because the experience is mostly the same.
Here you’ll either pick the raster editors or the vector editors. The above culture recommends vector-based editors (Affinity Designer, Inkscape, Adobe Illustrator) and this is the route I’d recommend as well. Though the catch is that you’re doing a lot of manual work whether you pick vector or raster.
Affinity Designer is what I use but I just don’t enjoy the process of making all those map layers manually. I’d prefer something else but something else doesn’t exist.
Moving on from mapping there’s the everything else and, here, you can see that the worldbuilding culture really doesn’t know what should exist.
Most of these have the same basic idea to them: you have a bunch of templates and you fill in text data manually. There’s no real automation – which would be beneficial – which makes the long-term use of these tools painful. And you might also find yourself locked in an ecosystem.
For reference, I’ve used Dokuwiki, Scrivener and Obsidian for organizing my worldbuilding notes and, of those, Obsidian was the best suited…but I also realized that it is completely unsuitable.
You may have just registered that I said the best software for the job is also not suitable for the job at all.
This also generally applies to the Obsidian alternatives, though I haven’t tried Notion which may or may not be better for this.
Often I find myself wondering why I should even bother with a lot of these organizational tools. They are functionally identical to pen and paper – except they exist in a digital form that sometimes is harder to look thru. And I often lack the means to keep track of changes.
The actual process of worldbuilding is the opposite of fun considering the tools that are available are simply garbage.
I don’t ever feel empowered by the tools available…in fact, I feel actively held back. Sometimes it seems like the tools are actively preventing me from worldbuilding. This is only signaling to me that if you want something done: you have to do it yourself.
You may also wonder how the culture and tools relate to each-other. Well, it’s quite simple: because the culture prioritizes realism to the detriment of more efficient/expedient yet still plausible worldbuilding…well, this reflects in the tools that they promote and develop for themselves.