Throughout the week, we’ve been using various methods for world building, either through a game or through a rapid class discussion. Both of these methods involve finding a starting point and answering questions that this starting point creates. But as you answer the questions and begin to expand the world, more questions arise in relation to these new aspects to the world. This is something that I’ve also observed in both of the projects that we’ve worked on. No matter what sort of medium we were working with, it would always come down to answering questions about whatever world we were creating. However, there is one clear difference in what we use as a starting point in the different projects and exercises from this week. Either we started with a specific question about the future or we started with an object or location from the future and asked questions of it.
The nature of your starting point does become relevant, as the first object that you create for some world will have a huge impact on the overall scope and tone of the project. For example, starting with a location like most groups did on Wednesday will lead to questions about the city of Chicago, while starting with something smaller (such as some of our projects,) will start with a much more focused vision. There are merits to both directions and scales. Starting with a question can help figure out what sorts of themes you expect to play around with, this is why Heartwoods’s felt so well put together, each question was thematically consistent with the past. This allowed for a continuous world that easily grew upon itself. Meanwhile, the exercise on Wednesday allowed us to start at a larger scale than before and come up with such wildly different histories over the course of about an hour. As someone who is interested in creative writing and the ways in which we envision the future, I’m interested in seeing how we’ll use these practices to create our rooms.
Climate Change in Media and Design 
Nicho—thanks for this interesting consideration of worldbuilding starting points. One thing that you point out that seems particularly compelling to me is the temporal mode of the start point in question: how does starting at a point in the past affect worldbuilding differently than starting from a point in the future, or in the present? Which perspective forecloses/opens up the most potentialities? You would think that beginning in the past, and thus constructing a history, would more strictly determine the rest of the world moving forward in time, but is this necessarily true? Might having a more structured foundation instead support and encourage more diverse imaginings? I’m curious about how your rooms might explore these world building temporalities.
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