The Importance of Worldbuilding

Editors note: Welcome to issue #4 of Transcriptions.

Mortimus has been on a bit of a lull lately. Both of us are heads down on new projects and this newsletter has taken a hit. It’s time to rectify that.

So today, we’d like to present the transcript of a talk given by Robert Kurvitz. Robert and his art collective were the brainchild of Disco Elysium — a wonderful RPG experience that we’ve had the pleasure of immersing ourselves in.

Disco is a really special and unique game. It has truly astounding writing, some great character work, immersive and stylish art, and a lovingly tragic soundtrack. It’s a complete package of world building. And it continues to inspire us at Mortimus.

Hopefully this talk will inspire you all as well.

• What World Building Represents Today

• Suggestions for World Builders

  • Don’t Do High Fantasy

  • Do Whatever Else You Want—Transpose High Fantasy Elements

  • Build Your World for at Least 5 Years Before Showtime

  • Make Sure You Own the Majority of the Company That Owns the IP

  • Names Are the Most Important Attribute of a Built World

  • Keep a Name Bank

  • Test-Drive Your Names in Sentences

  • Say Names Out Loud

  • Misreading as a Creative Technique

  • Find the Humor and Heartbreak in Your World

  • Make Sure Your World Can Support Multiple Genres

  • Write It in a Book Before You Use It in a Video Game

• Q/A

Mentioned in his talk:

Books/Literature

• Germinal by Émile Zola

• Tolkien’s works (The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers)

• Dune by Frank Herbert

• Hyperion Saga by Dan Simmons

• William Gibson’s works (cyberpunk fiction)

• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy by John le Carré

• Ada by Vladimir Nabokov

• The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov (mentioned as something he deliberately hasn’t read)

• Gabriel García Márquez’s works (also deliberately unread)

• Neil Gaiman’s works (mentioned but unread by Kurvitz)

• Homer’s Greek epics

Video Games

• Disco Elysium (Kurvitz’s own game)

• Dragon Age: Origins / Dragon Age series (BioWare)

• Dragon Age: Dreadwolf

• Baldur’s Gate

• Neverwinter

• Icewind Dale

• Arcanum (mentioned for its desert “Vendigroth”)

• Mass Effect

Tabletop/Settings

• Dungeons & Dragons

• Forgotten Realms

• Greyhawk

Film/TV

• Star Wars

• Bureau of Legends (French spy series—he calls it better than le Carré)

• James Bond films

Other

• Brian Eno (music producer, “sonic architect”)

• The Death of Marat (painting by Jacques-Louis David)

My name is Robert Kurvitz. I made a game called Disco Elysium—thank you, that was very sweet of you—and I consider myself to be, well, I make my money by being a writer. That has somehow mysteriously turned out to be the most monetizable skill that I have, and I did a lot of that on Disco Elysium too.

But my first suggestion to you—and this is going to be like a BuzzFeed article, I’m just going to list wisdom that I want to impart on you because I’m going to be 40 in three months. Everybody knows that the moment you hit 40 you become incredibly wise, so I’m going to subject you to some of the wisdom that I’ve amassed over the years.

That topic is going to be world-building. And here’s the first piece of wisdom: I don’t consider myself a writer or a musician or a video game developer, which is one of the many things that I’ve done and had the privilege to do. I want to call myself something fancier. I want to call myself a World Builder, mostly.

I would very much suggest to anyone: don’t attach yourself to these beautiful giant words like “writer” or “musician,” because then you’re going to be in competition with all the best writers in the world. I’ve never wanted to do that.

There’s this music producer called Brian Eno, and well, he could call himself a producer, but sometimes—quite often—he calls himself a “sonic architect” in liner notes, which I think is silly and cute. So my first suggestion is: come up with a fantasy title, in D&D terms a prestige class, for yourself. In this way you will never be in competition with anyone. You’re not a writer, you’re not a musician—you’re some weird thing that you came up with. And I’m a World Builder. So that’s the capacity in which I’m here with you today.

I have another thing that I don’t do: I don’t prepare for speeches, and apparently for workshops and things. I just come and wing it. But world-building is something that I think about anyway, every day, most of the time—maybe even half of the time I’m awake. So hopefully it’ll be in some way useful for you, because it’s just what I’m thinking about anyway.

I will try to basically list things that I found useful, or maybe in some ways even novel, in world-building. I hope that some of these things are in some way useful for you in your career—in basically anything in entertainment, because world-building is a very important part of entertainment today.

I will try to do it in three parts. First, I will very shortly say what I think world-building is, what it represents for investors today, and what it is generally in the entertainment industry. Then I will list my BuzzFeed-esque suggestions to you. And then finally I’ll take a couple of questions if I have any time. I’m a very verbose person, so that might not happen, but let’s see.

First of all, I would say that world-building is more important than it has ever been. If you’re interested in world-building or if your job is to do world-building, don’t ever sell yourself short. You’re worth a billion bucks. If coming up with entire worlds is your passion, then yeah—don’t let anyone tell you that you’re not a billion bucks in the making.

Because if you look at it this way: there’s been a long, I would say, trepidation in gaming especially, but also in other forms of entertainment, that perhaps TikTok is just going to come and take all our jobs. But I have learned from very smart investors that that’s not actually how they see it.

TikTok and the little fidgety things we do with our phones are what is called “scattered time.” Human beings always had scattered time. They just used to fidget with some straws or play a banjo or just sit around when they had scattered time. So scattered time is not going to take focus time. People still want to focus.

I’m being very large-picture McKinsey consultants here, but I found it very interesting to hear this—not my thoughts. People still have a requirement for focus time. So what do people do in focus time? They play video games. That’s one of the things they do. They also can maybe watch half a movie, and then TV series and books.

So the requirement to focus is not going to go away, and it’s not going to be eaten away by scattered time. So you’re not out of a job—good news.

And when you do focus time, when human beings focus on things, one of the things they like to focus on is other worlds. They like to go away from their lives, from the day, into an alternative or slightly even dreamlike state. This is what all video game people know as the coveted “immersion,” or I call it “immersive time.”

As World Builders, this is basically what we do: we build other worlds that people can go away to, from this world of ours. And as people who provide that, you’re never going to be in any way short of a job—because for some reason, people want to get away from our world more and more.

Now, there are maybe different interesting theories that you can have for why that’s the case. But for some reason, in the age of modernity, we just come up with industrial amounts of other worlds. Whereas in previous historical periods, you would have the Heroic Age for the Greeks—that was their world-building, and everyone just set their stories in that one. Generally, all world-building was something that happened 400 years ago, when things were cooler, nicer, more heroic.

Then, for many reasons—one of them legal, because we no longer have legal access to other people’s built worlds—that’s no longer the case in modernity. Now, no one knows what modernity means or what it is. We have no idea of the time period we’re in, but it seems to be something that’s not very nice. People don’t want to spend time here.

And as World Builders, this is what we do: we give them a little window into another place. That window will always be an essential psychological good, or virtue, or very freeing experience.

So you can come up with different theories about why modernity is such a strange place, with suddenly 10 million other worlds to go away to, not just one. But I think it speaks to something about the lack of heroism in our age, or how much stress we have here.

Anyway, that’s just a very large-picture understanding of what I think of as world-building. And you may have noticed I didn’t use the word “escapism.” I don’t think all world-building is escapism. I mean, if you look at Homer, who wrote the Greek epics that completely shaped the Greek mind—he was probably not thinking that he’s creating escapism.

So I wouldn’t suggest thinking of world-building as escapism. I would think of it as a vital psychological service to your fellow men. Doing that maybe sounds a little grandeloquent, and some would say pretentious, but it also may help you aim high and not sell yourself short.

Now, when money looks at you and you’re a World Builder, they think Star Wars, Lord of the Rings—dollar signs are in their eyes. One out of every million World Builders builds an IP. World-building is seen as an incredibly quintessential element of IP. One might even say that world-building is all of IP.

Even legally, if you start determining what an IP is, world-building makes up most of it: names, concepts, visual language. So it is a big business, as they say.

And don’t take this little hiccup in capitalism too seriously—the one that’s taking place right now. I understand it’s a very hard time; it’s a hard time for all of us in gaming. But nothing—none of this little financial oddness—has really changed what we’re called upon to do as entertainers. The audience is still out there. So keep strong, believe in what you do, and I think we’ll get through it.

Now, that’s the boring philosophical part. I’m now going to try to workshop you.

The first thing I would suggest—and I’m just going to brutally and boringly suggest things to you to do as World Builders—this does not mean, you know, I’m going to preface it: this is not the only way to do world-building. This might not even be the way I do world-building. It might be the way that it sounds good for me to say that I do world-building. But nonetheless, I hope some of it might be useful.

Just don’t. Don’t do it.

The reason for that is the same as why I don’t suggest being a writer: because chances are you’re not going to be a better writer than Émile Zola. You’re not going to write a book better than Germinal. Why try to be a writer? Be something else in which you can be the best, or among the best.

So, high fantasy was already done as well as it is possible to do high fantasy by this guy called Tolkien. I’m sure we all respect him. And you can just understand that you won’t be able to make better high fantasy than Tolkien by looking at the names of Tolkien’s places.

Names—this will be a recurring theme in this little wisdom-sharing exercise—names are incredibly important to world-building. And when I look at built worlds, I go immediately to the names. Well, Tolkien has like four good names for one mountain. And that’s one mountain—he has four mountains.

So if your high fantasy setting has a name in it as good as Caradhras, all right, you know—now we need seven more. If it has a city of elves in it as good as Lothlórien, I’m sure you’re going to get funding once funding returns to planet Earth. But chances are that might not be the case.

I started out as a high fantasy World Builder. I wanted to build the best world that was ever built because I was 16 years old and I dropped out of school, so I had only my belief in myself. I had to overly inflate it. And quite quickly I understood that I’m just creating lesser versions of Tolkien’s work.

It’s even somewhat offensive to even call his work “intellectual property.” I don’t think that’s quite how it works.

So you might say, “Yeah, but Tolkien’s world isn’t really a world-building world. It’s not really an IP. You can’t set TV series in it.” We have seen that’s not physically possible, actually—although you might try. It is not very easy to play D&D in Tolkien’s world, because constantly you’re going to have to create something as noble and Christian—because that’s a very Christian world—as Tolkien’s characters. And chances are you’re going to be a bit like me: your Elven names are going to be a little lamer.

So there’s also already an answer to that too. This is called Forgotten Realms. Forgotten Realms is basically the perfect middlebrow fantasy setting that just relaxes some of the style guidelines a little bit so everyone can have fun in it, make some jokes. It’s basically a vulgar version of Middle-earth—a secular version of it, like a bar song or like a punk rock track. Which is super cool.

But over the years, Forgotten Realms has just become very, very good. It has great names. If you look at it: Amn—great name. Icewind Dale—great name. Baldur’s Gate—okay name. But Neverwinter—great name. Vaasa—good name.

So I could just go on and on. And also notice that these can also be used as adjectives—so this is another tip: if you name something, then it has to be a good adjective for a place too. So Amnish, Boran—great names. That’s why I think it won over Greyhawk and all of these other settings and kind of subsumed them into itself.

So that’s great fun, but it already exists. The question is: can you make one more fun? And I’m not saying you can’t, but I suggest you don’t try.

Another suggestion that now comes to mind is: do, of course, whatever else you want to do. It’s also important to understand that you can always have high fantasy elements in other worlds.

This is a real thing that I’ve learned: the elements that make high fantasy so fun and adventurous and iconic can just be transposed onto other settings. So a sci-fi setting can have the same elements as a high fantasy setting.

What does a high fantasy setting really have? A place to gather in, certain stereotypes or archetypes of characters, deep history, group dynamics, already out-of-the-box characters that players can just immediately understand who they are, and so on.

All these things—if you really look at high fantasy, and I suggest you do—you can pick it apart into elements, see why it works, and you can bring those elements into another setting. So you can get the coziness, the fun, and so on, without trying to outdo Tolkien and **Forgotten Realms** in medieval fantasy.

“Transposing” is a word from music, which is basically taking one melody and putting it into another chord—which is the reason why all of modern music exists. Basically, all melodies are other melodies that are just transposed into another chord. Otherwise it would be very difficult to even legally make music nowadays anymore. So you can do the same thing with high fantasy.

Another suggestion I would have—and this is going to feel almost impossible to do, but I’m going to give it anyway—I think a world needs to be built for at least 5 years before showtime. At least 5 years before you get into the project, until you start using it in a game or even quite often in a book.

Now, I know I already see a couple of my friends in the audience who have built really cool worlds in like a week. But I am of a different school. I started doing world-building because I thought it was just the grandest thing to do—come up with an entire other world.

And I have seen examples from other world builders that seem to say that I’m correct in this five-year assessment.

For example, Dragon Age—the BioWare IP (though I’m not an incredible fan of the word IP), the BioWare world—was built for three to four years before they started making Origins. So they put a lot of time into just coming up with all of that stuff. And if you play Dragon Age: Origins, you can see that it’s really deep, interesting. They have these cool concepts about golems in that world, and they’ve kind of changed some of the high fantasy language around and have cleverly chosen certain things from George R.R. Martin’s work, which at that time was quite novel to pick from. So it has this quite heavy tradition to it already.

And of course, Tolkien spent about 20 years building his stuff. And then it goes on and on. William Gibson developed his style and his vision of the future for about 7 to 8 years before—I’m not a literary scientist, so don’t quote me on these—but as you can see, it takes a long time. Definitely longer than it is usually done in video games.

Now, video games like to do about a year of pre-production, and then the world’s supposed to go. For Disco Elysium, we did world-building for about 10 or 15 years before we used it in a game. What it allowed me to do was basically walk on water when we produced it—by which I mean I had a solution for everything. I had a joke beforehand. I knew exactly what was happening in this world. It was almost as if I couldn’t do wrong going about the stylistic elements that we had built, because I had so much to draw from.

So this is, I understand, very difficult to say to someone who has to work on video game timelines. But my suggestion would be that if you’re interested in world-building, then you take it up as a hobby. Build a really cool world, hopefully with some other people—it’s fun that way. And then when you get a chance to make a game out of it, you’ll have something in your back pocket.

You don’t have to only build the world; you can do other jobs on the side. But I would suggest building this—what in psychology is called a “paracosm,” which children sometimes come up with—building this paracosm for yourself of these thoughts and ideas, names and places, for when the time comes. You will definitely not regret the time you put into it.

My next suggestion would be—and this is a very dry, legal one, but it comes from a very hard-earned personal experience—when the time comes to use your world in a game or in a Netflix series or whatever, but mostly for you in a game: make sure that you own the majority, or are part of the majority-forming coalition, in the company that owns that IP. So, over 51% generally.

I mean, obviously have a lawyer present. Be a lawyer. Have your mom be a lawyer. Generally in life, have a sidekick like Kim Kitsuragi, but he’s a lawyer, basically—that’s my suggestion to you.

But nonetheless, it really comes down to this: if you don’t have majority control of the company where the IP is at, then sadly, in the place that the entertainment industry is at, you might lose control of it.

Now, I will tell you: there is nothing more heartbreaking than losing control of something you’ve come up with for—what I’ve suggested—this 5 years, for example. Imagine being Tolkien and getting to write The Fellowship of the Ring, and then “we’re bringing in our people to write The Two Towers.” It’s not going to be a very enjoyable process for you to see that Two Towers be written by someone else, because all of the world, all of the effort you put into world-building, is going to be undone.

This happens quite often, because people in business have this unfortunate view of world-building: that it’s just intellectual property and can be picked up by anyone. Which it can’t. You know, Star Wars is George Lucas, for better or for worse. When you hear George Lucas’s ideas about Star Wars, those ring true—that’s Star Wars, even if you don’t agree with them. Other people doing Star Wars are spin-offs of Star Wars, but they don’t have that same soul.

So make sure that soul stays within the world that you built.

Now, of course, a lot of you might say, “But I work at a company. I have a working arrangement with them that generally, in most legal spheres—the European Union included—means that the company owns all of the IP that you create.” So you will be creating a world for another company.

My suggestion: don’t create your best world for that company. Give them your B-roll and say, “Oh, you want my A-roll? Give me 51% of the company.” And then don’t settle for vetos, points, or any other things that your lawyers might tell you that aren’t that enforceable.

Now, perhaps more creative topics next.

As I said, I think the most important attributes of a built world are names: names of characters, names of places. That’s also what the legal system thinks. And likely appearances—so that means basically concept art to some extent as well, but not so much.

When you really try to define what Star Wars is, or what Middle-earth is, or what Elysium is (the world that I spent my life on), it’s just a collection of names. Names for places, names for people, and names for concepts.

Now, I’m going to bring an interesting example. I threw the gauntlet in your face—I said you need mountain names as good as Caradhras. So I might try to give you a little hint as to how to get good names.

I can’t repeat enough how important they are. Really, if your capital city is called “Rexholm,” then that sucks. I even have a generator in my brain that generates bad fantasy names, which I think you all probably have too by now. So give it a whirl, and then see that your good names aren’t coming from that one.

Now, the question becomes: where do you get good names from? A good world has good names. Even Star Wars has very, very good names. Tatooine is a great place. George Lucas has his wacky, weird personal approach to names, which is fun and silly but very striking at the same time. That’s his personal style that people try to emulate, but it is just an emulation.

So the way I do it is: I use Wikipedia a lot. Big surprise. This is another hint: live in Wikipedia. It is the greatest thing on the internet. The more tabs you have open, the better things are going for you as a World Builder.

And the way I do it is: after a while, I understood that the names need to be more rad than they are. And then I started just looking at names in the real world.

The trick I did was I stopped competing against the names of Tolkien, and I started competing against an even better naming standard: the naming standard of reality.

The real world—our world—has mesmerizingly beautiful names. The cities are called Arkhangelsk, Astrakhan, Berlin. If you’re able to come up with something like that, you’re on money.

That was a way that I could circumvent the specific world-building of Tolkien. We just started emulating, or trying to at least—and we of course were not successful at it—but we tried to compete with real-world names.

I’ll bring a good example of how to do that. Do not look where other people are looking. So don’t look into ancient Rome. Don’t look—a little, but everyone’s already there. That vein has been mined already before you got there, before you were born.

Here, I think in world-building, what was once frowned upon as hipsterism is actually cultivating a professional language that us artists need to do. Hipsterism is sadly just a side effect of being an artist. You need to know rad stuff.

In names, I would say: cultivate an interest in cultures that everyone hasn’t been around yet.

I’m going to bring some weird examples. Did you know that the Sardinians, before it got named this weird name— “Sardinia” kind of brings into mind the sardine, bad association, probably not good for world-building—but the original name it comes from is **Shardana**. Much better, I would say. A Neolithic civilization who built these beautiful earth mounds in the mountains in Sardinia.

So, already an interesting naming section: Shardana. What do we do with that?

Another one: they have these **nuraghe** structures that are called names like **Su Nuraxi**. So “Su” is one syllable—if you have a place name that’s trying to get that kind of vibe, it’s going to sound novel and hopefully unexpected for people.

I’ll bring another example of how World Builders have used it to create effect—hipsterism, or just essentially cultivating a more niche reference library.

Dune. Frank Herbert. Not a terribly good book—incredible world-building.

So for example, Kwisatz Haderach. Sounds pretty serious, like it sounds like a real thing. That’s what you want your terms and things to sound like. And it doesn’t sound like it’s of our Earth; it comes from another place.

Well, he didn’t use Wikipedia—he didn’t have that. He just went to libraries. And then he knew that there is such a thing as a Circassian hunter language. Circassians were Central Asian tribes, considered to be the most beautiful people in the world, who got into a spot of genocide trouble, I believe, with the Russians. They dispersed and then became heads of harems in the Arab world.

Frank Herbert knew this. And he knew that they have a hunting language—a hunter language used by hunters of animals to communicate. And “Kwisatz” literally means “the shortening of the way” or something about “the way.” Again, don’t quote me on this; I just went on Wikipedia three weeks ago, so this might be incorrect.

But as you can see, he mined into a part of the world that not everyone knows about. So it seems completely novel. A lot of world-building is just smoke and mirrors—it’s just people who have very specific tastes that are not mainstream knowledge. You’re just educating people on cultural touch-points that they’re not used to.

So basically, in my mind I have a map of the world, and I just don’t go to certain places.

Another good idea: world-building is also about negative spaces—what not to use. So in Elysium, we decided it would be interesting to look at a world that hasn’t had an ancient-world experience of slavery, where other evils came about, where slavery was already eradicated 3,000 years ago. And that creates a certain difference in how things are going.

But also you can look aesthetically. In Elysium, we decided that America doesn’t exist. We’re not going to look there. We’re going to try a world where the lingua franca isn’t American—where it’s French. I hope you will see this as a compliment: Napoleon’s plan worked out.

And this creates a huge novelty in the setting, I believe, and helped us look at things from another direction.

So yes: cultivate a personal reference library that other people don’t know about. Look into little obscure cul-de-sacs of history. Don’t think about Napoleon—think about Tamerlane.

There once used to be a great conqueror who the peoples of Europe called “Tamerlane”—Timur the Lame, as in limping on one foot. The Timurid dynasty. No one really thinks about it nowadays. Might be a good way to enrich your next world-building project.

Another thing I have is called a Name Bank. I became basically a maniac of names, and I just started collecting all of the cool names that I’ve ever seen in hyperlinks or anywhere.

I think it’s now tens of thousands of entries long, probably. It looks like a maniac’s scribblings. But that means that whenever the time comes, whenever I need a name, I’ll just pick out whatever I found from the Timurid dynasty, whatever sounded cool, and I have an answer to these things.

Another thing you might want to do is: when you’re coming up with names, use them in sentences and give them a test run.

If I have time, I have an instructive story about this. I hope you appreciate that I’m going to show how lame my ideas once were. It’s going to take a little out of me to share some of my embarrassing world-building things, but here’s the thing:

We wanted Elysium to have a desert. And the names of deserts in the real world and in world-building settings are really, really cool. They’re always very, very cool. So we needed to have a very cool name.

This hopefully shows how you can get names better, and especially how you can use years and years of iteration on names for them to become better and better. Because you’re going to want to have a map with names on it, and the things that sound lame—you cut those out a year later. Believe me, you’re going to be wise as to what didn’t work and what works.

So, we knew we’re going up against some pretty good names, even in fantasy worlds. For example, Armaghast is a name in Dan Simmons’s Hyperion Saga—it’s a pretty cool name for a desert. I won’t say it’s the ultimate name, but that’s where the competition was. Arrakis is the name of Dune, or “Dune” is another name for a desert planet. Vendigroth was the name of Arcanum’s desert.

So we were like, okay, Elysium needs a cool desert, and it’s got to sound good. So we all presented our ideas. We used MS Paint to write the word down in cool letters—which I don’t suggest you do; that’s cheating. Just write it in uncool, regular letters.

So I came in, and I had written on it—I showed it to my friends, my friends were all there—and it said... I thought about it for like a month or two at that point. So we have the best world ever, obviously. It’s going to be cooler than Star Wars and Middle-earth and all of those things combined. I’m not in school anymore; all day long I just lay about and think about desert names.

And here it is. Here’s what I came up with:

Indrid.

Someone in the back row says, “Inbreed?”

So another friend, who was a little bit more tactful, said, “You know, yeah... no.” So my first reaction was of course, “No, Indrid is cool! You guys are wrong! It’s the coolest name for whatever!”

And then the more tactful friend said, “You know, ‘Ind-’ is a good combination of syllables. That’s—there’s worth in that. They’re not boring syllables. It’s a good combination. Not sure about the ‘-grid.’ ‘-greed.’ How’s it even written?”

So a week later or two weeks later, that same friend came with his own idea. It was also written in really cool letters. And it said:

Fuga.

Now, that comes from—that’s the Estonian version of the word “fugue.” If you’re in a fugue state, that’s related to sleep and hypnosis. So, pretty cool idea for a desert. Very trippy.

But the friend in the back goes, “Dubai?”

So, you know, associations—you’ve got to be careful with them, obviously. But you can see it didn’t quite work out.

So a little time goes past, and I’m looking at names for other things in that world. See, we have this huge map where we have all of the names on. And this is a trick that works very often: you bring a side element name—where you haven’t had the stress of coming up with a desert name as cool as Vendigroth—and you bring it to the center.

So when you had less—it’s like a B-side. Bands used to do them. You have less creative stress; you can come up with cooler ideas.

So there, I had a concept or a name which came out as:

Iilmaraa.

So Iilmaraa is what we went with. “Iilmaraa” probably comes from French, so it probably was my mind trying to say “island of Marat.” I was a huge fan of history at that time, and that painting which we all love—of Marat in his bath. So I was like, okay. And it’s a kind of Estonianization of a French word, so it has a language genesis that’s not very mainstream.

So, “the island of Marat”—just calling a desert “Iilmaraa” sounded... oh, wonderful.

So we went—we decided we’re going to go with that. Now, is it as good as Sahara? Gobi? No. But I think it’s maybe a little better than some of the desert names in other fantasy worlds.

Now see—I’m going to have to take it... sorry, I’m on stage. Goodbye.

(Phone interruption.)

Because I came unprepared, I need to use this for my notes. I’m very sorry for this unprofessionalism.

So we didn’t make a desert name that’s necessarily better than the real world, but I hope this inspires and shows you how you can make mistakes and how you can iterate upon this stuff. It’s worth it to do. In the end, you will get a cool thing. You’ll go to sleep every night and you’ll say, “My desert is called Iilmaraa, not Fuga,” and that’ll feel like a victory for you.

Another thing we noticed: saying things out loud helps. If you use it in a sentence, you will understand if something is lame. This is something my dad told me one day, and I understood it later.

So if you say, “He has arrived at Fuga,” you know—the “Fuga” stands out there. There’s something wrong there.

“This young man comes from Indrid.” One of these words is kind of standing out. It doesn’t have what is called verisimilitude, or “likeliness to truth,” which is a virtue that you really want everything in your world-building to have—realism or verisimilitude.

But if you say, “He comes from Iilmaraa,” you know—it flies under the radar. It doesn’t stick out as a sore thumb.

So: test-drive these names.

And I’m not even going to tell you about character names. I hope quite a lot of you are probably writers of some type, because you came here. So I think you’re cursed with it, probably. So you all know about how J.K. Rowling comes up with **her** character names and has this bank of wacky names.

Obviously, your character names are going to have to be good. But those are much easier, by the way, than place names.

A little trick that you can do to come up with names, by the way, is misreading things.

Sometimes when you see something written somewhere, you see it slightly differently—your brain jumbles it up for a moment. I had an example of this: on Reddit, someone misread something and came up with a place name like “Ironsaga.” It’s not bad; it’s a pretty cool name. It’s probably “Isengard,” but when you look at something and your brain doesn’t quite read it, you can be in this dream state where you misread it. And sometimes those misreadings can be quite helpful.

Take this as a little DIY trick for coming up with stuff.

Now, after this long and very technical name-mania, maybe some more mainstream or general humanitarian tips.

When you build your world and your concepts and the things that you’re interested in, what I tried to find is: this world will need to go into writing. People will need to express their pain and their longing in it. They will need to entertain people in it. This will be a toolbox that everyone is going to use.

And for that, I have a little test—actually, a couple of tests that I’m going to suggest to you. But the first test that I do is: I imagine, okay, I’m going to have to actually write this stuff. I’m going to have to write 100,000 words, maybe a million words, in this world. So how do I make it possible?

My answer is: I find the humor and the heartbreak in this world.

I don’t think it’s possible to write long tranches of text and stay actually motivated to do it without being what in 2019 was called “based on your bullshit.”

After you’ve been very friendly with everyone and come up with cool names and hopefully haven’t done a fantasy world but instead have transposed something onto a science fiction world—especially, extra points go to you if you build a modern built world (Elysium is one of those, and a lot of people lately, in the last 20 years, have started building modern other-worlds; they’re very interesting, at least for exercises)—I try to understand how I can make jokes in this world.

So that’s one of the litmus tests the world needs to pass: that this needs to be funny. Your bitterness, your pain needs to be in there. The time you got fired from your job, your anger at things in the world—if you cannot transpose them onto this built world, then it is going to be hollow.

Worlds have their inside jokes. They’re built of bitterness and hope, and broken dreams and resuscitated dreams. And if the jokes that you and your friends make translate into the world that you make—then you know that you will have hit something really, really special that people are going to want to come and experience.

Because you and your friends, not using our-world things but otherworldly things to talk about trans, music, and the time... it... drugs—there is something very novel and special in it.

So I suggest finding the humor and making sure that you can make jokes in that world.

And the other is heartbreak. I think that’s quite self-explanatory. No point building worlds that you can’t talk about getting dumped in.

A friend of mine once said that no one reads anything for any other reason than love. And in some way, I think that’s completely true.

So another thing you might want to check is that the world is ready for heartbreak.

And the final thing that I have to suggest to you is a very technical and hard thing to try to aspire towards. I can’t say that I have completely been able to achieve this, even in Elysium where I put an inordinate amount of time. But this is—if you take one point from this listicle of suggestions, I would suggest you take this (and the lawyer thing):

Make sure that the world you build can tell as many genres of stories as possible.

Quite often, a world is only usable for an adventure story. Adventure is the most coveted genre of writing in video games because it goes well with game mechanics.

But the next one would be: yeah, but can I also tell a detective story in this world?

Detective stories are widely the most entertaining and populist type of story. Whodunit—it just works. That’s why even in D&D you have murder mysteries and the investigation skill and stuff. Disco Elysium really takes this murder-mystery world-building thing to quite esoteric lengths.

Murder mysteries are good because they talk about the material reality of your setting. A detective will need to understand that this cup was made—why does it say “Wiener”? It’s made of paper. Now, see, quite a lot of world-building is already in here. We know that we mucked up with plastic, so we need to make them out of this stocky cardboard. Now, I’m sure this name means something, and there’s a serial number there—all little elements of verisimilitude.

If your world doesn’t have this level of realism, then you’re not going to be able to build very good detective stories in there.

But now, these are very low-hanging fruits. There are other much more difficult genres to write in.

One of the most difficult things to get working in your built world is a spy thriller. Now, I don’t mean a James Bond spy thriller or a parody of a spy thriller. I mean an actual, like Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, or Bureau of Legends—which, by the way, thank you French people, the best spy thriller ever written, better than John le Carré’s stuff. And ‘the new [unclear]’, really incredible and beautiful spy thrillers.

Now, can you tell that story in your built world? Huge challenge. Of course. But it is possible.

The names of the nation-states on behalf of whom the spying is being done need to be incredibly stylish and cool. You will need to have real-world references, otherwise the comedy and the anger of spy movies—”the Americans coming in, the Russians coming in”—you don’t have any of that to lean on.

So, you know, you might want to have elements of known geopolitical actors in our time in it. Really, really difficult to achieve. And I almost never got to that point in Elysium where I was like, “Yeah, I know exactly how to do a spy story.”

By the way, Dragon Age: Dreadwolf was supposed to be a spy story. So the people who wrote Dragon Age got to a point where they were so confident in that world, they thought, “All right, let’s tell a spy story here. We have Orlais—we’ve got it to a place where it’s cool enough.”

And other places—by the way, don’t call anything “Orlais.” People will know that you’re trying to say “Orleans” and switch one syllable out. With absolute respect to the people who wrote Dragon Age—it’s a wonderful world—but it usually doesn’t work.

I would rather suggest just using Gaul—just use it, just use a slightly different spelling of it. No one’s going to be angry at you because you called a large part of your world “Vaasa,” although it’s a name of a ship and a city in Finland. You might not want to take something so grand and so known as Orleans, but anyway, I digress.

Really tried to make a spy thriller work there, but...

Now you can start coming up with other genres. Can you do romantic comedy? Does that work? Mass Effect really makes romantic comedy work. You can do a lot of good stuff.

If your world can also carry an adventure story and a romantic comedy...

The ultimate test I propose is: **the autobiographical novel**.

The most boring, grandest genre ever. Something that’s called something like “Tunbridge Wells,” you know—one person’s life from the beginning to end.

Where were they born? During a snowstorm in a military hospital somewhere? What town? What city? Who are their parents? What’s the lineage of their families? And so on, to their death.

If you can narrate a person’s life story which is as rich as your own—with all the cafés they went to, all the girls they had hopes in, and all the political beliefs that they had, the waves of history throwing them around—if you can write that life story in another world, then you will probably have built a perfect built world: a complete copy of ours.

Nabokov tried that with Ada. He had this very novel otherworld where he wrote the life story of some siblings who were up to Nabokov stuff, because it’s Nabokov.

So literary scientists can say whether it is a built world and how successful it was. But there is an example of someone having already tried to do it, and that one person is Nabokov—a pretty esteemed writer.

So this is the test that you might want to take. Trying to imagine what an autobiographical novel or a spy thriller will be in your world—it will really, really help you fill in the gaps of this world and make it much grander.

You will understand that you need not only large states but middle players. You will need names of streets. You will need all the ephemera—I don’t even know how it’s... I’ve only seen it written, so if I mispronounced it, excuse me—but you will need all the ephemera of our world. The matchbox will need to look like a matchbox, and it needs to be made in a factory somewhere, in a place.

So I would say that is the ultimate suggestion: basically, take 10 years, write an autobiographical novel in another world, and write it in a book. That’s another suggestion, really—that’s my final one for today.

Before you use your world in a video game, write it in a book.

It will give you a legal advantage. In France, it will give you an indomitable legal advantage. But everywhere in the world, at least the moral advantage. And you will get to road-test it without international finance coming in.

Because in today’s world—I don’t know if you knew this—but if you and your friends want to meet each other 5 days a week, then an investor needs to own 40% of what you’re coming up with during those meetings. It’s just that kind of world, but if it’s you alone, just on your computer, that’s the cheapest way to world-build and to create these things.

So that’s my final thing. A little bonus suggestion to you.

I think we have time for about two questions or something, because I went over time.

Let’s have one or two questions... three or four is fine.

I want to piggyback a little bit on your conclusion. First of all, I want to thank you for this inspiring talk and for your life’s work, really. It’s left a big impression on me and on many other people.

But yeah, you mentioned during the talk that creating with other people is more fun, and then you conclude by saying, ‘Take your creation for a spin on your own computer.’ I know, for instance, you started by creating an art collective, I think. So my question is: could you give any recommendation or advice for people who might be starting up to look for this kind of structure in a world that’s more and more isolating and money-driven?”

Robert Kurvitz:

I look for the word for what me and my buddies created when we dropped out of school together, and I think—”art movement” is... no one understands what it means. It’s called a gang. That’s the best word. It’s an art gang. I think everyone understands those.

And yeah, I know—I understand it’s a contradictory suggestion. But the companies come and go. Even nations come and go. But companies definitely come and go.

So yeah, I would definitely suggest that when you’re building a world, or anything really, that you put people first and friendships first. The greatest asset in your life, for world-building or achieving anything, will be that brilliant friend of yours.

They come with their problems—everyone does. You know, if you’re not... in this world, you can choose to be alone or forgiving. I suggest forgiving.

So yeah, I’ve heard from other people who have seen what I have done that they’re building a gang of their own to start doing a world and so on. In video games, it’s called networking. But a good time to start networking is 18, 19, when you can really build that camaraderie, that gang of dudes around you.

You need an artist. You need a philosophy guy. Someone needs to understand Hegel and actually read him—I don’t, but I had a guy for that, so I feel like I did.

You know, it’s good to have a programmer, but to be totally honest, that’s not super important for world-building.

Great—you can never know too many great writers in your life. And musicians too. That’s just an unbelievable gift, to have a friend there.

So yes: cultivate friendships, be forgiving. Try to... again, I can’t... like, you—while I said that five times a week you can’t meet with your friends without an investor owning 40% of what you do (which is literally the world that we are in, the world that they built for us)—you can meet them once or twice, even on weekends, without investors needing to be there.

So use that time. Hang out. Have a lot of coffee. You French people know how it’s done. Pay each other’s bills and help each other.

And when the day comes, you know, in games or anything, it doesn’t matter what you’ve done or what your CV says you’ve done or what your title was in anything. It’s what you can actually do. And you know what these people can actually do, because you were layabouts with them for years.

And fight for that time in your life, by the way. It’s called your 20s. Don’t do anything in your 20s. Don’t work. Nothing. Be a complete parasite. Just chill out and come up with cool stuff. And if someone tells you not to do it, tell them to fuck off, basically.

I have a rather simple yet extensive question. What is your relationship with intertextuality? Or, if I shake things a little bit, what would you think of Neil Gaiman’s body of work, for instance?

Robert Kurvitz:

I’m not a huge fan of Neil Gaiman. I don’t know—I’m not supposed to say it.

It was a really, really important step in the development of popular culture. That’s one thing I have to say. The other thing I have to say is I haven’t read any of his work.

I’m one of these people who... like, I have a joke, which is: I’m not a reader, I’m a writer.

But I think, if I may say one thing about it—this is a weird suggestion—Neil Gaiman is probably really interesting for you to read so you can understand what cool world-building can be done by calling a character “Mr. Wednesday” and then he’s Odin, and stuff like that. He has cool ideas.

But another thing you can do is not read some famous things which everyone else has read. You know, work with negative space.

I have some things... everyone in Eastern Europe reads _The Master and Margarita_. They just think it’s the coolest book out there. I haven’t read it. Never will. I don’t want to be one of the guys who references _The Master and Margarita_.

I’ve never read Márquez. I’m sure it’s an unbelievably good experience, but I don’t want to be another person who does that.

This is just me trying to defend not having read any Neil Gaiman here. Houdini-ing myself out of the question.

But you said “intertextuality”—so yeah, what is it?

“The art of coming to something new with something very old.”

Oh yeah, of course. I mean, just the juxtaposition—taking Bronze Age things and moving them to the present. Absolutely.

That is the core of creativity. Associative creativity is just simple: it’s memory and association speed in your brain.

You can really improve your memory by just cramming it full of Wikipedia. And association speed—God either gave you or didn’t. You can definitely lessen your association speed by doing a lot of drugs. So take care of your neurological health.

And then your brain is just like a particle collider. It will just jam these references together, and you will come up with a new thing.

So yes, big on intertextuality, if it means that.

If you enjoyed this transcript and want more, do subscribe.