Critical Worldbuilding

Undergraduate / Graduate

Worldbuilding has many connotations: the conceptual process of imagining a fictional world, the spatialization of that world (eg. 3D modeling and level design in a game engine, production design for television or film) and the way details and ideas from that world are expressed to players and viewers. In general, worldbuilding suggests an attention to systems, an affinity with genre fiction, and the aggregation of small details to create senses of time and place that extend beyond a single narrative or experience. But what counts as a world? How is worldbuilding distinct from other forms of imagination? Why and how has it become so popular as a way of making and thinking about media now? In this theory-practice hybrid course, we will critically interrogate these questions through the process of building our own fictional worlds. You will bring to this course an idea for a fictional world, and over the course of nine weeks we will pay sustained attention to it through a series of small assignments and exercises. In the process, we will learn about the history of worldbuilding, the many academic and creative disciplines with which it intersects, and how we might use those theories and methods to imagine worlds differently.