Today we are going to talk about the concept that convinced us to start Ideal Gas: Worldbuilding. Packy argues that there are Two Ways to Predict the Future: by calling it or by building it. He uses the analogy of sports to show how athletes predict what they are about to do and then go do it. Though not easy, this is possible because sports is an example of a tame problem. It is easy to know if an athlete has called their shot because sports is mostly black and white. You either score or you don’t. To predict that you’re going to smash a boundary, you don’t need to predict that there will be game called cricket and that it will have a particular scoring mechanism etc. Building a company on the other hand presents what is called a wicked problem, “a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize”. It is called a wicked problem because it involves experimentation, new tech, rapid learning, luck and so much more. Some CEOs however, can lay a “clear vision and an unintuitive plan” to make it happen against all odds - these are the worldbuilders.
Common traits of these worldbuilders include: predicting something non-obvious about the world before the market can adapt to it, creating a wedge into this world to then leverage it into a much bigger opportunity and finally time-stamping (making public / announcing) their vision. Jeff Bezos for example, noticed that internet usage shot up by 2300% in 1994. He used books as the wedge and leveraged it into the opportunity that Amazon is today. You can see him time-stamping this proposition in his old interviews.
“I picked books as the first best product to sell online after making a list of like 20 products you might be able to sell … there are more items in the book category than there are in any other category by far”
-Jeff Bezos
At the time, other startups like Webvan tried to replicate this model for selling groceries online. Webvan’s founder already had an offline bookstore chain, yet chose to build a more capital intensive grocery delivery business (with almost 100x VC funding as Amazon at the time) only to not be able to reach product market fit. Perhaps the wedge that works demands more careful selection. Many rushed into this space to sell products that didn’t yet make sense in the context of the internet and lost out.
The same can be said of Apple. Personal computer companies dismissed Apple as a phone company but their strategy was actually to build an even more personal computer. It was not to add more functionality to a phone but to reduce the phone to an app. We can go on with more examples but you now probably understand what worldbuilding looks like.
These are big stories from big companies but we could honestly use a more tactical guide for worldbuilding ourselves. This is where we turn to sci-fi fantasy writers and their approach to creating intricate settings and worlds. We can then draw a few parallels from these methods hopefully because life imitates art more than art imitates life.
Life imitates art
There are numerous examples of sci-fi tech coming to life. Robots, jet packs, holograms, AI, the list goes on. The term ’metaverse’ was coined for the 1992 sci-fi novel Snow Crash and is the most recent example of life imitating art. Oscar Wilde was a major proponent of the idea that life imitates art more than art imitates life. He argued that this was “not merely from life's imitative instinct, but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of life is to find expression, and that art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy”. I have always marvelled at how people can think up not just stories and characters but entire worlds down to the tiniest detail. These worlds enable an already engaged audience to further enhance the narrative through fan theories creating new subcultures and communities. Just look at the number of subscribers The Film Theorists YouTube channel has.
Sci-fi worldbuilding
Brandon Sanderson’s lecture series on writing sci-fi fantasy novels is a reminder of the magic of the internet. It is one of the best resources for anyone looking to get into writing. Sanderson argues that worldbuilding is the element that separates writing sci-fi fantasy novels from regular novels. Here’s how Sanderson approaches worldbuilding:
Crafting the learning curve: The audience wants to be immersed in your story but this involves a certain learning curve into your world. It is useful to think of your world as an iceberg. Your job is to convince the reader there is a much deeper layer beneath the tip. The mode of getting the reader to learn about the world is also important because a mere info dump would just feel like a wikipedia article and not like a sci-fi novel. Analysts argued that Amazon had to sell all the books in the world to justify its valuation in 1999. But as we now know, books were just the tip of the iceberg that got us used to online shopping. This is why selling groceries online didn’t work just yet as the market was not ready.
There is a physical world and a cultural cultural world: The physical world consists of all the attributes that you can think of that would exist even without sentient beings (like weather, topology) while the cultural world covers elements like rituals, governments, economics etc. While the actual product needs to have a utility of its own, the cultural narrative plays an equally important role in scaling / expanding your world. The whole web3 scene is the best example of a cultural setting. Be it the mutual appreciation for products built within the community or the fact that there is always someone to greet you with a ‘gm’ or a ‘gn’ tweet is very wholesome and only helps expand this universe.
Combining things rather than making up things: It can often be very tempting to go crazy with the previous point. We might want to focus on 5-6 physical and cultural elements but this only creates confusion. Forcing yourself to prioritise and pick one or two each and combining them in different ways through the characters builds more depth into the world you are creating. In other words, these select elements can be the wedge that you leverage into a bigger world.
Magic systems: On the surface it might seem like you will need rules for building a good / predictable magic system or for defining the powers of the characters. This is not always true. While the first Iron Man movie had a more believable suit, the nanotech suit introduced in Infinity War defies all logic but still leaves our mouth open across all the action sequences. A good magic system lies somewhere along the spectrum of a strictly rule based / predictable system to one that’s fuzzy, creating a sense of wonder. This sense of wonder idea is best explained with Discord’s brand identity. Their tagline is simply ‘Imagine a place’ and I think that’s the most beautiful thing ever. Their recent campaign is a chaotic video that perfectly captures what using Discord feels like.
Anyone can cook
Another useful mental model to consider while designing ‘worldbuilder products’ is the idea of building ‘operating systems’. Alex Rampell describes operating systems as being a ‘system of truth’ - something that keeps track of everything for a customer or a company. This enables the product to become a daily active use product rather than a mere feature. Hence it is becomes easy to add other things to this operating system and expand the world.
One of the biggest things holding people back from doing great work is the fear of making something lame
-Paul Graham
Having laid out all these frameworks, I still believe that the hardest step is the first one. It is fascinating how all these intricate worlds start with a blank piece of paper. The gap between the creator’s taste their actual output is usually very significant at the start. This is the zone of lame outputs. It is in times like these that I highly recommend you re-watch Pixar’s Ratatouille to internalise the idea that ‘anyone can cook’. Leaving you with a thought from the movie: