I’ve watched Inception once a year ever since its, er, inception. While no film ages perfectly once you can quote it in real-time and have pored over every little flaw and inconsistency, I think Nolan’s heist movie about breaking into people’s dreams still holds up as a piece of work that’s simultaneously amazing and absolutely terrible at world-building.
Viewers and critics frequently like to joke about how for large stretches of screen time in Inception, characters only speak in exposition, with one person asking questions and the other launching into a lengthy explanation. There are so many bits of exposition necessary just to follow the plot of the film that world-building seems to get left behind entirely. How was the system for lucid dreaming devised? How widespread is its use? Was it just used for industry espionage or are there any cyberpunk-esque commercial applications?
Inception has no time for these questions, unconcerned with the wider world. It has no way to hint at the world that made dream heists possible in the first place, and while I understand why, I think it’s a shame. Lore deep dives can be tricky for films to do due to time constraints, but Star Wars and Mad Max are examples of films that presented us with completely realised worlds even before sequels and other media padded out their universes.
By comparison, games have time, right? Yet for all the time they have, world-building is rarely done overtly, which can have the effect of it seeming optional. The thing I enjoyed most about Control, for example, was finding correspondence from Bureau employees, not only because it helped an otherwise mostly deserted place come back to life, but also because it was crucial in helping me figure out what the Bureau even was. It made me realise how often games resort to codex entries for lore simply because there aren’t any other humans to tell you their story. Still I think I prefer audio logs for that human touch – think BioShock or Deadspace.
Control Gameplay – A Quick Look at Some Environmental Combat Watch on YouTube
This makes me think that world-building works best for games that tell the story of a journey. The Outer Wilds, our game of the year, makes you part of the world-building process as a space archaeologist – that world may be gone, but what you learn about it influences your own. My favourite example is Final Fantasy X. When Tidus arrives in Spira, he has no clue about this new world he’s found himself in. So people have to explain everything to him, and by extension you as the player. My favourite character to do so is Maechen, a historian whom you meet near certain landmarks. Sure, talking to him is optional, but he isn’t a history book or a codex entry someone conveniently left lying around. He tells a story in his own words, which makes matters much less dry than, say, Dragon Age Inquisition’s treatises on Orlesian theatre. I’m sure they are fun to write, and as vital to this society as a tube map is to mine, but let’s be honest, how often do you actually read all codex entries? How often do you even pick them up, when world-building seems this optional?