On Worldbuilding (and complexity)

Advertising has been eager to ditch complexity in favor of simplicity, or at least something that feels simple. Whether this aversion to the complex is a habit of the client in buying, the agency in selling or perhaps just a general low expectation of the audience, what we most often do is sacrifice the nuance, the stuff in the middle where most things become interesting.

In Convergence Culture, Jenkins quotes an unnamed screenwriter, "When I first started you would pitch a story because without a good story, you didn't really have a film. Later, once sequels started to take off, you pitched a character because a good character could support multiple stories. and now, you pitch a world because a world can support multiple characters and multiple stories across multiple media."

Worldbuilding is mostly used in reference to fantasy, but I think it’s an interesting way to think about brand things, too.

What worldbuilding can be is a platform for complexity. Mostly because it forces you to no longer talk only about who you are so much as creating a vision for how things could be. Not necessarily some new science fiction reality, but more like regular life, just a bit better.

So our job is less about finding the USP and more about creating environments in which our audiences thrive. Which means we should be spending more time finding what better means and the context by which that better matters.

So still good to simplify the vision. But we need to be prepared to embrace complexity in just about everything else.