To be fair, I'm not quite sure how I feel about the term itself. It seems a little asinine in some respects. Some of the most beloved cultural franchises over the past fifty years have relied on a mountain of 'official' lore that seems to be valued way more for its worldbuilding than its actual storylines.
I would argue for instance that Tolkien's Middle Earth setting has become far greater than the stories themselves, solely because the worldbuilding is so incredibly detailed. The same could be said about Star Wars or Harry Potter, too. It's not just films and novels either, computer games also have their examples of this. Bethesda's Elder Scrolls and Fallout franchises have been derided for years for having piss-weak storytelling but fans overlook this fact because the worldbuilding is so immersive and detailed.
Regardless, my argument would be that this criticism doesn't really make sense in the world we're moving into. For better or for worse, literature is dying. Corporate greed and the terrible decisions they make on what actually gets published in the first place, has killed the prospect of getting anything truly original published, anyway. This of course isn't helped by the fact that education leaves many kids borderline illiterate.
In an ideal world, these issues would be dealt with but given the way technology is going, is non-interactive entertainment, both with books and film, is it a realistic thing to try and cling onto?
Like many people over the last few weeks, I've been amazed by some of the hyper-specific, niche entertainment that is now rapidly flooding the internet. Whilst it has its detractors for sure, some of the projects now being shared were simply impossible for human beings to do only a year ago. Daggerfall Online springs to mind as one example, which rejuvenated a thirty year old game. More impressive than that however is the merging of two or more games into a totally seamless 'new' game. Grand Theft Auto assets in Skyrim, or Tony Hawk skateboards in Call of Duty. It's still early days but I wonder if we're on the cusp of creating Ready Player One's 'Oasis', where every cultural reference is smashed into one infinite game world. Eventually.
Admittedly, this isn't without its own issues issues. An infinite repackaging of nostalgic pop-culture will lead to a future even more culturally sterile than the 2010-2020 era we're leaving behind. But it's also obvious that consumers of entertainment are going to want to direct their own experiences these days instead of relying on a now stagnant linear media, that the media industry has deliberately driven into the ground.
I've spent the last week or so using a new roleplaying interface on the Perchance AI website. It is totally free and allows users to create and share their own worlds that can people can roleplay their own stories in and I have to say, given the small amount of tokens available for Perchance in-house LLM, I'm really impressed by it. The most impressive thing is that the creator of the interface has used a script to auto-save core memories and hide lore information from the main context until information is required again. Is it perfect? No, of course not. But given the speed at which AI has improved in three or four years, I don't think we're too far away from a system that is able to make bespoke worlds, dialogue, characters and images or video, in one neat package.
This is where worldbuilding may come in. Maybe I'm being a bit too hopeful. AI stands to seriously affect writers and artists across the board. But worldbuilding may be one element of storytelling that stays out of trouble. After all, if the public have the will to explore worlds as a played character, then those worlds need to be deep enough to be immersed in. In a future where there is a potential for infinitely recycled shallow rubbish, well constructed worlds may offer a well needed respite from both the nightmare of the twenty-first century and an endless slopageddon.
