How to Level Up Your Settings, Part 1

A lesson from video games on "environmental storytelling"

This was a crude cross-section I drew of Eridysi’s lab for Sighwitch. The illustrator, Rhys Davies, used this + my own in-text descriptions to bring the whole place to life in a gorgeous sketch.

This post comes to you thanks to two questions:

@Ellie Barlow asked:

This relates to what you discussed about world-building in YA vs adult fiction.

When starting a new epic fantasy, how do you decide how much world-building is enough/too much to include? I’ve been slowly building this fantasy world and its characters in my head since I was a kid, and I think I’m finally ready to share it. With approximately 20 years of mental world-building, it’s hard to know what to include and what to leave out. How do you find the balance between being immersive and being overdone?

And @bren asked:

Got a question that came to me after the last newsletter. You’ve cited video games like Assassin’s Creed as inspiration. I’m currently writing something inspired by Mass Effect, but find myself writing scenes like game levels in a way that’s not as interesting to read as it is to play. 😅 Does this happen to you? In other words, how do you translate game inspiration into a non-interactive medium?

Ah, be still, my heart. Getting asked about video games and writing craft fills me with such immense joy. I am truly excited for the post below.¹

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What is Setting?

This might seem obvious to some, but for those of you who are new to writing, setting is the physicality of a scene. It’s the spaces in which a character moves and interacts, the objects they see or interact with in a scene, and the sensory descriptions we use to bring the character’s surroundings to life.

World building is different from setting in that it is much larger. World building encompasses the entire world, including the history and politics and geography and creatures and magics and technology and beyond. Worlds are big, but settings are intimate.

The Witchlands is a world.

Meanwhile, Pin’s Keep in the city of Lovats is a location in that world…and the heat off the bodies, the smells of cooking, the slope-ceilinged attic with its window to let in a breeze, the walls made of a stone that don’t match the rest of the city—those elements all make up the setting.

So while you cannot fully execute world building without setting, you also have to remember that setting is ultimately scene-level. To create that immersive experience, we must amp up our physicalities—and I want to posit that the best way we can do that is to think like a game designer.

In other words: we can use something called environmental storytelling.

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Dragon Age & Gaming

Feel free to skip this section if you don’t care about my AHA! moment regarding settting and gaming. But if you’re interested and enjoy the Dragon Age games…

Well, step back in time with me to eight years ago.

It was 2015, and I’d just finished copyedits for Truthwitch. It was off to be typeset and turned into a Proper Book, and I was exhausted. I wanted something to refill the “creative well” that didn’t require me to read more words. A friend of mine had just recommended I try the Dragon Age franchise, so I thought, Sure, why not?, and I bought the first two games for my Xbox 360.

Flash forward three weeks to after I’d binged the crap out of the first two games in the series², and now I needed the third, Dragon Age: Inquisition. I literally got an Xbox One just to play that game.

Hilariously, I didn’t enjoy the game all that much the first time I tried it*** (Damned Hinterlands!), so I set it aside about halfway through…UNTIL one year later, when I was sick with the flu after my second Truthwitch tour of 2016. I was physically laid flat and thought, Eh, let’s try it again.

This time, for whatever reason, the game connected for me. Flash forward one week, and I had binged the entire game and the recently released Trespasser DLC. I was so obsessed with the series—the music, the story, the world, the romance(s), the settings…

It was true epic fantasy, and on top of that, they actually had a similar twist in the game that I was aiming for in the Witchlands. That I had already set up, in fact, with Truthwitch and that I was now struggling to figure out how to foreshadow in Windwitch without giving too much away…

But my goodness, BioWare did such a good job of giving the players hints to the story in the physical, interactive setting. Foreshadowing was everywhere once I knew the twist and what to look for! On top of that, character and world building were constantly being revealed to me everywhere I looked.

Had games always been this way? Of course. But it wasn’t until I played Dragon Age: Inquisition that I fully realized just how much you could do with the physicality of the space around your character.

And after that, it was all I wanted to do. I wanted to make my setting the biggest foreshadowing tool for my series. I wanted to make books like Sightwitch that are literally in-world documents characters in Truthwitch read…

Basically, I was ready to take my setting to the next level.

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Environmental Storytelling

In gaming, environmental storytelling is how the objects and setting are arranged in a game to create a story for the player.

So for example, imagine we move our character into a room. It’s a bedroom in a crumbling mansion. We can see how it used to be a fancy, fine estate—there’s still beautiful art on the walls, even if it’s peeling out of the frame. The four poster bed is a lush, expensive texture that’s now moth-eaten and frayed. And the dirty, many paned window looks onto an overgrown garden.

We’ve already got the start of a story here, don’t you think? Faded wealth. Former glory.

So now let’s add more.

The woman whose room this once was loved mystery novels—and not just any mysteries, but an author named Eliza O’Connor. So there’s a worn copy of an O’Connor novel on the bedside table. And then more books on a towering shelf, most of them all mystery titles—and most by this same author.

Alrighty, now we have faded wealth + former glory…for a woman who loved to read twisty mysteries.

But we can of course add more.

As our character continues exploring, we see signs of medical interventions . There’s a doctor bag next to the mystery novel on the bedside table. There’s a syringe on the floor. There’s a pile of dirty bandages on the bed with strange green symbols on them. And there’s a book titled, Exorcising the Devil’s Disease that has fallen to the floor beside the syringe…

Now we’re really getting an idea for this world, aren’t we? The wealth and glory faded because of a disease…possibly a magical or demonic one. And the woman who once loved mystery novels likely suffered from that disease.

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Engaging All the Senses

In a game, you won’t have all the senses to work with—there’s sight and sound and maybe a little touch, depending on the controller or console you’re using. But smell? Nah. And definitely not taste. In a written story, we can bring all of those senses to life.

So let’s give it a try.

There’s an astringent smell in the room that burns in our character’s nose. It mingles with stale incense and general decay. Our character can taste those scents too, and it coats their tongue in a weird fuzziness—which is only made worse by the fact that there’s no running water in this place, and they’re thirsty.

And as for touch? It’s the middle of summer and this house has surprisingly few holes in it to let in fresh air. The heat is suffocating…which only makes the smells worse. It hangs on our character like a heavy blanket, making them sweat. And everything they touch in the house is covered in dust or cobwebs.

Now, we can’t forget the sounds! It’s eerily quiet, but the house settles and shifts as our character steps over floorboards that haven’t been touched in ages. And every few moments our character hears a strange hiss coming from…somewhere. Perhaps the bookshelf with all the mystery novels…

Are you getting a vivid sense of what the story is yet? How about an idea of what the world at large might be like—or what might be at stake? Things probably feel creepy and a bit dangerous…

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Using Setting to Evoke Genre

Now how weird would it be if everything I just described was for a romcom?

I mean, don’t get me wrong: I’m sure someone could make that work! But I’d say our environmental storytelling is suggesting something else. A horror mystery, perhaps, or something fantastically frightening.

Plus, our character hasn’t even begun to fully interact with the objects in the room. What will happen when they approach the hissing sound? What will they find when they open the book about exorcism?

Think of Chekhov’s Gun: if the reader sees a pistol hanging on the wall in Act One, then that pistol should be used in Act Three.

But of course, we can do better than just a mere pistol. What if upon opening Exorcising the Devil’s Disease, our character finds a worn key. And what if the mystery novel on the bedside table actually foreshadows the story ahead—like maybe it has a similar whodunit twist.

And hey, we can keep going by having the hissing sound come from a crack in the bookcase beyond which is…absolutely nothing at all but darkness.

There are so many fun things you can do with a setting, and tapping into all those dimensions is one of my absolute favorite things about writing—and gaming too.

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Because I really love this topic, I have a second part on the subject coming next week! I’ll touch on how to use character as the connective tissue between setting and world building, as well as the differences between games and books

In the meantime, thanks for reading and I’ll see you all again soon!

💚 - Sooz

1. Also, the Mass Effect franchise is in my top five games of all time…so you have good taste, Bren.

2. Look, I didn’t have kids yet, and I could easily spend all day doing nothing but gaming. It’s actually one of the things I miss most from my pre-child days.