A little ways back, I wrote a piece on the use of lore for world building. It was inspired by some stuff I was seeing in anime and was generally well received. Well, I just caught up with Shangri-La Frontier, and DAMN is this show hitting home. Time for an update to that article, let’s dive in!
CAUTION! Mild Spoilers for Shangri-La Frontier ahead.
Background
If you haven’t read the original article, take a moment and catch up. Don’t have time for that? No worries! Shangri-La Frontier is an anime series following the in game adventures of a group of “trash game” players who decide to play a high quality game for once. There’s no weirdness around being trapped in the game, no being transported to other realities, just players being players in a massive virtual world. Within the context of world building, it’s a masterclass in demonstrating how player assumptions can lead to them missing out on world building and storylines. After all, it’s a fantasy “full dive VR” game, and everyone ~knows~ how to play that kind of game, right? And what I pointed out in the article was that the players seemed intensely disinterested in the larger story as they pursued levels, gear, and the regular grind of an MMORPG, even as it was being presented to them. And damn have the last few episodes busted this wide open.
World vs Game Design Fights
Game play and world design have to match up, or there’s going to be issues. Mechanics affect how stories develop and are told because they’re how the player characters interact with the world and vice versa. But they can also be at odds vision wise, and this is something that GMs and game designers and world builders face off with. And Shangri-La Frontier dives right into it.
In episode 20, we’re introduced to the in the anime’s real world game designers Tsukuyo Tsukuri and Ritsu Amachi. The former is the world builder and story designer, and the latter is the game designer translating the story to in game mechanics. And after Wethermon is defeated, they’re fighting. Why? Because the original vision of Wethermon was a functionally unbeatable super boss to the point of being broken, the “greatest hero of the Divinity”. However, tying story progress to an unbeatable boss is bad game design, so he was nerfed to an insanely hard battle. But the main point here, for my purposes, is that they’re actually directly addressing the issue between translating a world and larger meta arc to playable mechanics.
It’s comparatively easy to create a world and populate with creatures, peoples, and beings that match a vision. Making it work mechanically in a way that is both engaging for players and lets it advance? Much more difficult. I love seeing this being addressed!
Lore too Deeply Buried
Another thing I took away from these recent episodes is that the lore in Shangri-La Frontier, like it is in a lot of tabletop RPG settings, is too deeply buried. Even though it’s affecting the world, it’s “lost”, “forgotten”, “hidden”, or locked away behind events, making it inaccessible to the players, which affects how they interact with the world. As the players battle Wethermon, the idea that the events in the game are story driven/influenced comes up as a method of planning how to battle and win. That’s a legit use of lore. It’s a great use of lore. But the player base in the show is so in the dark about the lore of the game that they have trouble interpreting it and even the world. Do they eventually figure it out? Yes. But do they grasp the deeper connections? I don’t think so, not at this point at least.
The world of Shangri’La Frontier is actually similar to the one from Wheel of Time, in that it’s actually a science-fantasy post-post apocalyptic world. Something happened during an age of higher technology, the apocalypse goes down, and now people are surviving and thriving even as the aftermath of the event becomes a distant memory to most. But therein lays the problem. Without knowledge of the past before the apocalypse, of even really of it, the people (in this case, players) simply accept things as they are as the eternal normal. Science-fantasy is a common genre in anime and manga, and has become more common in games, so the presence of cyborgs and technological monsters isn’t seen as something worth investigating, it’s “normal”.
Within its own timeline (and I’m basing this off the anime, not any of the other media, I’m not spoiling myself), there was a period of vastly higher technology known as The Divinity. Something went wrong though, as Setsuna refers to the players as “You are Pioneers, the descendants of the second plan.” Wethermon makes references to breakthroughs, implying that barriers between worlds were broken. Setsuna’s scene ends with her imploring the players to explore the world and seek out “Bahamut”. Then no explanation of who, where, or what the in game definition of Bahamut is given.
Lore Access Denied
The problem is that even the players in the world who have dedicated themselves to gathering knowledge into a massive library had no real clue about this, or that there was a “world story”. To me, this indicates that the lore necessary to drive the story is too inaccessible on top of players being obtuse and/or oblivious. Bahamut is not a known entity in the game. No one is tracking any of the deep history that’s supposed to be affecting things. And I think a part of this is missing mythology and oral tradition.
In the real world, mythology and oral traditions are important ways to keep ideas and memories alive. But in the west, we tend to be derisive towards both, arbitrarily categorizing them and breaking them into small components while ignoring the holistic whole. So as GMs, as world builders and game designers, we need to step back and build holistic mythologies that represent knowledge passing forwards through the ages. And I’m not talking just the supernatural, I’m talking about how people would keep memory and knowledge of what life was like before. Examples in the game would be NPCs presenting varyingly accurate or distorted memories of the apocalypse and how people arrived on the world, losing technology, legends about power armour and lasers… That kind of thing. And these would range from common knowledge to esoteric. That’s what I think is missing from both the anime game world and a lot of our own.
Final Thoughts
I’ve been strident in the past about stating that the deep history of game worlds is as important as their current states. With all the ruins, undead, cyborgs, aliens, extra-dimensional beings, lost civilizations, ancient magic, ancient technology, and everything else that these worlds are packed with, it makes our real world’s deeper history look like it never got started. But where we accept the impacts in the real world (to differing degrees), as a group, we seem adamant that these things don’t affect the realities of our creations. But the result is the situation we see at tables and in the example anime. Players playing the game the way they ~know~ it’s supposed to be played, and not engaging with our efforts at world building past a superficial level. I think that better accessibility that has more direct and immediate effects, and the use of more holistically designed mythology would go a long way to resolving this and to increasing immersion and memorability.
