What's the Point?

Whenever you're building something, you have a goal in mind. If you're building a house, you might be doing it to provide shelter to your family, and you might be doing it to eventually sell for profit and become rich. When you design a program you might be doing it to teach a player a standard, and you might be doing it to entertain. Regardless, you have a goal in mind.

When you're building a world, however, your goal is probably not to house your family or entertain - although those might be why you're doing the design in the first place - you're usually designing a world to act as a background as something. Lord of the Rings is a great story, but without Middle Earth it would be fairly generic story. Final Fantasy games have been progressing to a single world for their games to take place in - the world again is the background for the story and the action.

But it's important to remember that for the things that exist in the world, it's usually not *just* a background. People supposedly live their entire lives there and have for generations. Buildings are built to be used, typically not just to be abandoned and filled with monsters. Everything needs to have some sort of purpose in the world rather than just filling it with things for the players to see on their way from point A to point B. Sure, once the purpose is served it should be interesting, but the fact of the matter is that truth is stranger than fiction. The less realistic, or at least the less plausable, an ecosystem is in a world, the more likely the player's going to pick up on it.

But i'll go into more detail in a later post.