Domino Worldbuilding and the Brilliance of Mass Effect - Twenty Sided

Domino Worldbuilding and the Brilliance of Mass Effect - Twenty Sided

To explain what makes Mass Effect so interesting to me, let’s talk about how other game worlds are developed. Different writers have different approaches to creating their fictional worlds, but the overwhelming majority of them are built in a needs-first kind of way.

Shamus Young coins the term “domino worldbuilding” to refer to storytelling in which events are (sometimes surprising) consequences to each other, rather than just a bunch of things that happen to serve the needs of the plot. He provides the first Mass Effect’s backstory as a particularly good example and discusses the value of this approach in games.

For much more on the Mass Effect example in particular, see his Mass Effect Retrospective.