SWE #15 The Player & the Pentacle with Nick Jones

Join us and Author & Senior Narrative Designer Nick Jones as we discuss his book, The Player & the Pentacle!  Nick Jones is the Senior Narrative Designer at Shark Mob Games and expert infusing folklore in to story to develop vibrant and "lived-in" story worlds.

Buy the book here: https://www.amazon.com/Player-Pentacle-Folkloric-Motifs-Narrative-ebook/dp/B09Q8G5CJY/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2X496WSY2ZSA4&keywords=player+and+the+pentacle&qid=1688595733&s=books&sprefix=player+and+the+pentacle%2Cstripbooks%2C88&sr=1-1
Watch the episode on YouTube: 

The Player & the Pentacle is a book about Narrative Design and interactive storytelling, and how allowing greater levels of agency in your stories allows for your audience to get lost through collectivism and empathy. 

We dove deep into folklore and the concept of "folkloresque", the difference between a folktale, myth, and legend, and the concept of the magic circle.

It’s an educational, motivating, fantastic conversation!

#folkloresque #theplayerandthepentacle #narrativedesign #folklore #storyworld #storytelling #transmedia #collectivejourney #artists #creatives #worldbuilder #producers #indie #newconcepts #storyworldexplorers

Transcript

hello. Hi, and welcome to another edition of Story World Explorers, where we're exploring the story world of actually, we're not exploring the story world today. We're learning something about folklore. That's right. We had author and narrative designer Nick Jones on talking about his book, The Player and The Pentacle, which is all about introducing and having folklore in a story world very specifically about video games.

But we're talking about all types of stories world Broadly speaking, any story role can benefit from having stories told about the world itself, right? And the difference between a myth, a legend, and a fairy tale. While most people think are all the same thing, they're actually very different and are all layers that you can help develop a living, breathing world.

That's right. Nothing feels better than when you're walking around in a video game and people are talking about something, whether that be a fairy tale, a myth or a legend. And you learn different clues and you find out how and why people think the way that they do what? Why do they go, the places that they go? What kind of religions do they have?

This all stems from folklore and folklore. So it was a great episode, highly educational, highly recommended. If you are trying to develop your own story world are getting kind of stuck or you know, because when you get to tell stories about your stories about your stories, that's when the fun really starts.

Enjoy the show.

All right, great. Well, we're on with Nick Jones, senior narrative designer at Shark Mob Games and also the author of The Player and the Pentacle.

Nick, thank you so much for being with us. It's always it's whenever you get to talk to somebody that really does live and breathe transmedia such as yourself and as a student of the genre, it's always a lot of fun to have these conversations. And this one in particular with this book that you wrote about narrative design and video games and kind of the importance of some of this mythology and the folklore that you that you just you could take for granted.

But the real video game players, real players that really do enjoy that stuff that explore every nook and cranny of an explorable world, you know how important all that stuff is. And this is going to be more of an educational akin to our conversations with Jeff Gomez and with Houston Howard on transmedia itself. I mean, the benefits rather than exploring an actual world, but you know what?

You need to know how to navigate, create your own stuff, and otherwise you'll never find a new world to explore. This is this is just when we get to nerd out about all these different things, about how you can how you could create a living, breathing world that feels authentic to your audience and make the audience ever want to leave.

So let's start off. Let's kick off. What is what is this book? What was the inspiration behind it? Give us your give us the author's insight. Take. Yeah. Hey, guys. It's good. Good to be here. Finally, after I don't know how long we've been planning this, but it's it's been in a while at this point. But yeah, no, my book, I guess, really, it came out of it came out of a lot of sort of thought around folklore and around storytelling when I was doing my one of my masters a few years ago and started to sort of develop into an idea that I eventually sort of took on as as a Ph.D., But really

it came from, funnily enough, a YouTube video that that I actually reference in the book about the Catholic mythos and the way that H.P. Lovecraft, for all his faults, created a universe or a mythology that is possibly the closest we have and modern ish times to being similar to how a real world canon of folklore develops. And, you know, he did this through sort of half arcing it in a way, which is kind of funny.

But, you know, there were these sorts of props and gods and characters that he would sort of reference offhand and and his and his stories and never really fully explain them. They were sort of just little background props that he would move around to help with his his storytelling in general. And then the other thing that he did was he had a a group of writers that he conferred with constantly.

And, you know, they would be reading each other's stories, They would be writing stories that included these props from each other's stories. They were sort of sharing these things around. And so what ended up happening was this sort of natural growth of a of a larger mythology that relied on these props, which is very similar to how real life folklore develops.

And it's what's called mimetic circulation, which is this idea that cultures play like kind of a a game of telephone with each other over many, many years. You know, the the Greeks have a story and then they share it with the Romans and then the Romans go, We like that story, but we're going to change this, this and this to fit our culture.

And then a new version starts up and then they share it with someone else and it sort of spreads. And so that idea was really, really fascinating to me because it got me thinking. As a narrative designer, how do you utilize that same sort of approach for for video games? And that was sort of the cornerstone of the idea really, which over time evolved.

I didn't actually want to do a Ph.D. initially, but I was convinced or told told to do it multiple times by by all my lectures when I started thinking about this. And so so yeah, I started looking at this from a PhD perspective and thinking about how you can utilize folklore and folklore motifs to create better story worlds, particularly for video games, because that's my, my background.

But all sorts of story worlds really. And yeah, that, that gradually progressed into me having like a large enough body of work around this idea that I thought, well, I might as well put it into a book and sort of make it easier to understand then just the sort of academic approach so that other people in my industry and neighboring industries can enjoy it and hopefully get something from it.

Yeah, Yeah. It's it's it's absolutely fantastic. And we will have information of how to download the book, which is available on Amazon for you guys all to read. Because it is, it is quite the journey. And I think that one of the most interesting parts of it was this idea of folklore and folkloresque. To my understanding, I did do a little bit of reading.

Nick put a lot of references in there and so I picked up a couple of books and one of them was the folklorist who I should I, I just looked at it because I was like when I was writing the notes for it, I was like, I want to make sure I spelled this right. I was spelling it e s, s c, and I was like, That's not it.

And then I was like, Oh, it's got to you at the end. And I looked up the title. But what's interesting is this There is this constant battle and this is kind of like a sidebar. It's a constant battle between folklorists and then people, the folklorists, people to do the study, the study of folklore and how they somewhat discount the new stuff that's coming out that a lot of it is from the story worlds of a Star Wars or of of a larger of a larger world that allows people to go in and make up their own ideas and their own stories and their own interpretations of the core work.

And they are what what's ended up happening is this new term folkloresque is kind of coming out of it. And so why don't what let's talk a little bit about what folklore is and how like how important it is to attach that back or how important like folklore is to the human experience. And thus, if you really want to make like a great world, folklore or folkloresque ask is really important to being to develop to somebody actually feel like they're a part of something or that they can participate in the world.

Yeah, yeah. Well, I guess and in the briefest of terms the folklorist because this idea that a piece of work, you know a video game, a film, a TV show, whatever, initially gives the feeling to the audience that it derives from folklore or from traditions that a much older stories that are much older than it is itself. But usually when you sort of dig into that a little bit more, you start to realize that, well, this isn't really based on any one particular tradition, but on a bunch of different ones from around the world or the traditions that have been slightly twisted in a way to sort of make them new and unique.

I believe that the the professor that sort of first term this is named Michael Foster, don't quote me on that. But he he he sort of talked about in his book on this. He was asked to give a talk on Spirited Away from Studio Ghibli and talk about the folkloric origins behind that film. And he started to realize as he was going through this doesn't really follow Shintoism.

Yeah, they're sort of commie creatures or yokai creatures in it. But, but there's no direct correlation to what's actually in the mythology. And that's sort of where he sort of started thinking about it in that way. But it's a, it's a really interesting concept because it gives you a lot of freedom to play right and to explore things in a way that allows you to create a more interesting, more in depth large world.

And I think one of the one of my favorite quotes by him about this that sums it up really nicely is that he says something along the lines of pop culture aspires to be folklore. That's the ultimate goal of pop culture, is to become folklore. And so I think that's that's something really worth taking an interest in and keeping in mind when you're creating worlds that the stories that last, the stories that you know, carry over from generation to generation.

Star Wars is a great modern example. They, you know, start to morph and start to become folklore or folklore esque. So, yeah, I think I think it's a great lens to look at modern stories through and it's also a great lens to have when you're creating your own stories, right? Yeah. And this idea that like how, how it's so interwoven with the human experience.

Right? So you were talking earlier about how we have these like the game of telephone that's going on right between different cultures and how really a lot of the folklore and I'm going to ask you to define some of the the difference between a fairy tale and a legend and a myth in a second, but how all those different pieces end up shaping, shaping really just an entire culture going all the way down to, you know, myths to teach moral lessons of of stuff and like how to keep people on the on the straight, narrow or in line with whatever the cultures.

Yeah now priority list for one of my thinking values are and reinstating well it also goes to show you too that like in order for in order for us to in order for our culture to be real in a story we're telling, the culture has to tell stories about itself. You know, it's like that's that's what it comes down to.

It's like we need stories to communicate, to create other stories, because that's well, that's I mean, essentially that's a human like experience. We just are a collection of stories and experiences. So in order for your story world to feel real, it needs to have stories about itself in the story world, right? Yeah. Yeah. That's that's a pretty accurate assessment.

I think, you know, storytelling, it's possibly one of the oldest traditions that we have as human beings. And when you look at the sort of origins of storytelling, you know, the sorts of things that we were telling each other when we were cavemen and the ways that we were telling those stories, it's very much conversational in nature, right at the idea of a story being something that an author writes down or develops and then gives it out to an audience, and they just sort of passively digest it as a relatively new concept when you think about it in terms of like deep time and in terms of the human experience prior added that you would

have campfires with a village elder or a or a priest or a shaman or whatever, right? That would be telling a story to help the rest of the community exist in the world. You know, this is where you get the hero's journey from, right? They had to go out of the normal world into the dangerous world and bring back some sort of treasure to help their community.

And part of this interaction was a conversational nature. So you would have other people listening and they would interject and be like, well, there's there's this thing here, like this saber tooth tiger here that you need to avoid. And then the storyteller would include that in in this story at the at the same time. So there's this sort of back and forth, back and forth always which, which is why, like in my book, I talk about this, there's a sort of mistake that people can make that think that things like video games and non-linear storytelling are a modern adventure invention.

But really it's a quite an ancient tradition. So yeah, very, very communal, very about people. I one of the things I said in my book is, is that folklore is this idea of like nose to nose. It's it's intimate, it's close up, it's about us. And about how we interact with the world. And because of that, it's it's incredibly important to have an in your story world because that's where you get that human element from in a lot of ways.

That's where you get that intimacy, right? Yeah, that's how that's how information is passed. I remember when we were just kind of talking about that a while back, our pre conversation a little earlier or late last year that we were talking about how in a and I think it was I think it was like it wasn't a specific game but how, you know you could be talking to a group of people in a mountainous area and they have the same story.

But then when you go down into the valley, it changes ever so slightly. And this kind of idea of like, well, it is that game of telephone, right? And then there are people that added stuff to it and embellish certain things for certain specific reasons or admitted certain things for whatever reason. But it gives this kind of fabric of like something not seen, but it's definitely there.

And that's so apparent in the human experience of, of just those oral traditions and things that, you know, we grow up on. And that's one of the one of the arguments or thoughts that I had when I was reading it that was like, well, you know, Star Wars really is in folklore, but I'm like, people use stories from that to teach their kids lessons.

So I don't know. I think we're getting pretty close to jumping over that one. Yeah, yeah. The Jedi religion as well. Right? So this is there's a however ridiculous it might be. I don't know too much about it, but but, but there is a belief system that has developed as a result of that story world, which is, you know, classic folklore, classic folktales.

Right? Exactly. And you know, it it makes sense that like, if it if it is such like because a lot of times people say that there is no more unique stories like every story is really been told is just how different can you tell it And the difference between how this folklore story can be told in the mountain versus the valley could just be like as in Little Red Riding Hood.

Like in Germany, it was a wolf because they had wolves there. And in China there is a tiger because they have tigers there. So it's like the core of the story might not change much, but the different things, the signifiers of just the terrain you're in and the dangers that are out there are like, if it was a tiger in Germany, people like, I've never seen a tiger in a tiger.

I guess we can walk around it. Yeah, right. Yeah, yeah. I was actually I was I was actually looking the other day at a lot of folklore from sort of the northern Italian region around the sort of the Alps. Right. And one thing that came up there was that there were some very interesting folk beliefs from the people that sort of existed there before, the people that, you know, we sort of think of as like Italians or, you know, the the Roman Empire.

Right. And the one group of people exist. They lived sort of down on the flatlands in front of the mountains. And then another were were further up in the foothills in the mountains. And they had the same same sorts of beliefs, same sorts of stories. But in the flatlands, one of the characters was comparable to the Greek gods, Zus, and then in the mountains that same character became more of like a, uh, they were still like a thunder god, but they were more of a troll, a a mountain troll sort of thing.

So that's a great example there of how the higher up mountain in this area changes the story to fit with what they know. Right, Right. And yeah, a little teaser about why you're researching stuff in the Northern Health. What's one of your projects that you moved of regular production meeting to join us here? So we very much thank you for that ancestral which you know hopefully we'll have you on to talk about that and actually dive into a story world because that one's fascinating.

But yeah, so we have we have these we have this thing right? We need folklore in our story worlds. What are some of the elements to help create that life, right. Like we can. I think what's really interesting, we've already kind of covered it is that the video games or any kind of story world it's going to take from take things they like from other folkloric pastimes, right?

If you like the idea of Mount Olympus, you might adapt that to your own, to your own games or store world folklore, right? It might have similar themes, but then that also that doesn't mean you have to stick with the Greeks. You can go wherever the heck you want. You can go across to to native North America. You can go to South America anywhere, right.

And pick and choose pieces of storytelling, of traditions, of values, and then bring them together to make your own folklore, your tales, the myths, the fairy tales, all that stuff, and really make something relatively unique while still using tried and true things. Yeah, and I think that now it's a good, good time to to define those terms that kind of separate that are part of your folklore.

You know, there are specific subcategories for characters and I think those are good idea. It's a good idea now to kind of explain those because all you have to layer all these things to create an, you know, actual believable story world about the story world where you're creating. So I think it's like fairy tale versus myth versus legend.

Yeah, Yeah. So this is this was one of the first things that I came across when I started researching this sort of subject was I was under the mistaken belief, like many other people, I had noticed. I still have many arguments with my coworkers at Shama from time to time about these these things. But that there's this idea that myth, legend, folktale are all interchangeable words, right?

And and the truth is that they're not. They are the different subcategories of the larger body of folklore. And the reason why we sort of muddle this all together is, is this concept of semantic change right? Where with words that mean one thing gradually evolve into meaning Something else so awesome to us means great, like exciting but awesome way, way back.

I mean, awe inspiring and terrifying. So this is sort of what's happened with with these words. But if you can sort of break them down and understand the differences between them, then it gives you three different tools or tools it's really to work with to lay a story into your world. So very quickly, to give you a rundown of the different definitions, we'll start with the legend, right.

So a legend is essentially a story that is considered to have a basis in history. So this is something that it may or may not have happened, but the culture that tells it believes that it did happen at some point. And over many years of telling and retelling more fantastical elements might have been added, things might have been smushed together.

All this sort of growth and evolution has occurred, but at its core, it's its historic world. So something like Let me think, Troy Right. The story of Troy. Now, it's debatable whether there was a war between Greece and Troy in the way that, you know, we understand it with Brad Pitt and and Sean Bean and all those guys are going to be outfits.

But the Greeks believed that Troy, the Trojan War did happen. And there are actually archeological ruins that archeologists suspect is the original city of Troy, though there is no they haven't found any evidence of a war actually happening there. But but that story is a prime example of a legend, because the core concept of it was believed to be historical.

King Arthur is another great one. King Arthur was most likely a barbarian tribesman who led a bunch of other barbarians to kill a bunch of people and then was glorified over years and years and years. And and that developed over time and mixed with Christianity. When that moved into that part of the world and sort of became what we know today as the Arthurian myths.

So that's sort of what legends are basis in history have evolved and grown and changed over time. But there is a kernel of historical truth usually in myths. On the other hand, I talk about them as opera. They are on a grander, more cosmic scale. So these are stories about gods, These are stories that are about the creation of the world, about massive things that we don't understand, and they usually have morals connected to them, right?

So they typically connected to the religious beliefs of the culture that are telling them and are designed to convey those religious beliefs and teach them to the next generation. And then you have fairy fairy tales or folktales that those two are kind of interchangeable. But these are stories that are much more personal. These are small stories. These are like like we were talking about before nose to nose between people within the same community.

And they are typically designed to explain smaller events that we don't understand. You know, like what's out in the forest that keeps dragging our children off or why is the weather doing what it's doing at the moment, and how do we protect ourselves from the undead like these? These are folk stories. Interestingly, folk stories also include things like the myths.

So Bloody Mary, the the what? Some of the other myths, you know, the hitchhiker or the myth. Right. Or the the woman. And why it's like these are these are folktales as well, because that they're small, that personal. They're about us as people and us grappling to understand the world around us. The interesting thing about all of all of these categories, but specifically folktales to a greater degree, is the way in which and we talked about this just before, the way in which depending on where they are being told, they will change folktales in particular.

Often you will you'll find competing visions of the same folktale within a small area or versions that flat out contradict another vision or have mistakes in them. And this is all part of the beauty of it, right, is that it creates this like rich tapestry of telling and retelling and and uniqueness. Right? It does. Does Bloody Mary scratch your eyes out?

Does Bloody Mary drag you into the mirror? Is she covered in blood? Is she a witch, Is she a ghost? You know, all of these are the answer to all of these questions is yes, right? They are all equally valid. They're just coming from different locations or different interpretations, right? Yeah. So that was a fantastic breakdown. Yeah, right.

And and it's so interesting to have these three, like, very disturbing fact categories of these stories. And so like helping helping you actually sit down and write out or to think about your story world and knowing the difference between a legend a myth in in a folk fairy tale is so important. So like, like, you know, a legend now makes a lot of sense.

And I read the book and then we spoke about it again, and now it's making sense a third time, right? So sometimes you got to read three times or experiences three times. But a legend, it makes sense of like a legend being something rooted in in something in history. It just makes sense. It like it's all the legend of of for the example of Troy, like, I was the first one that popped into my head because it's like, Yeah, does that happen?

Maybe like, you know, was it all about a princess? Probably not. You know, like, but like that was what was told, you know, and, and a group of people and like, for example in your story world could believe like for the most part that's going to stay pretty consistent throughout an entire area. Right? And with the and with the folktales, that's what it starts getting down to because I think individual yeah I think on the like when we were talking about that that opens up a lot of possibilities for like game where like let's say your hunting a monster Bloody Mary and then you have to but you don't.

But in this particular case you never heard any of these stories before. So you have to interview a bunch of the locals and they say, Oh well, she's allergic to metal. And it's like, And then this guy is like that metal. You mean coal? She can't eat coal. It's like that. He's wrong. That's why his children are dead, giving them coal.

And then you have to keep you find more of these things like, oh, she lives in a she lives in the forest. And it's like, no, she lives in a cave. And then it's like, no, it's where the birds fly. And then you find it's a forest. It's a cave in of Ward's cave, in a forest where the birds fly were found.

All three of them, like this is where she lives, you know. So we're getting pieces of that tale, right? Told throughout. But in order to get that, you have to explore the world and understand what what's going on. And those that those folktales are really that's really like that forces you in a very fun way to experience this world and explore and discover it.

Right. As opposed to being told right? Yeah, Yeah, exactly. And off the bat, Legion's a similar as well right. You they they don't diverge as much as folktales but you will have like different versions of legends showing up. So it might be that you're you know you're trying to hunt down Excalibur and Excalibur is according to legend, with King Arthur's body in his tomb.

But no one knows where his tomb is. And, you know, you're listening to these different versions of the legend and going, okay, this one says that the tomb is in this mountain and this one says it's over by the lake. And and so then you've got kind of like a red herring, sort of situation where you're like exploring these different leads and trying to work out which is the correct one.

And in the process of doing that, you're learning more about the world and you're engaging with characters and exploring and discovering new sites and, you know, having, having hopefully a great time. Right, right. And that and even down with the myths, you have something of like the creation of or like I feel like with a myth you can get a lot of like the value systems or what a culture in a story world really values depending on what type of if it's a creation myth, if it's, you know, just a jet, like how did that mountain get there kind of stuff, you know, like it it, it like you would get a lot of like

the cultures that like what are what are what are like the traits that these people value the most And and that's is so important because then that helps all these things influence each other, right? Like your fault, your folktales influence. Well, usually wouldn't influence your myths, but like it, they all intertwine. And how all these things work together in your story world.

And it's like, but it's true. And what in real life like you, you understand, Like the Greeks and the Romans basically had the same gods. But who did the Romans adore more like it was Mars. Mars was a very powerful God, very respected God, but in the Greek world areas was like the fucking it was like it was like, no, we're talking about strategic war more than just the blood for war.

You know, It was like it was Athena was a much more respected God than Aries. Aries was always getting bested by Athena, but I don't necessarily think that was true in the Romans because they actually liked to go to war. So it's like, yeah, that tells you a lot about the morals of that particular place, even though they are very similar gods in that.

Yeah and you can you can kind of work backwards with that as well. Right. I was, I was researching the Greeks just yesterday actually. And you know, just yesterday I was researching the Greeks and I, you know, one thing that I was I thought was interesting is that the the Greeks believed and probably the Romans as well, I'm not sure, but the Greeks specifically believed that the gods had a lot of say in who got sick and who was healthy.
Right. And if you were sick, you work by the gods for whatever reason. And so, you know, they they wasn't always the greatest health care as a result of this belief, because they would be like, no, the gods have done this to you. They need to undo it. If if you are supposed to be healthy again, what am I supposed to do?

Right.


Yeah. So, so yeah, that's, that's an interesting way of, of, of sort of reverse engineering things. Right. Like you can, you can create your myths and then think, well, how does this myth inform the culture after it's been around for a while, you know, like what are the, what are the ideas that people develop about their gods, about their society based off of this mythology?

So yeah, right. Great way to sort of explore culture with that one. Yeah. And that's so fun. And like we when we were just, you know, we had recorded an episode just before yours, we were talking about how much fun it is to play in the sandbox because there's just this endless stream of gets. I mean, honestly, like in maybe if we were actually in a world or, you know, one of the ones that were developing that, you know, like, okay, so this this is this is a truth to these people.

How what how does that affect the day to day life? It didn't even, you know, like, of course it would. Of course it would. And of course, that would affect health care. If they think that the gods are cursing them, you know, And that's such a that's such a cool it's such a cool and such a human thing to have, you know, and another thing that I think that we should touch on real quick, it's the ritualistic traditions.

And I know I didn't mention this before, but it just occurring to me now that we didn't talk about that, like the the rituals that these people perform or that you can run into in a story world and how obviously those have, you know, roots in their in their, in their myths and in their, well, potentially in their folk or in their folktales.

But like the the the kind of cool stuff that you can do with those rituals. Yeah, you know, Yeah. Yeah. Well like the study of, of folklore, they often break it down into different categories of, of folklore in the sense of like the these are the, these are the ways that folklore exhibited in a society. Right. So you have sort of verbal traditions and these are things like what's a good one?

You know, one of our modern day folkloric verbal traditions would be knock, knock, right? When I say that it tags it for you that this is a joke and you're supposed to respond with who's there, right? Or why did the chicken cross the road? You know, it's a joke. Or I could say once upon a time, you know, it's a fairy tale.

So these are these are sort of verbal traditions, things like happy birthday singing, happy birthday, as well as another one. And then you have other traditions that things like handshake shakes, hands, hand signals, you know, flipping someone, the bird, all of that sort of stuff are folkloric. And then you have expressed in things like architecture or clothing or food, you know, it sort of spreads out everywhere and isn't just necessarily like, you know, sacrificing a goat on an altar on a mountaintop somewhere.

Right. It encompasses everything. And one one of the more interesting subcategories that they talk about, interesting because it's very little is known about it is this idea of child law. And this is how children alter the folklore of the community that they are in into the world of childhood. And we don't know much about it because kids tend to be secretive about their worlds.

But but some of the things that that researchers have picked up on, things like, you know, hopscotch and little playground songs and jokes and urban myths and stuff that children tell each other. So that's another really interesting sort of thing to explore. If you if you're, you know, developing a community that has has quite a onus on it's folklore.

So yeah, now there's a lot of a lot of fun little sort of ritual ritual and some groupings of things that that, that you can sort of inject into your story. Yeah, I think it's important to that was an important point to say that doesn't have to be sacrificing a goat on a mountaintop somewhere with a special letter and you know, and then they drink the blood and eat the hooves and then boil the you the eyes.

Oh, boy. Look. Right. Because they have to drink it out of a special ceremonial ball. Yeah, that's you know, that's the bittersweet. And hopefully it's made it that's made from the glassy tears of an animal's ram. Right. And then of course, it has, you know, a virgin's a virgin's snot in it or something like that. And it's all mixed together and makes us bubbling stew.

But yeah, so it has like, like a great story world guys. Keep going. All right, write it down. All right. But it's important to note because you write, consider all those things. You know, even just like down to the the way that you would greet somebody and know that it's a friendly greeting or just I'm the same way.

It's like starting off. Well, now I think one of the things that I was just thinking about here is because now, like a lot of people are going to be listening to this and be like, this doesn't quite pertain to my store world because it's kind of set mostly in the world that we all exist in. You know what I mean?

But it is still important to do these things right. These are still things that you can do, even though you're not going into like the biology of the world and the creation of the universe. Right. Are making up like your own planet. Right? Right. That's your own world. But it's Earth. It's just in this context of your story, because I think it's still we.

Can you just rely on the were the things that we all know on or as there's a little bit of extra effort that you need to kind of do to kind of subtly change these things so that it does feel unique? Yeah, I think it depends on on like sort of what genre you're working in for sure. You know, a a big epic Tolkien esque fantasy is going to require a lot more worldbuilding and and probably lend itself a lot more to myths and legends and folklore.

But, you know, as we've just sort of touched on, these things exist in every society, even even our modern day ones. They just sort of masquerade in different ways. So we don't necessarily recognize them at first. Right. You know, you say there are folklorists that are studying Twitter feeds because because of the way that ideas are exchanged, there and how they sort of take on a life of their own and influence communities.

So it's it's not just a fantasy thing. It's not just a, you know, alternate history story world necessarily, but but definitely there are certain story worlds that lend themselves more to greater exploration of the stuff and ones that maybe don't need as much of this done. But it's still worth considering and exploring regardless of of what genre you're working in.

I think because at the end of the day, what we're trying to create here is a place in which your players or your audience, your readers can interact with and empathize with the characters in the world, because that that empathy, that, that intimacy that you can sort of develop with these characters is what sort of creates long lasting fans, right?

I mean, that's that's why Harry Potter is still popular today. Like, it's definitely not for the quality writing or the lovely author. It's because there was empathy created between the readers and, you know, the kids at Hogwarts. So it's yeah, it's important to explore no matter what you're working with. Yeah. Let's you let you jump in and, and actually feel like you got dirt in your hands, you know, like I got something here, I got something different and, you know, we can, we can talk a little bit now about certain certain things that certain stories that have done this very well and certain things that quite haven't quite hit the mark for some of these

things. Like. So in your opinion, what is one of the what is one of the worlds that like is it it's like one of those things where I think, you know, when it's done well because you're instantly pulled in versus when it's not done well, it's kind of thrown in your face. Yeah, yeah, definitely. I think I think Elden Ring is a really great example of this, which came out after I had written my book shortly shortly after I'd written my book, and I was very, very happy to see that they had somehow gotten a hold of a prerelease and given it a read or something because they were utilizing a lot of sort of

what I was talking about, what I was exploring. Right. You know, this this idea that when you when you jump into Elden ring, I don't know if you guys have played it or not, but it sit in this this fantasy world called the lands between and and you sort of jump in there and in true from software fashion they don't hold your hand at all.

It's incredibly difficult and and initially it's hard to sort of understand what's going on here. And that's because all of the story content in that game is delivered to you through you experiencing and interacting with the world. It's not delivered through big, long dialog trees or massive five minute cut scenes. It's it's generally also so you just exploring seeing how the world is constructed.

You know, maybe you pick up the occasional item that gives you a description that hints at something about the folklore of the world, But oftentimes you're just exploring and putting two and two together. The more you engage with the world and, you know, it's it's one of the only games that has conjured for me the same sort of feeling that I had when I was like a young kid up those sort of fighting fantasy pick up books from like second hand stores and leafing through them and and you sort of never knew what what what you were going to get or where you were going to end up.

You might be walking through a forest and suddenly you find a dungeon and, you know, and it was that. So that same sort of feeling of mystery and mystique and everything. But there was this added element of like they really thought out this world and they've put a lot of effort into making this world feel like it has layers and layers of different stories and different interpreted nations of stories and and all that great stuff that creates a fully realized world.

Another great one. That's that's more on I mean, it's a great game story wise anyway, but more on like a narrative design game mechanics sort of end as goes to Oshima which utilizes folklore to narrative eyes. Don't know if that's a word or not, but it is now a narrative is a gameplay mechanics of basically working out where you need to go next.

You know, a lot of games just give you like an arrow that points in the way you need to go or or a little icon will pop up on the map or, or they have a little GPS system in the corner of the screen. Right. And all of these things work fine. But, you know, I often find them annoying, particularly like one of my all time favorite games.

The Witcher three is horrible for this. They they have a little thing in the corner of the screen. And instead of watching this beautiful world and exploring this beautiful world, I'm looking at that little dot to like, try and figure out where I'm going. Right? And and so what goes to sashimi does that so brilliant is it it takes the the folklore of Shintoism and this idea of Kami spirits being and everything including the wind and has this guiding wind function where you can just I think you just slide up on the the d-pad on the PS4 controller and a wind will blow in the direction of where your next objective is.

And so you don't have to look at any UI or anything like that. It's all part of the world and it ties into the folklore of the world as well. So it makes for a much more streamlined experience, right? Yeah. Yeah. No. Yeah. And that's such a great right. Yeah, it's such a great because yeah, you got to, you have to integrate.

You're right. Yeah. You have to integrate the, the, the mechanics of the world into the story of the world and it makes it that much more enjoyable. Right. And you know what? And I can, I can echo that on The Witcher three, even though I didn't really get all that far, but I was very much just like, where am I looking at the map?

Looking down in the corner, where the hell am I trying to go? And you're right, but it's such a beautiful like it just looks it's so, like extensive that you could just sit and just kind of stare out and watch rather than to look down and follow. And that's an interesting way. Once again, like you said, integrate the folklore into actual gameplay mechanics and really get you rooted down and actually cause some sort of an escape, which usually you wouldn't think that GPS system would like take you out of it a little bit.

But it definitely takes your attention for it. You know, like maybe that if that was an eagle that would fly over or, you know, you when you get close to it, there was just a couple of buzzards flying around, you know, something, you know, it's something that would make you use the world to tell you where you're going.

Right. And, you know, like the GPS works and something like a Grand Theft Auto, because that's just part of the world that makes sense that they would have a GPS in the car. Right. But if it's 1970, they wouldn't have one. Right? Right, right. You know, Yeah. So and all of a sudden we're at 52 minutes, which is so crazy.

Like, we you just kind of flew by and we saw the two points that we kind of want to touch on. Actually, we just kind of did with go to humor about integrating the world. And partly reason why we bring that up was making the or our discovery through. So we did kind of talk about that, but the discovery of folklore through exploration rather than those narrative dumps.

So I'm just realizing that we did do that and I had it in my mind. I can see like the checkpoints and I just was like, we didn't do that, but we did check that. All right. And how much more value zoomed past it. We did well, it was integrated into another point, and that's why I got to look at that.

We were even integrating the folk, look at their own show, and to the points there were the magic, its magic. So the last thing to go over here is the pentacle itself and exactly what this device is. And we will show that on the screen Now do that now future Frank. And so let's just kind of take a look at it and kind of go through exactly what what the different elements are and and how how to how this helps us develop these these world and help us do the narrative design and how it could potentially help us do story worlds and in general.

Yeah, gotcha. You're going to you're going to test me here on on how much I know my own stuff, but I think probably what's what's important to say upfront with this right. Is is that. Well, two things really. First off is that this is just one approach, right? Stories, particularly non-linear stories. There are many ways to approach this.

This is just something that I found helpful and thinking about the different components that come together. The second thing, though, is that the sort of basis for for this comes from this concept of the magic circle, right? And the magic circle is, you know, you've seen it and every supernatural horror ever, the chalk circle with the pentagram in the middle and everything.

And this is a very old folkloric ritual that I think the earliest has been traced back to is somewhere in Mesopotamia. So, like, way, way, way, way, way. And that was done with flour. They'd make flour, circles, flowers, and like, you know what you make bread out of not not on what you can smell. But they'd use this to like, protect against evil spirits.

Right? And so there's this tradition that has carried over different cultures for thousands of years of protective circles. And and, you know, I mean, fairly modern times, but still, like, I think maybe like a couple of hundred years back from where we are now, there was work done on the concept of the Magic Circle in relation to play and this idea that that any sort of ritual that we as humans do, which be playing a game, watching a movie, it could be going and, you know, being doing jury duty and a court or all of these things are magic circles.

They are spaces that are consecrated and set apart for a temporary world to be created within them, in which it has its own rules and its own sort of structure. And while you're in that circle, the outside world doesn't anymore. You're focused on this one thing. So this has obviously been taken into a video game study on an academic sort of level, looking at like how games are these magic circles.

So that was sort of the origin of this. This sort of idea is, you know, we're talking about creating a sacred space for for lack of a better definition for the players so that they can sort of experience this thing separate from the the normal, mundane world and hopefully, you know, experience some form of enlightenment or transcendent transcendence through through play and through story.

So, yeah, So the other element, I guess is non-linear stories. They don't really follow the traditional structure of a narrative. They don't, you know, they, they may have these elements in them, but it's not like specifically that sort of rising action thing, you know, sort of the start, the conflict, the rising conflict and then the drop down until do no harm to it doesn't always work that way with non-linear storytelling.

Non-linear storytelling is more something that blossoms outwards, right? So a star is really good representation of that because you've got these different points that move in different directions. So yeah, the, the, the pinnacle of narrative design is just a way to think about the different elements and how they sort of are moving out in different directions and things that players can interact with at any given time in any way they want.

Is that that a good overview? Yeah, I think so. It make sense. Listen, if I can only get my fiance to understand the the magic circle kind of idea and then like how Yes. Like you can't just walk in in the middle of me playing a game because I'm not here anymore. Yeah, I'm not, I'm not here. Yeah.

So you coming in and talking to me about X, Y or Z? Yeah. Like it's not just to pause and just be like, yeah, go ahead. Yeah. Not a big deal. I'm just. I'm just. Do you know, I'm just, you know, killing these people, like, not big deal. Just I'll just stop, right? It's like you're in something. You're emotionally invested.

Your mind is thinking because really are you are in a different world. There are different rules. Yeah. And the reason why you play these games or you enter into these story worlds, if we just do a big old blanket over it. Yeah. It's so that you're not in this world anymore. It's the escape of this world with something.

Just like we said early on in the conversation that you mentioned, right, we would go and we tell these stories, we'd add in our own stuff. And yeah, for a moment there around the campfires or the caveman, we weren't in our world anymore. There were no troubles. There was nothing on the outside, right? It was just us. We were just here.

We were in something else inside of her mind. You know, it's an intellectual thing. When your parents, when you were younger, said, Can't you just pause it? Yeah, right. Yeah. No, Mom, you can't. That we have now. We have this book. You read this book, there's a reason why there is an academic reason why you cannot do that.

That's the. The true inspiration for my book. Yeah, right there all the time. That's the reason why. But it's such a it's such a great and want to get inside the screen, but it's such a great demonstration of or an illustration of of all the different aspects of this narrative design of non-linear story of a story world that you can explore in detail and not only that you can explore, but as we all know, people that listen this podcast, that as an audience member, you could feel free to explore more and create your own ideas for your own stories that take place within that world and challenge some stuff and have fun with it and

end up, you know, being a part of the larger narrative. And then, you know, and for people that are want to create these star worlds, it's important to have these types of folkloric things and you can layer them into multiple different stories. And like you were saying, that the person who kind of started to discover that he could do this or they could do this, Michael Foster No, not Michael Foster Was it who?

Lovecraft Oh, yeah, yeah, it was Lovecraft. He didn't know he was doing it right. He didn't know what he was doing. He didn't know he was doing it. He was just like, yeah, this this is a monster. That's something, but I'm not going to talk about that. But he was throwing them out there, and then all of a sudden a group of people latched on to this and started to work these things into existence.

Right. And but that's the thing. It's like that's why it's kind of in a transmedia world. It's kind of cool. You could have this concept of this legend and be like, Yeah, it's a legend, and you could reference it in multiple different stories. And then you can be like, Well, maybe you should write this legend and this and we can settle, anchor down a few things.

And these guys are getting this stuff wrong because it's been thousands of years, and this is why they think this happened. You know, he he killed the monster. It's like, nope, he tripped and fell on the pole, just went up and killed it. But that's their entire identity. But their identity is that they're it's a it's a good get out of jail free card for writers, right.

Like, yeah, right. It's not a narrative inconsistency that's just folklore or changing over time. Yeah right exactly right. It makes it real great. Well, Nic, this was fantastic conversation. I'm so glad for just for some reference, this has been a battle about a year and a half or something like that since we met. Yeah, well, ready to get you up in a long time.

It's been I felt like we've already had two podcasts we have, because each time that we talk to you, we for about an hour readiness. But but we've, we've, we've talked to about a couple of different projects that you're working on that we know that we're also very excited about to learn more about with the with Ancestral, which is a story that we're working on, which is a fantastic one that we won't spoil anything here.

And then also and I can't remember the name, it starts with a T for the perfume company. Yes. Thornwood Perfume Thornwood. There you go. Yeah, that one's had a little bit of a stand still at the moment since I moved countries, but hopefully we'll get that up and running at some point. And and if you're, if you're a true creator you have plenty of projects are in a standstill but nonetheless are good ideas interesting to talk about.

Yeah so yeah so we've we've we've like I said, we've tried to have Nic on a couple of times and for whatever this and this and that, we finally did it. We did it. And you will be back on the show again and we will talk about ancestral. I know that you guys are really deep into making that world, and I'm looking forward to exploring it and talking and sharing with our audience because this is what we need to do to get new audience, to get people excited.

Well, maybe we'll maybe we'll we'll playtest again with you guys at some point where I just sort of doing that with with a few people. So so you know what to watch this space. Okay, well, yeah, just let us know and we will get 100%. Well, of course. Great. All right. Well, thanks for being on with us. And we'll talk to you soon.

All right. And I was.

Thanks for joining us. Intrepid explorers. If you want more great content. Well, look at one way I think it's over here. But this episode was very much about how to create a story world or elements to a story world. If you're interested in learning more, we highly recommend our episode with both Houston Howard and Jeff Gomez, both transmedia producer, and know a far more than we know because they are experts in their field, so I would highly recommend those.

Those are available on the site here. Continue to create your own story worlds and we'll see you next time.