The Worldbuilder’s Journey: a Sourcebook and Roadmap for Courses on Worldbuilding Douglass S. Parker August 16, 2019 This is a ‘hyperbook’ — a PDF ebook with hyperlinks that query web resources. PDF Readers — and Browsers — handle Links differently PDF readers handle links differently — not all show URLs when mousing over links. In Firefox and Chrome, the PDF readers display link content; in Safari, the current PDF reader does not. PDF reader apps: Acrobat and recent versions of Preview display link content. In Safari: Command-click opens links in a new Tab; Command-Option-click opens links in a new Window. For use of information in the links, select a browser and PDF reader accordingly. If not satisfactory, consider configuring your browser to use a different PDF reader. For example, an Acrobat plugin can be used as a plugin PDF reader in most browsers. Please check periodically whether this is the most recent version of this document. Send questions, corrections, suggestions, etc. to: [email protected] mentioning: Worldbuilder’s Journey version of 2019–08–16. Please help us improve! Attribution License: this book is distributed under Creative Commons License CC-BY: this means you can copy, distribute, and display this work in any medium/format, or make derivative works based on it, provided you credit this work. Douglass Parker, Worldbuilder’s Journey 2019, douglassparker.org/worldbuilders-journey August 16, 2019 2 D.S. Parker . The Worldbuilder’s Journey: a Sourcebook and Roadmap for Courses on Worldbuilding Douglass S. Parker Imaginary Worlds are fictional places like Middle Earth, Narnia, and the Land of Oz — sometimes also called fantasy worlds or fictional worlds. They have always been important in myth, folk tales, fairy tales, theater, and literature. They are also important in gaming and entertainment. A common feature of these worlds is a map, giving perspective on the entire place. Another important feature is the journey story, describing voyages or quests in the world. Intrigued by these worlds, Douglass S. Parker, Sr. built a library of books about them and coined the term Parageography to describe their design. ‘Para-’ means ‘beyond’ here, and the idea was that par- ageography goes beyond world maps into world design. In other words, where geography describes physical structure, parageography describes conceptual structure — so parageography is ‘conceptual geography’ of world design. Parker taught an undergraduate worldbuilding course at the University of Texas for 25 years. After experiments with a course trying different worlds in 1973–1978, he offered a regular course titled Introduction to Parageography (CC.327) in the Dept. of Classics from 1982 to 2007. It emphasized creativity, and took students on a journey studying about 20 great worlds over history, starting with the Odyssey and ending with Middle-Earth. The course project required students to build a world of their own. This approach was successful — the course won awards and became a very popular course at the University of Texas. This PDF also describes the parageography library. The core of the library has about 2,000 nonfiction books, with a corresponding index having about 50,000 links from books to web resources. These books cover about 30 topics related to world design. Today imaginary worlds are an important medium, and worldbuilding plays a central role in some industries (such as media franchises). The course and library PDFs are being made available as re- sources in the hope they’ll help people and promote worldbuilding. Disclaimer: this book has been put together by Douglass S. Parker, Jr., who was only indirectly involved with the course. The preface and the introductory comments (first chapter) try to present the Parageography idea, but they are in no way summaries of Parker Sr.’s lifetime of perspectives. The presentation differs significantly from what he would have presented. The Parageography concepts are due to Parker Sr., then, and this book description (including all inaccuracies and inadequacies) to Parker Jr. All ideas for improvement are welcome. Our information about offerings of the Parageography course after 1995 is incomplete; if you have access to more recent course materials please let us know. Cover image: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus (Bruegel the Elder, ca. 1558) [n.b. lower right corner] D.S. Parker 3 August 16, 2019 . Preface Inspired by the World of Oz in the 1930s, Science Fiction worlds in the 1940s, and Tolkien’s Middle Earth in the 1950s, Douglass Parker started looking for good references on imaginary worlds (aka fantasy worlds or fantasy lands). These worlds are difficult to characterize. One very popular feature isthe world map — an outline of journeys to unfold. Another common feature is the use of journey stories, which track a sequence of challenges facing characters on a quest or journey through the world. Parker was interested in the design of these worlds — ‘how they work’. Over 60 years he compiled a library, with a nonfiction core that reached 2000 books, and came to think of them as defining a field that hecalled parageography (‘beyond geography’). The idea of parageography is to go beyond a world map (geography) and get at world design. Parker started to offer a course on parageography in 1973. Its scope grew until 1978, covering recent worlds like Ozand science fiction worlds like those of Dune and Amber. However, at that point it was not yet a ‘worldbuilding’ course (requiring creative and active involvement from students). In Winter 1982 he offered the course at Dartmouth, with very motivated students, and it became a regular course in Texas emphasizing what he called ‘applied creativity’. Over the next 25 years at the University of Texas, up til 2007, a generation of students took the course. It made a tour of about 20 great worlds through history, with required reading of source texts. It became a worldbuilding course: for the final project students had to build their own creative world. This put them ona Worldbuilder’s Journey — a project of their own design. Parker took the role of a Guide, offering background and general strategies while letting the students improvise. This was among the most successful aspects of the course, and helped it stay popular for 25 years. Figure 1: Worldbuilding is a great journey [Map of ... Saturnin Farandoul (Robida, 1879) [Wikipedia: Public Domain]] The Worldbuilder’s Journey is the title of this book. It tries to make an argument for similar courses that combine a tour of great worlds across history with a worldbuilding project. It explains what the parageography course did, the importance of comparisons between worlds, and how the course project worked. Worldbuilding has evolved enormously since this time, also, and this book briefly mentions worldbuilding directions beyond topics covered in the course — and how worldbuilding communities can help. One reason for the term ‘parageography’ was to stress that the approach was unusual — a ‘conceptual geography’ of world design, grounded in influential examples from history. A map can summarize some aspects of a world, like its geography, but cannot summarize journey stories for example. The first chapters focus on great imaginary worlds, and offer overviews of the parageography course and library. This introduction is followed by chapters about comparative world design — with suggestions for worldbuilding. Some of this material goes beyond what was covered in the parageography course. D.S. Parker 5 August 16, 2019 . There is a final chapter of bibliographies on related topics: world catalogs (coffee table-books), worldbuilding basics (such as designs of basic structures), course readings, and reference works (including encyclopedias). Hopefully this book will help people design worlds, and explain ‘how they work’. The bibliographies here emphasize books related to the course; many more bibliographies are covered in the parageography library. The PDF you are looking at is a ‘hyperbook’ — a PDF ebook with links to resources. It gives a way to share materials from the course and library, and make them available to everyone: each book description includes a text synopsis and about 25 hyperlinks (which use the synopsis to query resource sites on the web). Even if a particular book is impossible to access directly, links that use its synopsis to search these sites may lead to something useful in worldbuilding. In other words, this book is a Parageography Course overview, along with some starting points for worldbuilding. The parageography course and library are summarized in two large companion hyperbooks. The Course hyperbook is essentially this Overview book plus copies of course notes, and is about 400 pages long. The Library hyperbook has synopses and links for about 2000 books, and is currently about 800 pages. Two interesting related Efforts in Education • The MacArthur Foundation Reports on Digital Media and Learning funded a groundbreaking project that produced Quest to Learn: Developing the School for Digital Kids (free PDF eBook by Katie Salen et al.) — a detailed game-based framework for education. To facilitate adoption it includes a detailed curriculum map and budget, as well as sample discovery missions and quests. This was a large effort with a similar outlook to the Parageography course: The designers of Quest to Learn developed an approach to learning that draws from what games do best: drop kids into inquiry-based, complex problem spaces that are built to help players understand how they are doing, what they need to work on, and where to go next. Content is not treated as dry information but as a living resource; students are encouraged to interact with the larger world in ways that feel relevant, exciting, and empowering. • The National Endowment for the Arts developed the Teacher’s Guide for A Wizard of Earthsea (free PDF eBook by Michael Dirda), with a topic-by-topic syllabus for Ursula K.