Fractal Storyworld Part 4: What’s the Point?

For the past couple weeks, I’ve been discussing the idea of creating “fractal storyworlds” designed so that you can “zoom in” to reveal new details of the world while keeping the core vision of the world intact. It’s been a fun bit of theory-crafting, but you may be wondering, “What’s the point?” After all, this sort of world-building is more work that just saying “It’s Game of Thrones meets Aliens” and calling it a day.

So what’s the point? Here it is:

Let’s break this down a little bit.

Different Stories for Different Platforms

I’ve written about this sort of thing before. It’s a short post, and worth the read, but for those of you whose arthritis is flaring up again in your clicking finger, here’s the gist: There are countless ways to deliver a story, but not all stories are well-suited to all platforms. What works for a comic book might not work as a short story, a video game, or a series of tweets ostensibly sent by an astronaut monkey trapped on the moon.

By making your storyworld fractalicious, you’ve got much wider (some might say near-infinite) range nodes, each of which is a story you can tell. With all these options before you, it’s much easier to find to the story that best matches the platform.

Maintaining the Core Premise

Once you start going all transmedia on your storyworld and spreading it around to different platforms, it can be easy — even tempting — to lose sight of its core premise. Then you end up with things like the Great Gazoo, or a kids’ cartoon based on the movie Rambo.

Because each node has a premise, and that premise — by definition — works within the storyworld’s core premise, you don’t have to worry much about getting off-track.

The Point of the Point

Ultimately, the true point of designing fractal storyworlds is that they’re made of nodes, and each node is a potential product. Products — whether games, traditional media, marketing campaigns, alternate reality games, or other such things — are how worlds earn their keep. Going fractal lets us make more, better products, which mean more, better profits. Because even if you’ve got the world-building chops of George Martin and James Cameron, if you’re not moving product, you’re just playing dungeon master.