Category:Transcript 2014 - 07/15

This is the transcript for the first class of World Design, held on July 15th, 2014.

Note1: The method of teaching does change over time as the instructor learns what works for this body of students.

Note2: Due to only being granted one student's permission to provide their speech, and the strict rules of Tapestries on such, large portions have been ommitted entirely. Due to this, some of the instructor's comments have been altered so as to provide proper context. Some other comments have been created which are attributed to generic students as they are not copy/paste quotes, but rather are paraphrased excerpts of student's comments stitched together to provide bare-bones context as well. These quotes are not attributed to anyone and were never spoken during the class.

Xiseria says, "This would be class 102, World Design. Tuesdays, 6pm sever for one hour.""

Xiseria walks through the rows of desks, handing out chocolate chip cookies wrapped in paper towels for the crumbs to each. "These are for bothering to show up at all. There are a lot of students who have never bothered to show up for a class; if you participate and work hard, you will be rewarded. If you slack off and refuse to seek help when needed... well, let's just say I promised the headmaster I wouldn't nail anyone to the walls literally, but figuratively is still on the table. Now then, let's begin."

Class is now in session!.

One student says, "I'm kind of curious what 'world design' is. Like, do we get to play god and make world?" He quiets down when class starts though.

Xiseria writes her name upon the board then begins speaking. "Good evening, class. This is the first class of World Design. My name is Xiseria, and I'll be yer instructor fer this series of lectures. You will refer to me by name, or by instructor, nothing else. Don't piss me off. It's not that you won't like me when I'm pissed off so much as I have an open window policy for those who piss me off. As in the window is open and you will go through it in said event. I am strict, but fair, and will require that you raise your hands, paws, hooves, or whatever when you have a question, or I will ask you a question and expect people to call out the answers."

Xiseria glances over the students present. "You will show yerself interested in learning, or I won't have ya present. I don't care what yer skill level is, newbie or mistress of the art, I do care that ya learn and better yerselves. I'm not here to lecture to brick walls. Note taking is fine, but class participation takes precedence above all else. Ya don't tab out, ya don't pass notes, ya don't fuck under the tables behind my back. If you want to learn, then I will put in as much effort as you do - if you run into problems, ask me directly and I will spend extra time out of class to help with your homework or work with you on areas you have problems with, so don't you dare tell me you didn't understand and couldn't be bothered to ask."

One student brings up the matter of cursing. (This is removed from the course afterward)

Xiseria bows lightly. "My apologies, I normally am rather foul mouthed, I shall endeavour to be more cautious. Now then, with that aside, my point is simple here: my job is to provide ya with the tools ya need to build a world so ya can write a narrative. No world, no story. The story's the fun part, it's where stuff happens. It's where characters grow up, it's where they do stuff, it's where they live like heroes and die like peasants. The thing is, for stuff to happen, ya gotta have somewhere for that stuff to happen. "Stuff happens" is the watered down version of a different phrase, but it's not just a phrase; stuff doesn't 'just happen', not in reality, not in fantasy. There's a long list of tiny things that lead up to stuff happening, we just normally aren't aware of all the stuff that led to stuff happening, but that doesn't mean it's not there influencing it."

Xiseria says, "So, before we go any further, do we have any questions in particular before we cover the primary points of what the class is about, and move onto the syllabus and how homework will be handled?""

Xiseria clears her throat lightly. "Also, when asked a direct question such as this, you are free to answer without raising your hands. Please jump in with any thoughts you have."

One student asks if there will be chances for extra credit in the class.

Xiseria nods slowly in partial agreement. "In a way, yes, and in a way, no. If you miss a class and put the effort in to catch up and finish your homework anyway, or you go out of your way to participate and show an interest in learning, you will be granted additional points for participation. Note that if you wanted to just read off how to do something like this, wikipedia is always available. The reason for why you're here now, being taught, is you have the option to learn firsthand and ask questions, to have a hands-on approach and such. If you're not going to make use of that, there's not honestly much reason to be here, now is there? To that end, participation will be valued highly and there will be opportunity for some bonus credit for such."

You say, "However, your participation mark is out of a set maximum value, so you cannot exceed that amount even with extra credit - you can merely reach your maximum potential.""

Xiseria clears her throat lightly and continues. "If there's no further questions, then let's begin with the most important question, the one that was asked earlier - What is world design? For that, what are your thoughts? What do you think world design entails? Call out any ideas you can think of, regardless of how unsure you may be of such. This is as much to get a feel for how much you know already as it is to answer the question."

One student offers, "I'd guess that it's something to do with games or creation. Make your own world, be god, knock up some hopeless virgin."

Another laughs a bit. "Designing worlds for roleplaying games, or writing stories."

Yet another grins. "Depends on what you need the world to do! And what's interesting about it, from laws of physics to biology to economics to politics and the ramifications of all of them."

A final one says, "Creating a story setting that's got internal consistency and a reason for storythings, that works without resorting to Stupid Writing Tricks."

Xiseria sits back against her desk lightly, providing a soft laugh at the first answer. She nods her head to a few of the answers provided. "These are some good answers, but I would suggest the last one may have caught a point others had missed - world design is a bit of a misnomer; it doesn't necessitate that you have to design a whole world. A microcosm such as just a city as you'd expect to find in something like Grand Theft Auto is still world design. A culture for a historical fiction novel is still world design. Any time in which you have to create the backdrop for where stuff happens, the factions involved, what their culture is, their architecture, their anatomy, their species, whatever, all of that falls under the broad spectrum of world design."

Xiseria walks down between the desks, handing out candies to Tyche, Mikael, Arashi and Masamune for answering. "Now then, the purpose of this is pre-production. There are three main stages to anything which is created, be it advertisements for commercials, TV shows, movies, video games, books, plays, you name it. The first stage is pre-production. The more time you spend in pre-production, the quicker and easier everything else is done. It's the whole measure twice, cut once idea. If you know what will happen or have the tools laid out already, you don't have to make up an answer on the spot later on.

"Pre-production is when you write the script and choose the actors for example, production is when you actually shoot the film, and post-production is when you touch up the film with editing, special effects and so on. Ideally, you want to spend as much time on pre-production as possible. If you know exactly what will happen before you get to the filming part, then the filming or writing part is quick and easy, flows smoothly, and everything just falls into place.""

You say, "A poor choice of actors or a half-done script means you waste enormous amounts of time messing around with these things when it costs you the most money to work on them. The same is true with world design, but on a more profound scale. Consider that you want to make a character for a new species... this character is a very unique and interesting member of their species. How do you stress how different they are without a baseline of what is considered normal for that species? You honestly can't. There has to be a reference point somewhere to say what that species is known for as primary traits. Otherwise you just get a generic, bland human with funny ears and perhaps a tail.""

Xiseria heads back up to the front of the class and draws the rough outline of a planet upon the front board. "The same goes for everything else that world design covers. For something to be unique, you must have a baseline to draw from to say what is normal." She pauses a moment, then nods towards a raised hand. "You have a question?"

The question asked is: "Jar Jar from Star Wars and his entire god-forsaken species. Bad world design?"

Xiseria taps the side of her muzzle lightly. "Yes, though likely not for the reasons you might expect. Consider that the Gungan race actually seemed to have some slight hint of a culture; they had an aquatic homeland, they were removed from the general population, and otherwise seemed to have some sort of traits that made sense. The problem is more so that no thought was put into what made sense. They had what... energy balls the likes of which are nearly impossible to produce today, yet thrown with catapults? They had a monarch who looked completely different than the others of the species with no explanation. They had holes all through the reasoning of such."

Xiseria she taps lightly on the board at the planet. "This is what happens when you make stuff up on the spot and try to make excuses or just throw stuff in because it seemed like a good idea at the time, or it sounded cool. That's great and all, but it leads to plotholes all over, and as you try to fill in those plotholes, you'll find it makes even more in the process by digging new ones to get the dirt to fill the original holes."

One student makes special mention in saying: "Turns out, George Lucas is kinda a hack."

Xiseria laughs softly. "There's a reason most everyone loves The Empire Strikes Back the most... it was directed by his university professor, not by Lucas himself."

Xiseria hrms a bit. "Time's going quicker than I had first thought. Good enough. Alright, I'm going to make a change of the rules - you are allowed to speak within class without raising your hands, so long as it remains on topic - it seems to work significantly better and is more organic. Also, a question that will be important. I would like to provide transcripts for each class online so that if anyone misses a class, they can read what they've missed. Due to the rules on the server, I must request your permission to repost any conversations. With that, if you have an issue with this, please whisper me that you would not appreciate such and I will edit your name out of any transcript with a fake name so no one will know who you are but that any questions asked can be maintained."

"I was going to save this for a bit later in the evening, but as we're on the topic, for those who are unaware, a wiki has been set up with the information for this class, including homework assignments and transcripts of the class. Again, if you do not want your name provided in these transcripts, please let me know. To see the wiki's information, please go to

http://world-design-class.wikia.com/wiki/Xiseria%27s_World_Design_Class_Wiki

and bookmark it so that you don't miss anything important."

Xiseria says, "As we're running low on time, I'm going to skip straight to the Syllabus and what you will learn in this class. The class itself has been broken up into several large chunks of topics which will be covered in order. The amount of classes that will be spent on each topic will essentially be 'until we're done talking about it.' so there is no set limit to how long we'll discuss something.""

You say, "The first aspect we'll be covering after this initial class will be Chaos theory, how it applies to world design, quantum theory and the concept of "Close enough".""

You say, "The next part we'll be covering is Planetary scale concepts, Orbits, Suns / moons / planet types, 5 forces (gravity/em/wnuke/snuke/magic) and Non-terran planets (low water, low oxygen, volcanic, etc)."" You say, "From there, we'll move onto Geology and planetary restructuring, Tectonic planes, contenental drift, volcanic islands, erosion, meteors, comets, gamma ray bursts, solar flares, Ice ages, solar maximums and minimums, mineral rates and so on. These are the broad brushes used to create major events in your worlds."

You say, "Next, we will be covering evolution, how it doesn't necessarily have to interfere with dieties or religions, things like reproduction / sex / gender concepts, molecular Biology, and alternate non-terran biology such as sulfur based life.""

You say, "Ecosystems are next on the list; the circle of life and death, viruses, insects, carrion feeders - higher predators and herd animals, alternatives to plants and animals and unique growth under extreme conditions."

You say, "As I'm getting really low on time, let's condense this further still - we will cover magic, technology, culture(S!) with a stress on the plural there, architecture, politics, religion and finally we will cover deity built worlds."

You say,  "For homework in this course, you will have one large final project - each of you will be building your own planet from scratch. Each week you will be given a bit of homework to work towards that final goal. Individual homework assignments will be passed in and I will give you my thoughts on such for how to improve upon them, but they will not be graded. The only thing that matters is your final project when it comes to homework. To this end, you will not want to miss a single piece of homework as in each case it is important to build upon the previous topics covered. "

You say, "Regardless, by the time this class is complete, you will have a living, breathing world which could be put on par with something you'd expect from J. Michael Straczynski."

You say, "For this particular week, as we're just starting, you have but a single, simple bit of homework to cover - write out what you hope to gain from this course and why you want to be here at all. The reason for this is you may find you have little reason to stay, or you may find later on that your goals have changed significantly. As with everything, a benchmark is required to determine where you go from there. If you don't know where you started, you can't compare where you've gone. Send all homework assignments to Xiseria@hotmail.com please. As we are out of time, that will be the end of this week's class. You are dismissed!"

All flags on this room have been cleared.