For nearly a decade, I’ve been increasingly interested in games and the development of games, and so games often now come out in my novels. Today I got to write about an invented game in this new novel.
And I just find that fun.
But adding onto what I wrote yesterday, this is all a way to build your world. Like in a very real way, this is worldbuilding. But it’s not the worldbuilding of kings and queens, of empires and nations. Or, it is, but at its most fundamental and then diffused through history.
Where does the game of chess come from? Why did it become so popular in Europe?
These are interesting questions! To the degree they have answers, we learn much about people and places and even things.
Nursery rhymes and folktales, fairy tales and songs older than time – these are ways that the ancient spill into the present. Where stories told for centuries become just a story, where a tragedy gradually becomes superstition and then just a story told that no one thinks too much about.
Why would people all play this game in this novel?
Well, this is layering history, but without the lectures. This is building the world but in simple, building block ways.
On top of all that and more important than any of it, I just think it’s fun.
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