Jared van Duinen

Worldbuilding as Historical Research: a Method for ‘Creative Histories’

Symposium presentation 2pm Wed Dec 7

This presentation aims to mine the crevice between academic non-fiction history and fictional worldbuilding and explore ways in which the theory and method of academic history can be combined with the creative method and practice of fictional worldbuilding in order to produce more creative histories. In this way, it engages with the concept of ‘Creative Histories’ as described by historian, Will Pooley: ‘creative histories bring creative practices into conversation with historical research to provoke new methods, develop alternative generic conventions, and suggest new questions’. The presentation will examine the above concerns via worldbuilding website and software Campfire Write. This software has been chosen because it is most commonly used by players of role-playing games (RPGs) and fiction writers for creating their fictional worlds. This presentation suggests that worldbuilding software like this could just as easily provide the framework and provocation for researching and building historical worlds that are creative and academically rigorous. Thus I argue that the crevice between academic non-fiction history and fictional worldbuilding is, in fact, a fruitful place for the production of more creative histories.

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