Building a worldview from scratch

Original link: https://blog.guhub.cn/concept/creating-my-own-world-setting.html

I mentioned in my last post that I was going to create my own worldview, inspired by the backrooms series, but after thinking about it, I don’t think I have the skills to maintain a large worldview as well as a website like MEG Database Authoring Group ¹ (of course In the end, it can’t be that large.) However, I still don’t plan to give up this idea, it’s a big deal to make it smaller. Creating the world or something is super cool.

Explore the core of the “back room”

We have never done anything about writing a worldview. It is necessary to analyze the existing works in depth and learn from them. I’m going to start with the “back room”, but well, we have to know what the “back room” is.

What is a “back room”

Backrooms, namely Backrooms, some marketing accounts on Douyin are also called “darkrooms” and “darkrooms”, but these are all wrong translations, and the correct official translation is called “backrooms”.

The back room originated from a post on Reddit, where the subject asked netizens to share pictures that were creepy, weird, or that didn’t look right, and matched these pictures with a story they wrote. One of the images is of an old, derelict office with nothing but pale yellow wallpaper, a musty dank tan carpet, and humming, erratic fluorescent lights.

This is the original appearance of the back room. Now, it is called the “front room”, which is level 0, the first level of the back room. At this level, the space is non-linear, the area is larger than three earths, most of the rooms inside are randomly generated, and the location is constantly changing, only a few rooms and items (Malani room, mirrors, etc.) will appear in a fixed place. In addition, level 0 prevents Wanderers ² from meeting and separates Wanderers who are consciously grouped. And due to its unique spatial nature, it is very easy for wanderers to become disoriented and hallucinations. Fortunately, however, in level 0, the flow of time seems to be delayed, and the wandering wanderers here may not feel hungry or thirsty for dozens of days, and it is difficult to meet post-mortems here. Threatening entities in the room ³ .

So, how do you get into the back room?

When a person cuts out from an incorrect position in reality, he will come to the back room. Usually, cutting out directly from reality will come to the level 0 just mentioned, and there is a very small probability that it will come to a higher level. Dangerous level 2. Yes, in addition to level 0, there are many different levels in the back room, each level has different entrances and exits, of course, some levels have no exits at all.

What is the so-called “cut out”?

This word can be understood as “pulling through the mold” in the game. The person who first proposed the level 0 setting used “cut out” to describe the method of entering the back room. Why do you use the word “cut out”? I guess it should be pure mouth talk, but it has become one of the very important concepts in the back room. For example, the normal way to go from level 0 to level 1 is to go from level 0 to any Cut out the wall, hit the wall when it’s not looking, and go through the wall without breaking the wall. In some places in reality, the barrier between the back room and the front room ⁴ is very weak, such as a wall without shadows, and any places that make people feel uncomfortable and weird, may directly cut into or be sucked into the back room.

In addition to various peculiar concepts and different levels, there are supernatural creatures and objects in the back room similar to those in the SCP Foundation. They are called “Entity” and “Object” respectively. Most of them ignore The laws of physics in the front room operate in their own way.

The underlying logic of the back room series

The back room creates an unreal world that is independent from reality but closely linked to it. As can be seen from the various levels in the back room, most of the levels in the back room are related to reality, and they are often modeled after a part of reality.

For example, the level 0 we mentioned at the beginning, its prototype is an old abandoned office, at least it looks like that; the first safe place that the homeless encounter can be settled – the prototype of level 1 is underground parking farms and warehouses; level 3, which is rich in materials but full of danger, is a real power station and even a prison; level 4, which has the most important resource “almond water” in the back room, is an abandoned and tidy office building; The most populated tier, level 11 is an infinitely stretched city.

Building on these archetypes, the back room distorts the physical rules of reality and gives these layers their own character. For example, level 6 is a labyrinth-like icy corridor that extends almost infinitely. There is no light here, and the light sources such as flashlights carried by homeless people will all be useless, and the sound can be isolated here. The name of this level is “Lights Out ( Lights Out)”.

These features can also cast a layer of mystery on these layers, or create a sense of tension and crisis. After seeing the setting of level 6, some people may wonder “is there any lights on this level?” “Where is the light switch?” “If I reach this level and see nothing, how do I leave?”. When I read the introduction of each level, I always rush to find the method described in the documentation to get out of this level. Although the worldview of the back room is completely independent of reality, this “cut out of reality” thing seems to be something that everyone may experience unexpectedly. Ever since I saw the back room, when I fell for no apparent reason, all I thought was “Fuck, I’m going into the back room”. Because of this nature, the worldview of the back room gives people a strange sense of substitution, just like “Rules and Strange Talk”, it feels like reading a survival guide, and there are also many attractive and interesting settings.

In addition to describing the characteristics and functions of a certain level, an entity, and an object, all the backroom articles also tell the wanderer how to leave a certain level, how to deal with dangerous entities, and how to use an object correctly. Compared with the unclear reasons of “Rules and Strange Talk”, it only asks people to strictly follow the rules. The back room article not only gives readers a strong sense of substitution, but also allows readers to understand everything. But this still does not affect the sense of mystery, fear and excitement brought by the back room, because many “suggestions” are not only difficult to complete, but also have a certain luck bonus. For example, in level!, players need to breathe a sigh of relief Run ten kilometers of corridors and jump over obstacles to avoid the pursuit of thousands of entities behind you. What’s more, in some cases, the homeless person can’t do anything at all. For example, his companion is infected by “reptile bacteria”, and he can only watch TA change from a living person to a white crawling monster without self-consciousness.

Simply put, the back room is a multiverse world of countless distinct layers of reality and fantasy, danger and opportunity (although sometimes only danger); psychological experience.

What is the kernel of the back room?

Or, how to write a good work like the back room?

First of all, we know that the back room has a world view that is independent of reality, which is mainly due to the two concepts of “front room” and “back room”, which separate the world of the back room from the real world, and the world of the back room There is no direct connection and no direct connection to the front room. This is very different from the popular SCP Foundation in previous years. The setting of the SCP Foundation looks like a secret organization hiding in the real world, and the supernatural life/objects/phenomena contained or discovered by SCP all exist in real world.

But the SCP Foundation is also a successful work. Is it really so important to separate reality from fiction?

I thought about this question for a long time. When I was about to give up and wanted to change the starting point, I suddenly thought: The back room and SCP are not actually separated from reality and fiction, but they are indeed separated from reality and fiction.

The back room separates reality and fiction, as evidenced by the “barrier” between the front room and the back room; the back room does not separate reality and fiction, and all levels in the back room have shadows of the real world and things that people are familiar with. The SCP Foundation separates reality and fiction, and SCPs contained and controlled by the Foundation will not affect people’s normal lives in most cases; the SCP Foundation does not separate reality and fiction, and all SCPs are in the Foundation’s worldview. exists in the real world.

From this we can conclude that to write a good worldview, we must balance the boundaries between reality and fiction .

Of course, the core of the back room certainly doesn’t stop there.

Most of the levels in the back room, even entities and objects, can give people a “sense of sight”. As mentioned before, many of the layers in the back room are taken from a part of reality, so I won’t repeat them here. Let’s talk about the entities in the back room. There is a class of entities in the back room called “faceless spirits”. Their appearance is almost the same as human beings, the only difference is that they do not have any facial features. Young faceless spirits are full of hostility and like to torture wanderers, while adult faceless spirits are usually not threatening, and old faceless spirits are very friendly, even holding the face of wanderers happily to observe them. The Faceless Spirit will have different performances at different levels. The more famous one is called the “Eleven Effect”. In Level 11, the Faceless Spirit and the Hound will appear in pairs, showing the reality of “people walking the dog”. Behaves and is not aggressive; on one playground level (forgot the number), juvenile Faceless Spirits are polite to wanderers when accompanied by adult Faceless Spirits in the rest area.

Whether it is the appearance of the Faceless Spirit or the somewhat amusing “Eleven Effect”, these characteristics and phenomena are related to things we are familiar with, and they even show an amazing sense of harmony with the surrounding environment, such as the “Eleven Effect” “It just happened to appear in level 11, a level similar to a real city.

This sense of sight may be somewhat similar to the “uncanny valley effect” ^5. The environment of level 0 is a familiar vacant office, but it just makes people feel wrong, because although it looks like a normal room, it It’s not normal, it’s a randomly generated wall that stretches almost indefinitely. To create such a terrifying worldview as the back room, this “sense of sight” may be the key.

In addition, there is a “sense of crisis”. Wanderers are exposed to varying degrees of threats at all levels of the backroom, including rampant entities, unstable levels, and even tampered documents. This is easy to understand and will not be explained further.

The back room and urban legends such as SCP also have a common feature – the interoperability of internal elements . For example, SCP-005 is a master key, so almost all structures with locks on file with the SCP Foundation can be opened with SCP-005. This interoperability is even more pronounced in the back room series. For example, after the wanderer reaches level 0, he can directly cut out from the wall to level 1. After reaching level 1, he may continue to explore and possibly reach level 2. At level 2, he may find an unlocked door and come to level 1. Level 3 or level 4, if you come to level 4, you can collect almond water here to continue exploring, find a stairwell or elevator here, you may come to level 6, explore level 6 in the dark, follow the sound of the waves Go, you will come to level 7, open the door of the entrance room, jump into the ocean, dive into the abyss of the ocean and put yourself in a coma, you will reach level 83…

This interoperability gives this type of work endless possibilities and facilitates the creation of new content. When people are creating new content, they can connect it to the original content rather than simply expanding the worldview.

shape of the world

A worldview needs to have some of its most basic concepts, such as the concepts of “entity” and “level” in the back room, which often reflect the basic shape and structure of the world. The back room starts with the concept of “world” and separates it into “front room” and “back room”. And I’m going to start with the concept of “universe”.

From a literal point of view, the “cosmos” in the universe means all space, and the “cosmos” means infinite time. The universe is the collection of all time and space. Therefore, I separated “universe” into two concepts, “universe space” and “universe time”. Let’s change the language and start with the word “universe”, uni- means “unity, collective”, and verse, which is written as versus in Latin, means verse and versus in the English environment are very different, but I will put them both. Summed up as “change”, understood from this level, the universe is “the collection of ‘change'”, which I call The Unity of Changing.

In this way, the universe carries cosmic space and cosmic time, and cosmic space and cosmic time support the existence of “the aggregate of ‘change'”, making the “aggregate of ‘change'” the content of the universe.

It was only when I wrote these concepts down to my heart’s content that I found out: I don’t even understand what this is.

I found that the concept of “universe” seemed to be a bit too large, and it would cause headaches for both writers and readers, so I decided to change my mind.

So I found the concept of “dimension”. What if we, who live in a three-dimensional world, are suddenly transferred to a two-dimensional world, or a four-dimensional world, or even a higher dimension? First, the shape of the world will definitely change. The lower the dimension, the less information an object can carry. For example, how many bones, internal organs, and how many systems are in the human body will be compressed into a piece of paper in the two-dimensional world. Perhaps, the two-dimensional world does not allow the existence of life at all. Perhaps, in different dimensions, the same object will have different shapes, properties, and even completely different physical rules.

However, it is too strange to be pressed into paper, and it is very difficult to understand the space above three dimensions. The concept of “dimension” does not seem to be a good starting point, but at least the idea is good. The world view of the back room is mainly based on the back room of the opposite and the front room. The world view of the SCP Foundation is mainly based on the secret organization hidden behind the public. Maybe my world view can be based on different dimensions of the same world, maybe it is not called As “dimension”, it is a concept similar to dimension, such as the inverted world in the Pokémon world view.

Sounds like a good idea, but what should this concept that is similar but not the same as “dimension” be called?

Or call it “the aggregate of ‘changes'”.

In the real world, things change regularly, and these changes require the permission of external conditions. For example, the second law of thermodynamics, heat will spontaneously transfer from a high temperature object to a low temperature object, but think about it from another angle, this process is spontaneous rather than free, it is regular, and heat will only transfer under the condition that the temperature difference exists . Then why is there no substance that can change freely without rules in the real world?

Because these substances that violate the laws of physics are in “the aggregate of ‘changes'”.

In the “collection of ‘changing'” (hereinafter referred to as “variation set” or UC, namely The Unity of Changing), most of the laws of physics no longer apply, and it is opposed to the real world we know well, similar to A chaotic reverse world. And the real world we know well is called “constant set”, that is, “constant set”.

At this point, a special space similar to a back room that allows creators to ignore physical rules has been created. Now the thing to think about is how to get into this space.

People who cut out the weak barrier between the front and back rooms will enter the back room. Similarly, when people break through the limitations of the laws of reality in physics and complete events that are usually possible in the “variation set”, they will be actively inhaled by the “variation set”. There are many ways to accomplish such an event, they are called “constant set breakthrough experiments”, and the common method is to make the changes of matter irregular. On the contrary, in order to leave the “variation set”, it is necessary to carry out the “variation set breakthrough experiment”, so that some substances in the “variation set” conform to the laws in the “constant set”.

the contents of the world

I have a lot of ideas to add more variety to the back room series. Compared with the complete isolation between the back room and the front room, “Variation Set” and “Constant Set” are complete opposites. Any existence in the “constant set” can find an opposite existence in the “variation set”, but this opposite is not the simple opposite of “cold is hot” and “high is short”, but a It is a kind of correspondence that is difficult for humans to directly understand. This puzzling correspondence between two sets is called “constant variation”.

Any object has a “constant variation relationship”, because there is its counterpart in another set, and this counterpart is called “constant body” in the constant set, and “variant” in the variation set. A pair of objects with a “constant variation relationship” have exactly the same composition, but show different shapes and properties in two different sets. Bringing the “constant body” into the “variation set” will cause it to become corresponding “variants” of , and vice versa. This change is called “constant transformation”.

Of course, human beings also have corresponding “variants”. When entering the “variation set”, humans will turn into a pool of golden ooze that smells of disinfectant, but still retain their self-consciousness and ability to act. It will definitely be more difficult to explore the “variation set” in this way, so how to act in the “variation set” more freely? This requires the use of a “constant change suppressor”, which can suppress the “constant change transformation”, but because the “constant change suppressor” itself is also affected by the “constant change transformation”, it cannot achieve the desired effect. Instead, the “constant” or “variant” will become “intermediate” when “constant transformation” occurs, a process called “neutralization”. The “middle body” of human beings is a dwarf humanoid creature with a sticky skin surface that emits a toilet-cleaning scent. After being neutralized, humans can quickly adapt to this new body and conduct exploration work. However, the constant change suppressor needs energy to work, so the time for humans to explore the “variant” is limited. If the time does not return to the “constant set”, the constant change will turn into a pool of ooze.

In order to explore the “variation set” in depth and safely, the humans in the “constant set” established the organization EUC (The Explorer of The Unity of Changing), and ensured that the safety of the “variation set” and its effect on humans were fully determined. No information about the “Variation” and the organization itself will be disclosed to the outside world before.

The purpose of setting up a human organization in this world is to establish a database in the name of the organization that stores various data in the “variation set”, like the SCP Foundation and MEG in the back room, in this form, from EUC The world of “variation” is described from an organizational perspective. If you don’t do that, but instead, as I’m doing in this article, give the reader a god mode that explains all the concepts clearly, and tells all the things that will happen, it will seem very It’s boring, the mystery is missing.

But in terms of plot and setting, EUC is very different from MEG in the back room. MEG is set up to help the homeless, while EUC is set up to understand the “variation”. The purpose of the two is different. , and the only people who can explore the “Variation” are EUC members, not everyone can enter like the back room, and they can’t escape.

I also want to talk about the correspondence between the constant set and the variable set space, but I seem to be in a hurry. It is not good to shake out so much content in this article, so I will leave it for later.

overall perception of the world

The aforementioned “boundary”, “sense of sight”, “sense of crisis” and “interoperability” are all reflected in the worldview of “Variation”.

Boundary is the limitation of the rules between two sets. Only by breaking the rules of one set, that is, completing the “Variation Set Breakthrough Experiment” or “Constant Set Breakthrough Experiment”, can the boundary between the two sets be broken and go to the “Variation Set” or “Hengji”.

The sense of sight is the “variant” that exists in the “variation set”. They correspond to the “constant body” and have a “constant change relationship”, although I have not explained it in detail in the previous article, and I have not given enough examples. But most of the “variants” have certain properties that can be recognized by humans, that is, they are similar to reality.

The sense of crisis mainly comes from the unknownness of “Variation”. Who knows if “Variation” will attack the explorers? Could there be extremely dangerous areas in this underexplored space? Moreover, it is difficult for humans affected by “constant transformation” to survive in a completely unfamiliar environment.

Interoperability is very well reflected. Just like the chemical reaction that occurs between certain substances in the “constant set”, there will also be “variants” in the “variation set” corresponding to this reaction. As long as the objects are related in the “constant set”, their “variants” will also be related in the “variation set”.

Of course, it is not enough for a good worldview to only achieve the above four points. This budding story still needs to add more storytelling, a sense of substitution, and even its own history, maps, etc., in order to create a good overall look and feel.

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The things about “variation sets” are written here first. After I write some valuable content, I will put them on a separate website, and I will post an article dedicated to this series. It’s not going to have a lot of people working on it like the back room series, it’s just a product of my own amusement, but I’m still open to some good ideas.

Well, that’s it, I have to study the “Hengji Breakthrough Experiment”. (๑╹ڡ╹)

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