Introduction
The central focus for the Explorations Project was ”How can you find, explore, and/or expand your passion?” as students would explore their own personal interests and improve upon a particular skill set that address 21st Century skills. I decided to concentrate on World Building for my project. World building has always held a close place to my heart. I love really diving deep in books and movies and when the world around them is new and diverse without being a carbon copy of life as we know it, it is just so satisfying.
My 21st Skill Connection is to “Creativity”. I think that world building definitely falls under this category as it does require you to think outside the box and consider so many different elements that make reality as it is. Some of this can have inspiration from the real world, but different combinations and original ideas and concepts have to come from the artist/creator, which requires a fair amount of creativity.
Process
For this project, I started out by simply finding inspiration. I didn’t want to use any pre-existing projects because I felt like it would have been under cutting the purpose of the project, so I looked out to find somewhere to start from. Unlike previous work, I didn’t have an inherent idea that I wanted to work with, so I looked to other sources for inspiration.
I went to Google Earth to start. After spinning the globe and landing in the ocean a few times, I eventually got a location in Canada. From the satellite view, it looked like it was in the middle of a mountain so I decided I needed to incorporate mountains in some way. Then I decided to go to my Spotify playlist and pressed shuffle play. That gave me Let’s Groove by Earth Wind and Fire, so that was something else that i needed to incorporate. I also had watched Prince of Egypt recently, so that had been floating around in my mind at the time.
With my three main starting points, I started looking at what I could possibly merge and mesh together, but it was important for me to also find a “What if” question for my world as well. Despite not creating story that would require a “what if”, sometimes the world in and of itself is a kind of story and I wanted to have a focus and drive behind it that would push my creativity forwards. So after looking at all of these ideas and inspirations, I eventually settled on the following what if statement:
What if technology was advancing while coexisting with the previous style of living?
GRAPES
As I explored this “What if” statement and all of its implications, I was keeping in mind the acronym GRAPES. GRAPES stands for Geography, Religion, Achievements, Politics, Economics, and Social Structure. Each of these things needs to be addressed for a solid world, so as I worked to figure each of these out for this as of yet unnamed civilization.
Geography
For the geography of this place, it is a completely isolated city nestled right beneath a mountain, which extends in sort of a U-shape around where they have settled. On the opposite side of the mountain is an ocean. The ocean’s presence creates a prevailing wind and in combination with other natural forces, has this wind regularly reach roughly 100 mph (~161 kph). On the flip side, facing away from the mountain and the ocean is a plains area. The wind picks up here too, causing the city to be completely surrounded by greater than hurricane force winds constantly.
Unfortunately, the ocean and winds are unbeknownst to the current inhabitants. When the original settlers came into the valley, they were fleeing from death and danger and happened to come on a day where the winds were calmer, which allowed them to pass through despite only having medieval-esque technology (aka wagons, carts, etc). When they eventually realized the wind problem, they decided they would be protected inside the mountain range from both the wind and other problems, so they just settled there.
Over time, as generations passed, people forgot why they didn’t leave. When people began to wonder what was beyond the mountains and sent out exploration teams, the explorers never came back because they died due to the unknown elements of the high winds. After years and generations of the groups being sent out without returning, they just stopped doing it, so it became taboo and highly discouraged to even suggest leaving.
Religion
Religion is an interesting topic for this region. Almost every single person subscribes to one of two religions with varying degrees of fervor and belief. These religions do often come into conflict with each other, primarily because they have opposing beliefs. The general populace typically has just underlying tension between the two, but there are cult groups that are considered extremists that take religious disagreements a step too far. They are on both sides and both sides often use these groups to demonize the other side, which just continues the cycle.
Neither group has a name yet, but the first faction is the ‘Sky faction’. They believe in building upwards in hopes of eventually meeting their god who lives in the sky. They believe that the higher you are off the ground, the closer you are to heaven. This creates a normalized ideology that if there is an option to get off the ground, they should take it. They believe in collective work in order to get to their version of paradise and consistently ally with each other in order to keep industrializing and building. This is a sort of newer religion, but it had roots in other ones that came before it, but it really exploded and became a massive thing with the industrialization that occurred about 100 years ago on the time line.
The second faction is the ‘Earth faction’. Their biggest cause of conflict with the Sky faction is the fact that they believe that the sky god doesn’t want them building into the air. They believe that there is a significant problem with encroaching on the Sky God’s domain and would therefore prefer to stay on the ground and be digging down. To get to their version of paradise, they believe in more of an individual salvation and the fact that you should work on your own to get to paradise.
Both groups are polytheistic, but have really only three main gods: The earth god, the sky god, and some sort of evil, trickster god. Both of them have pretty similar stories and legends, but the primary difference, especially when they come into conflict, is the perspective of who is telling the story. In one groups, it may be told this was and in the other, it is told differently, so even though the broad strokes might be similar, the devil is in the details. If you really pay close enough attention, their ideas are similar but not always comparable, but that doesn’t stop debates and personalized attacks from occurring based off of the differences in belief.
Achievements
For achievements, the biggest on is the recent industrialization. In the last 100 years, there was a major industrial boom. This came from the food source stabilizing in some way (I haven’t quite figured that part out) and providing a surplus. With surplus comes population growth and the ability to start exploring other avenues aside from subsistence farming and that kind of thing. Because of this and their close proximity to the mountains, they were able to start exploring metal and industry a fair bit more and that exploded extremely quickly. At this point in time, they are around the technology of the 1890’s minus guns/cannons as there has been very little need for any development of military weapons due to the lack of neighbors.
Their architecture evolved from simpler mud huts to more complex metal building. Unfortunately, due to the conflict between the religious groups, the people who were living on the ground refused to give up land in order to build bigger metal buildings, so the architects decided to design buildings that could squeeze in between the lower homes. These buildings would have long skinny bottoms that would be the foundations in any space they could get and balloon out once they reached above the roofs.
Another invention is a complex gondola system as public transportation. As ground area gets increasingly scarcer, it became clear that people couldn’t be having more automated things wandering around beneath, so instead, they build gondolas in the sky in order to free up ground space. Other transportation that aren’t as automated but people still use include zip lines and gliders, but those aren’t as popular considering they are a one way trip.
Politics
For this world’s politics, I hadn’t quite figured out what type of government specifically they had, but it is something democratic. Politics is deeply tied with religion in this world because it is such an important part of peoples lives, so the political groups often follow the lines of the religions mentioned earlier. The vast majority of issues center around whether or not more things should be built and that kind of thing, but the two factions are almost dead evenly split, which leaves it to a third party to decide.
This third party isn’t strictly adherent to a specific religion. Their main focus is not building up or down, but rather reconsidering the decision to not go over the mountains or try to expand out. This Expansion faction is not super popular because leaving the borders is considered taboo, but they have enough of an influence to be an important swing vote. Their make up is a little bit funny because they are a hodge-podge collection of people who all have different motivations for wanting to go beyond the city limits. You have idealists who want to see the world, environmentalists who are concerned about the long term impact of the increasing population and a potentially limited food source, and business people who see an opportunity for profit. This makes it a little hard for them to work cohesively with different motives, but they try to make it work.
Economics
Due to their isolated nature, this civilization is completely self sufficient. They can’t trade externally because of the high winds, mountains, and taboo surrounding the whole topic, but they do have a pretty robust internal trading systems. Despite having industrialized, they are not completely off the barter economy. Goods are just as valuable as currency for almost everything. A lot of money does end up going into building and more industrialization.
They haven’t gotten to the point of paper money yet. Instead, their government has heavily regulated metal cubes about the length of a quarter. The edges have been rounded down so people wouldn’t slice their hand open on accident, and the insides are hollowed out in order to save metal. This is one thing that the government is super active in maintaining and protecting. Counterfeits are extremely hard to create because the metal used to create the dice is extremely regulated.
Social Structure
For social structure, it is also very divided based off of what theology you subscribe to. Both of them view the other as ‘lesser’ and it colors almost all interactions that they face. In all, this civilization functions pretty much like a regular city, except those who work in construction/architecture are both glorified and reviled in equal measure. The same is true for those who work in the ground. Farming is considered a very useless endeavor now that the food supply stabilized, though some families continued to work the ground in that way, which makes a lot of the other groups look down on them.
Project Reflection
All in all, I really enjoyed this project. I very rarely get to start with a blank slate when it comes to a creative project. It was fun to get some random inspiration and then just let imagination run wild. It was a really excellent creative exercise. There is more that I would like to explore with this project and I hope I get to do that eventually in the future. Maybe I won’t create a fully fledged story from it, but it is something I can add to me repertoire of things to think about.