Shakespeare’s first performed plays occurred in the late 16th century, the colour television was first demonstrated in 1928, the first YouTube video (‘Me at the zoo’, uploaded by co-founder Jawed Karim) was released approximately 23 years ago, and the modern social media titan, TikTok, was created approximately 10 years ago. The final marked an important, dangerous and disquieting epoch in entertainment. Though the claim that human attention span has dropped under that of a goldfish remains an incontrovertibly proven fallacy, in the past 20 years alone, the average amount of time a person can spend focused on a task digitally has plummeted from two and a half minutes to just 47 seconds. 47 seconds before we check the time, fiddle with our phones and lose our train of thought. Addiction to short-form content as such has greatly contributed to this collapse. To put it plainly, attention is a digital drug. It harnesses mass amounts of political, economic and social sway. For...
Immersive Storytelling: Worldbuilding George Digby (U6T) Worldbuilding is a crucial part of storytelling. It is the act of creating and cultivating a world for your reader/readers to immerse themselves in. In my opinion, one of the most enjoyable parts of writing a story is the preparatory work, a time when you aren’t bogged down with the flow of language, a point when you can simply create and cultivate a world in your mind without the restrictions of narrative. Worldbuilding is something I find fascinating. However for many of the fellow writers and storytellers I talk to, worldbuilding is often a slog, with the fundamentals of cause and effect often acting as a weight in the mind of those who struggle with it. This article will serve as an overview of my process and hopefully act as a guide to those of you interested in creating your own settings for use in writing or elsewhere. However, do not take this article as doctrine - this is simply what worked for me and what I hope c...