That Time I Got Reincarnated as a UCLA Creative Writing Seminar: Isekai × Experiment

Let's worldbuild! For this first exercise, we'll begin by brainstorming and pitching ideas for our collective web novel "TITLE TBD." We'll also work to roll up some characters that we can play together over the quarter ahead. As a reminder, here's the general idea:

A creative writing seminar is isekai'd all at once into another world. But they're trapped as voices within the same non-human body. Think "Reborn as a Vending Machine" meets Disco Elysium. What is this body? Where are they? What are they going to do? We'll write the diary of this entity from our own perspectives each week. What character do you want to play? What is their backstory? What are their hopes or motivations? Their struggles or failings?

We'll make some collective decisions in our next session. This week: let's prepare, explore, and brainstorm! For your experiment response to Discord this week, post ~500 word treatments in whatever form you prefer to pitch some worldbuilding ideas. Be descriptive! Consider genres, tropes, themes, arcs, characters, powers, game systems, anything that will help us do some collaborative worldbuilding. Explore references on the syllabus and PDFs in course Discord to help imagine, including TTRPGs like Journey or The Ground Itself if you'd like some mechanics for the experiment. As always, suggestions for the syllabus are more than welcome!

Create a tabletop role playing game (TTRPG) in one page or around 200 words. Explore examples here on the syllabus for inspiration and formal ideas. You may develop your game around an existing game (to "hack" or "jam") or invent something entirely new. IMPORTANTLY, use this game as a way to further build, explore, and invent our shared worldbuilding project. Perhaps you want to simulate the mechanics by which our characters take control (see Everyone is John)? Or to invent maps that might house them (see The Ground Itself)? Or might build a shared body for our PC (see LOSS)? The connection can be central or tenuous (a core issue or wild periphery), the aim is to think expansively about how writing (and playing!) a TTRPG might reveal compelling emergent storytelling.

Consider playing your game IRL: how might you play with a group of peers around a table? What would be fun to use as props, tools, mechanics, devices? Write your game to be played in roughly a class session or shorter. We'll group up in class and each group will select a game (or more) to play. Prepare to pitch your game for play and to play it as your groups decides!

If it helps, you can treat the 200 Word RPG Challenge, the challenge winners, the One Page Dungeon Contest, the 24XX Jam, or the WSCA Jam as loose models.

This week, we'll build a little paper portal. Make a one-page fandom zine that either brings a character from a fantasy world into ours (reverse isekai), sends a character from our world into a fantasy world (isekai), or crosses over characters from any chosen fandom with a real engagement with isekai. Think about how fandom circulates, annotates, archives, ships, bends, and transforms worlds. What happens when a zine becomes a field guide, travel brochure, spell book, religious tract, rumor mill, bestiary sheet, or survival manual for crossing over to another world? The zine should be "authored" by your character in our collective worldbuilding exercise. Use this layer of authorship fiction to further add to your character for our ongoing collective production.

Your one-page zine can be composed by any method or tool you prefer. You can draw it by hand, collage it, photocopy it, lay it out in Canva or InDesign, or use something like Nathalie Lawhead's very cool Electric Zine Maker. Keep it to one 8.5" x 11" page that can fold into 8 small pages as demonstrated on the Discord; if you'd like, you can also hide something on a full-page secret interior. In either case: make it FULLY DESIGNED for publication! I'll print them in advance so in class we can cut, fold, and swap together.

For your experiment response to Discord this week, post a printable version of your zine and tell us about how and why you produced it. Be playful and descriptive. Let the form do some storytelling. You might focus on one character, a ship, a monster ecology, a dungeon, a bureaucratic system, a magic item, a keepsake, a map, a fake ad: how can a zine DO worldbuilding? Explore the references on the syllabus for zine culture, fan production, and archives of small-press circulation. As always, suggestions for the syllabus are more than welcome!

This week, we're continuing our miniature experiments by building a Nano RPG with the remarkably intuitive Bitsy game maker. You can click the ? for information about each window. Play around with it! For a more guided experience, see Claire Morwood's excellent tutorial or the Getting Started with Bitsy guide produced by NVM.

Once you've finished your Bitsy game, you'll be able to export it as an HTML file. You can upload that directly to itch.io to share it there, and everyone should have an itch.io account regardless. For this experiment, again, the "author" pseudonym should be your character in our collective worldbuilding experiment.

As for content, the aim is to make a tiny RPG isekai. Consider our featured work, OneShot, as a guide, as well as the resources in this week of the syllabus. How can a small narrative game help develop our worldbuilding enterprise? What kinds of genres can you experiment with inside this minimal interface? How can tiny sprites tell big stories?

The form and genre of your Bitsy game are up to you. Make the kind of game you'd most want to play. Don't feel constrained by the story we've told so far: feel free to adventure out from the ballroom to explore and invent other areas of this world. Perhaps you want to build out from your fandom zine. Or you might produce a new area with new characters whom we may encounter ahead. Totally open format, and enjoy experimenting with Bitsy this week!

This week, we'll be experimenting with the amazing visual novel engine Ren'Py. We'll be picking up on our collective live RP session in order to successfully offer four quests in four locations. These visual novels will continue our ongoing web novel in a playable format. Your assigned groups have full autonomy to build the environment and scenario you want to explore, as well as the genre conventions, characters, and visual style of your collaborative work.

For this experiment, be sure to take advantage of the extensive community documentation and this highly rated beginner tutorial for Ren'Py. The language is very intuitive, and once you have the basics down, you can quickly get into telling a branching visual narrative. For the visual assets, feel free to use any method: drawn by hand, digitally composed, found online, photos you've taken, character generators, or even, gasp, generative images, if you feel comfortable working with those tools. For example, you can generate locally with a small model using DiffusionBee or something similar.

For your collaborative work, consider assigning different roles based on interest within your group, or plan a jam session so you can work together simultaneously. The method is up to you. The aim is to work within the conventions of the visual novel to play out a scenario in which your group, operating as a system, works to successfully entice one or more adventurers to accept a quest. From otome games and dating sims to detective plots, death games, and psychological horror, there are many approaches you might take to this experiment.

As a reminder, you'll work with your group privately this week, and we'll play and celebrate these visual novels in our next session, keeping each a surprise for a live playtest launch!

This week, we all become VTubers! We'll venture out to invent and report on the world we're currently inhabiting. So far, we have a weird multi-species Arby's, a fantasy island with a mermaid reef, a cyberpunk tower with steampunk slums, and a Victorian library helmed by the sweetest trio in the biz. Let's build out from there! What else is there? What connects these domains? Why are our anachronistic worldbuilding dreams coming to fruition? You decide! Keep the story going, and remember we are ONE system trying to figure out where we are, how we got here, and the rules of this new world we find ourselves within.

This week: become a virtual persona, aka a VTuber, reporting on the events, personas, environs, changes, and/or structures of our newly shared world. There are many tools to get started, beginning with VTube Studio and many related software, for example customizing avatars with VRoid Studio. But you can also use any number of PNGTuber or VTuber tools this week, such as VSeeFace, Veadotube mini, Animaze, Meshy, or DomoAI. There are endless options for mobile, tablet, or console. You may use 2D images that you bring a voice to, animated or not. You may become a 3D avatar, custom built or customized. You may inhabit a fandom character you admire, citing original artwork or making your own. You may use your own character in this world or any other of your invention, feel free. The goal is to have fun inhabiting any other digital body in your reportage for this experiment.

Your task is to make a short video, under 5 minutes, that reports on any aspect of our shared world. You get to invent this aspect of our world, so don't be afraid to venture out into new territory. We must understand where we are, and in this exercise, we'll produce the map of the world as a whole.

Be sure to consider positionality in your videos. What bodies do you feel comfortable inhabiting? What are the limits to this kind of play? Importantly, be considerate of dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and ability. How might you come to inhabit this virtual persona? What are the stakes, and what are the risks and rewards?

Post your Tubing videos to our Discord and enjoy this lighthearted venture into building out our world.

This week, we'll be playing Minecraft in collaboration with the Minecraft Bloc of Concordia University. The SMP For the Trees server is going live today. We'll jump in and have a group play session on Wednesday, so everyone should have Minecraft installed, plus the CurseForge app and mods installed by then. I'll drop in all instructions on joining and playing once the server goes live. Hopefully we can keep playing after the quarter is over as well, for those who are interested. Of course, it's not required, but it's already so fun! Keep an eye on the Discord for updates, and you may want to bring a mouse for Wednesday.

We'll use Minecraft Java for Mac or PC, but not mobile. As discussed, this project focuses on the "diegetic breach" of the actual solar servers installed in Montreal interfacing with the gameplay of this Reclamation-inspired modpack. We'll begin our exploration here, keeping in mind both the isekai elements of the modpack's quests and the ecological interface between our world and "another" world. In the meantime, continue developing final projects!