"Worldbuilding" is this exercise the fanfic community took on in order to keep from having to write anything. It's the quintessential "writing about writing" masturbatory fling; prior to the advent of Tumblr and LiveJournal, nobody wrote about what they were going to write about, they just fucking wrote it.

HERE'S WHY YOU CARE

The only reason to build your world is to show it to someone else. Nobody gives a fuck about your script, they give a fuck about your movie. Nobody gives a fuck about your sell sheet, they give a fuck about your game. Nobody gives a fuck about your show bible, they give a fuck about your TV series. And what you will discover is that the minute you start populating your "world" with characters, your characters are going to expose parts of the world you didn't even vaguely think about and utterly ignore the parts of the world you think are crucial.

When Tim Kring set out to write Heroes he set out to create the origin story of Peter Petrelli. The problem is, once they got writing they discovered that yet another goddamn boring origin story about a goddamn boring New York Privileged Son becomeing yet another goddamn boring White Superhero was utterly uninspiring and uninteresting. Meanwhile, two characters they intended to kill off Episode 2 - HRG and The Cheerleader - ended up spawning the narrative arc that basically defined the series.

Good Will Hunting was supposed to be about a savant secret agent. What we know of the movie was going to be the first ten minutes. Damon and Affleck took their script to William Goldman and he told them that a savant secret agent was the least interesting thing they could write, while a genius growing up a foster kid in the slums had real legs.

Here's the thing: The storyworld rules are the same. "Origin story of a superhero" and "shadowy conspiracy that makes superheroes" live in the same storyworld rules. "Savant secret agent who grew up in the slums" and "savant who grew up in the slums" are the same storyworld rules. But as far as the "world building" you get to waste an awful lot of goddamn time on stuff you'll never use once you sit down to write it.

Worse? What I've found of every.single.writer I've ever met who believes in "world building?" IF (big if) they actually write something, they're so busy driving their R/C car characters to all the cool places they built in their world they never bother with character development, dialogue, spontaneous choices, any of it. They've got a big dumb empty world with fuckall going on in it.

Here's a hundred fucking books in the same "world." When FASA established the "world" in the first two pages of Mechwarrior they established a universe into which more than a dozen different authors could pore a billion words into. Two pages is all it took to establish a stultifying amount of "world". Unfortunately they're all dreck because nobody can revise the world. It all exists in this canned universe where events are inevitable. If you care entirely too much about the world? If you live and breathe Battletech? Maybe you read the books. But if you're a normie who wants a story, the Battletech novels are the wrong ones to read.

I can define Harry Potter in one sentence: "There is magic in the world but there is a conspiracy to keep it secret." That defines EVERYTHING that comes after. Voldemort wishes to destroy that conspiracy. The MInistry wishes to preserve it. All the horcrux bullshit and Slytherin and Ravenclaw and Dolores Umbridge and Dementors exist within that world but they are in no way required. They are in no way implied. They are the creativity that is inspired by enough limitations but unstifled by too many. Horcruxes? Rowling pulled those out of her ass for the second-to-last book, at which point they were a Macguffin to subsitute into video games and the like. There is no part of Harry Potter that depends on horcruxes in the slightest.

Worldbuilding is bullshit. Tell your friends.