Worlds Within Worlds

Apart from a brief infatuation with Game & Watch in the early 1980s, I’ve never been interested in computer games. Books, films, and tunes are wonderful slivers of everyday escapism. Games just seem like work.

So the news that Disney and Square Enix previewed Kingdom Hearts 4 at a California fan convention yesterday, as Reuters reports,¹ wouldn’t normally get me very excited. But there’s a fascinating mechanism hiding underneath that release.

»A work has boundaries. A world has conditions«

Kingdom Hearts began with an unlikely encounter: a Disney executive and an executive from Square happened to meet in an elevator. They started talking, and the conversation became a collaboration combining Disney characters and worlds with the role-playing machinery of Square's games.² Two previously separate systems became adjacent, and something became possible between them. The game they made did the same thing to fictional worlds. It allowed one world to enter another.

In the Kingdom Hearts series, otherwise unrelated fictional universes can coexist. Disney, Pixar, and Square Enix properties retain enough of their identities to remain recognisable while becoming part of a larger system. The newly released game adds Pixar's »Coco«.

This is close to what media scholar Henry Jenkins called »transmedia storytelling« – stories whose elements are dispersed across multiple media, with each medium contributing to the larger world.³ Kingdom Hearts does something slightly different. If transmedia makes a world available in different media, this is closer to interoperability: making different worlds available to one another.

There is nothing new about fictional worlds crossing boundaries. Virgil incorporated Homeric material into the Aeneid.⁴ Dante placed Virgil inside the Commedia.⁵ Tom Stoppard put Rosencrantz and Guildenstern back inside Hamlet.⁶ Culture has always been good at entering existing worlds and finding new things to do inside them.

But these examples mostly involve one work entering another. Kingdom Hearts points towards something different: worlds becoming compatible environments.

A work has boundaries. A world has conditions.

A novel needs to remain itself. Its characters, events, language, and formal structure belong to a particular authored object. A world needs to remain coherent while accommodating things that weren’t there when it was created. Its boundary is less a line than a fuzzy zone in which something from outside can become something that belongs inside.

Theme parks already move in this direction. Disneyland turned fictional worlds into physical environments that visitors could enter. Games go further because their worlds are interactive: characters, objects, rules, physics, economies, and events can interact within the same system. The game world becomes less like a finished work than an environment into which other things can be introduced.

Kingdom Hearts is therefore interesting not simply as a crossover, but as a world capable of accommodating other worlds. The same logic is visible in Fortnite, where Disney, Marvel, Star Wars, musicians, brands, and user-generated content occupy the same digital environment.

In the 1960s, Metabolist architects imagined buildings and cities as frameworks capable of receiving changing components. What would stories look like if Archigram designed them? Perhaps less like finished works and more like environments with enough structure to remain coherent, and enough openness to accommodate things that have not yet been made.

That changes the role of the creator. A work has an author. A world can have inhabitants, contributors, adapters, and maintainers. The designer specifies less what will happen than the conditions under which things can happen.

Kingdom Hearts began with two companies that happened to meet in an elevator. What started as an improbable crossover has become a system for making worlds coexist. We have always put one story inside another. But the interoperable world is something else: an environment designed not merely to contain a story, but to accommodate stories that have not yet been imagined.

Worlds within worlds.

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