Jul 20 2009
Enhance Your Story With Other Fields: Biology
One of the best things about writing and gaming is that they take skill synergy like almost nothing else in the world does. No matter what you do or learn, odds are that some part of it can apply to the writing desk or the game table. Sometimes it’s direct, sometimes it’s obvious when you’re willing to think twisty, and sometimes it’s entirely unexpected.
Take biology. Micro, macro, medicinal, there’s a lot to work from—and there’s a lot to use. If you’re playing or writing in the real world, it helps you avoid slip-ups like putting polar bears and penguins on the same continent (seriously; someone in one of my writing classes pulled that at one point), having ferrets eating seeds exclusively… you get the idea. Not only that, if you want to do a storyline with some sort of biological threat, you know what you’re talking about. And of course, it can help you write convincing biologists, getting the jargon, the lab procedure and the material to something that doesn’t break a pro’s suspension of disbelief too much.
Then there’s biology in worldbuilding, particularly if you’re the type who sticks to ecosystems and how they work. While some people might settle for just creating newer and scarier predators, there are plenty of other things that a little knowhow can do: create prey animals as scary as the predators, figure out how the various species interact with each other when they’re not getting underfoot for travelers, estimate the impact of a given species on other species and figure out how to keep them from taking over, creating unique but logical behaviors for the critters to engage in and interesting little behavioral quirks—you get the idea. A little life science goes a long way.
Consider applying it to other sciences, particularly if you’re the kind who likes magical tech. People do this already, with things like car paint based on butterfly wings. But when magic gets involved, and when you’re willing to go microbiological, you can get a lot more variety. Consider, if you’ve played it, the City of the Ancients in Final Fantasy 7, where the architecture is very clearly inspired by conch shells. I’ve played a lot with the kinds of things you find inside a cell, like creating a transportation system based on motor proteins.
And every now and then, there’s taking something tangential and slapping it in. That’s one of the things I’ve had the most fun with; I once used the Inner Life of a Cell as a way to show people what a mindmeld with a vast and incomprehensible creature during interplanar transit might be like, I’ve named characters after enzymes because the names sounded cool, and I once had a character and three scenarios inspired by something I saw through a microscope during an experiment. It’s all about having an open mind and a little lateral thought.
Have you ever found new uses for biology in a story or a game? Share away!
I’m not against the idea, but there is the limiting factor that I have all the biological knowhow of a scone. The sciences and I don’t get along well.
And now I want a scone.
I love Inner Life of the Cell so much, I wish all education could be computerized like that and I wish there would be a video like that for every biology process you’d want to learn about. But just having the one video is enough to totally change the way I visualize biological processes happening when I read articles about them.
Brick: Is just one example. (Then again, what gave me the idea for this series was reading a book on neuromarketing, I kid you not.)
Beth: Ah, fun! I’m a bio major with a linguistics upbringing; gives me a lot to play with. And I heard a story once about a girl who’d gamed with the group I ended up joining my freshman year–apparently she’d spent a semester demonstrating why letting a geology major play a character whose superpower is control of rocks and sand is generally trouble. (I never did anything like that, though knowing how PCR worked came in handy during one of the games. When you really need a measurable quantity of DNA….)
Noumenon: Isn’t it, though? I was introduced to that one by Joyce Tamashiro at the University of Puget Sound, when she was delivering a lecture on “Beauty and Biology”–basically trying to demonstrate the prettiness in biology at all sizes. (Presentation also included a couple of protein models, but that one was what stuck out for me.) And yeah. The short had odd results on me; I never thought before then I’d be calling a motor protein “cute”.
Larry: Agreed. The nice thing about basing a world in fantasy is being able to choose a good decision point for where you don’t need to add details anymore, I think. When you’re set in the real world, it’s likelier that someone’s going to pick on it if you’ve got thymine in your RNA or are trying to get something anatomically improbable to function.