I had an amazing adventure visiting Japan over Christmas break. My husband, my son Luke, and I spent ten days exploring three cities. We visited three Nintendo stores, three theme parks, several Pokémon stores, and a bunch of other electronics stores, gaming stores, pop culture stores, and bookstores. We had a great time. Here are some pictures.

I couldn’t help thinking about many of the different “worlds” we experienced in that country and how writers can use in their storyworld building some of the tricks that theme parks and video games use to entertain.

Make Your World Immersive

While in Japan, we visited three theme parks: Tokyo Disneyland, Tokyo DisneySea, and Universal Studios Osaka. In my opinion, Disney has always been the master of creating an immersive experience in their parks, and each area flows nicely into the next. For example, New Orleans Square being next to Frontier Land and Critter Country doesn’t feel like that much of a stretch. But at Tokyo DisneySea, the American Waterfront area, which is an early 20th century New York/Cape Cod themed section, is next door to the Mediterranean Harbor, which is basically Venice. That felt a little odd to me.

Universal does great with immersive areas. You are in Hogsmeade or Diagon Alley. You are in Amity, Maine (where JAWS takes place). You are in a real-life Super Mario World Video Game. Click here to see how awesome Super Mario World is.

Both parks do an excellent job of theming different areas and hiding the world outside.

When building a fictional storyworld, the more immersive you can make it, the better. This sometimes feels easier to see in contemporary fantasy stories like Harry Potter because we get to see the everyday “muggle” world, then we travel to the wizarding world and see the magic. Yet worlds like Star Wars and Middle Earth are equally good at immersing us into their worlds. Find ways to make your storyworld immersive to your readers.

Make Your World Interactive

Some of the neatest rides at Disneyland are the interactive ones like Buzz Lightyear Astro Blasters and Toy Story Midway Mania. Universal’s Super Mario World has a 3D Mario Kart ride where you use the controls to shoot mushrooms and throw shells at the other cars. It was pretty cool.

Super Mario World is immersive in a different way. You can buy different character bracelets, wear one on your arm, and pair it to the app. I got to be Princess Peach. Then we played different games and jumped up and hit the bricks to collect coins. The app kept track of our coins and the keys we earned playing different games. When we had three keys, we got to face the boss.

There was nothing quite like it. We lined up, each standing on a circle in front of a curved movie screen that “reflected” a shadow that mirrored our movement. As objects fell toward us on the screen, our shadows moved how we moved. I jumped. My little shadow jumped. I punched a shell out of the way. My little shadow jumped out of the way. I got hit. My shadow shrunk. I jumped and hit a brick, a mushroom fell, and my little shadow got big again. The twelve of us in the room worked together to defeat the boss. It was really fun.

It’s a lot trickier to make a fictional storyworld interactive, unless you have a huge fandom and budget to invest in cool apps. There are genres of interactive storytelling that you can use apps to write, but I’ve not seen anything you can do in print. You can, however, find lots of ways to let your characters interact with the storyworld. We’ll talk more about that in the the sections to come.

Create Heroes Worth Rooting For

Video game characters are unique, have distinct personalities, and are relatable in some way. LitRPG stands for Literary Role-Playing Game. This is a fiction sub-genre that mirrors gaming elements with the genre conventions of fantasy and/or science fiction novels. In LitRPG, some characters are not very good yet. They have to be trained and learn and sometimes they fail because they don’t have the right powers. Yet. LitRPG allows the main characters to progress as their stats grow and they move to the next level.

This is something writers can pull into more traditional storytelling. How is your character growing over the course of the story in skill due to the obstacles they are facing?

Make Your Setting Like a Character

I’ve always created my storyworlds with enough personality that they feel like a characters. Can your setting be alive in some way? Can it cause obstacles for your characters? Can your characters alter part of the storyworld? How does the storyworld affect or interact with the journey (plot) that the characters are on? If you spend time on these questions, you will find ways to enhance your story as a whole.

Luke is a video game design major in college. He said that anything on the screen could be something worth exploring. In a game like Zelda: Breath of the Wild, I watched Luke have Link explore the land, go in and out of buildings, shake trees and bushes, find gleaming plants and good them, hit things with the sword to see if there is anything hidden there. Find creatures and pass their tests. Talk to people and get clues from the. You can also leave markers on the map and head that way. It’s a lot of fun to watch.

I’ve often talked about putting cool things on your map. Add a temple, a magical tree, ancient ruins, etc. But I’ve never tried to make those things more than set dressing. Why not plant things for your character to find or collect that can help them on their journey or act as clues that them solve a mystery? In a way, I did have Vrell do this in By Darkness Hid as she collected herbs for her healing satchel. And later, I was able to have her use them to help injured characters, including Achan.

Incorporate Level Design

My son’s specialty in his video game design major is level design. He loves creating the layout of the levels and making ways the levels get more difficult as the game goes on. Graphics are purposely designed and placed to lead the player in the direction the designer wants them to go. This could be done in novels. You could describe your setting in ways that gives clues to your hero as to which way to go.

Level design also uses halfway points, especially if there is a tricky area where you keep dying. When you finally get to the halfway point, you touch a marker so that when you die, you’ll restart at the halfway point. This is important because it feels like you’ve reached a milestone. As you finish levels, you’re reaching more milestones and getting closer to winning the game. Games also have things you can collect like the coins or 1UP mushrooms from Super Mario World or the different foods and weapons, etc. that Link puts in his pack in the Zelda games.

Such things can easily be added to your story. As your character comes up against obstacles standing in the way of their goal, you can show them advance in difficulty and collect something of value. If you want your hero to face a bad guy with a certain magical weapon, plant it somewhere along the journey where he can find it. Tolkien used this idea with the ring Bilbo finds. It enables him to turn invisible, which gives him a superhero-like ability he didn’t have before that he uses to help him and his companions on their quest.

Consider Using Story Engines

I knew little about story engines until I talked with Luke. This is the idea of a repeated structure in every game. A perfect example is how Pokémon video games follow the same general story over and over. Receive your starter from a professor that will help you on your quest to collect badges, stop the evil guys from succeeding in their plans, and in the end you become the champion. The fans love the story engine. It works.

This is something you could easily do as a novelist. Think of Janet Evanovich’s Stephanie Plum novels or the Nancy Drew or Hardy Boys books. Each series follows a similar story engine. They’re kind of the same structure over and over. Kind of like a James Bond story. The characters don’t change a lot. The plots are all similar. But we like the routine of them. We like knowing what we’re in for. Another example is the Magic Treehouse books. In every story, Jack and Annie get in their treehouse, go on adventure, save the day, then come home again. That’s a story engine that works for those books immensely well. Kids love it.

What do you think?

Which of the above ideas could you see yourself implementing in a novel? Or have you already done some of this in your worldbuilding? Share in the comments. I’m curious what creative ideas you might come up with.

Jill Williamson is a chocolate loving, daydreaming, creator of kingdoms, and the author of several young adult fantasy novels including the Blood of Kings trilogy. She loves teaching about writing. She blogs at goteenwriters.com and also posts writing videos on her YouTube channel and on Instagram. Jill is a Whovian, a Photoshop addict, and a recovering fashion design assistant. She grew up in Alaska without running water or electricity and now lives in the Pacific Northwest with her husband and two kids. Find Jill online at jillwilliamson.com or on Instagram, YouTube, Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.