#fantasy coded

I'm using this post to catalogue a phenomenon I've noticed that I haven't come up with a name for yet. I'm thinking something like "soft coded world building."

It's for when artists, when developing a fantasy world (typically for a video game), deliberately try to avoid the typical pitfalls of having their fantasy cultures be obvious stand-ins for real life ones, and instead blend together a whole cavalcade of different motifs to make a new aesthetic that's reminiscent of real life but indistinguishable as any one real life culture.

Contrast this with "culture chop suey" wherein a world builder combines two or more real life cultures, while not making any attempt to hide those influences. Soft coded worlds aim to blend so many cultures that it's impossible to retrace the original influence of the aesthetic.

Interestingly I notice, at least in video games, the architectural aesthetics this process produces tend to follow a lot of the same motifs. Typically you end up with large stonework monumental structures, usually large temples and fortresses interspersed amongst towers, obelisks, and viaducts; Not to mention archways which I think are meant to simultaneously evoke Triumphal arches, Torii, and Paifang gates simultaneously. Gompura-esque roof decorations are also common, and long lines of colonnades on most of the walls. While stylistically the actual stonework typically follows golden age Islamic tastes, with a maximalist level of detail but rarely showing any representative illustrations in the architecture, just abstract designs. You'll also see a lot of flowing banners and decorated ropes which always remind me of Tibetan prayer flags.

I think it's especially interesting that a lot of these tropes that I describe can be traced to a general middle-eastern or central Asian origin. Because the purpose of this aesthetic is ostensibly to be familiar enough to be evocative of traditional fantasy while exotic enough that it feels novel and unlike what we expect from fantasy. If I had to guess, artists are then drawn towards central Asia in particular because it's a part of the world that westerners are broadly familiar with but not to a detailed enough level that they'd catch the coding.

Of course you could also argue that historically so many huge influential empires have taken bites out of central Asia and the Middle east that any aesthetic made by blending historical architectures together is inevitably going to feel like that part of the world, because that part of the world is just like that.