The Problem With Lore.
When fictional worlds become databases, and stories turn into homework.
There is a particular kind of online sentence which ought, by rights, to be harmless, but which has started to fill me with a faint, weary dread.
It usually begins: ‘Can someone explain the lore?’
This is not, in itself, an unreasonable question. Games are strange now. Films are strange now. Television is strange now. Franchises sprawl across novels, comics, codices, item descriptions, prequels, sequel trilogies, campaign books, sourcebooks, developer interviews, wiki pages, convention panels, half-canon spin-offs and YouTube videos narrated over footage of someone walking very slowly through a ruined cathedral. If you feel that you have entered a story through the wrong door, it is natural to ask where the hallway begins.
Nor is the desire for lore a shallow desire. Quite the opposite. People ask for lore because they want fictional worlds to matter. They want the castle to have foundations, the monsters to have origins, the gods to have names, the map to continue beyond the playable area. They want to know that what they have just seen was not merely placed there for decoration. Somewhere, in some lost age, some king built that tower, some war broke that bridge, some priest wrote that heresy, some idiot opened the ancient door marked quite plainly ‘Do Not Open, Probably Full of Cosmic Misery.’
I sympathise with this. I own fantasy maps. I have lost time to invented genealogies. I have read paragraphs about fictional moons with a seriousness I cannot always extend to my own work emails. This is not an argument against lore. A world without any sense of depth can feel thin, stagey and disposable. Lore is one of the ways fiction suggests that the visible story is only the exposed edge of something larger.
The problem begins when that larger thing stops supporting the story and starts replacing it.
The problem with lore is not that fictional worlds have histories. It is that we increasingly talk as if those histories are the point. Story becomes backstory. Meaning becomes explanation. Mystery becomes missing information. A scene has not succeeded because it moved us, unsettled us, changed our understanding of a character, or left an image lodged somewhere unpleasant in the mind. It has succeeded because it connects to a thing we already know, or can be made to connect to a thing somebody else knows, or can be explained in a ninety-minute video called something like The Complete Timeline of the Sad Wizard War.
At that point, we are no longer encountering fiction. We are revising for it.
The poetry of not knowing
The first Alan Wake opens with a line attributed to Stephen King about nightmares existing outside logic, and there being ‘little fun’ in explanations. The fuller thought, developed by the game’s narrator, is that in horror the victim keeps asking why, but the unanswered mystery is what remains with us. Remedy reportedly secured King’s permission to use the opening quotation for a token fee; it is a neat little piece of literary inheritance for a game obsessed with writers, horror, repetition and the danger of mistaking narration for control.
It is also a useful doorway into the problem with lore.
Horror understands, at least when it is working properly, that explanation can be corrosive. This does not mean horror should never explain anything. A story made entirely from ambiguity can be as lazy as one made entirely from exposition. But fear often depends on an imbalance between encounter and comprehension. Something is in the house. Something is wrong with the lake. Something has happened in the old village, or will happen again, or perhaps has always been happening and you have simply arrived during one of its more photogenic recurrences.
The demand for lore often reverses that imbalance. It asks the story to account for itself. What is the monster? Where did it come from? What are its rules? Who built the ritual site? Is the cult connected to the entity mentioned in the second DLC? Does the deer-headed thing represent grief, colonial guilt, lunar fertility, the developer’s divorce, or a datamined boss cut from version 1.03?
Some of those questions can be interesting. Some of them can deepen the work. But there is a point at which the question ‘what does this mean?’ quietly becomes ‘what is the in-universe explanation for this object?’ They are not the same question.
That distinction matters because the unanswered mystery is not always a gap waiting to be filled. Sometimes it is the shape the work has deliberately taken. Sometimes the lack of explanation is not a failure of worldbuilding, but the means by which the story produces wonder, dread, melancholy or awe. To explain too much is not merely to add information. It can be to change the genre of the experience.
A ghost story with a complete metaphysical rulebook is not necessarily richer than one without it. A ruined kingdom whose every dynasty is exhaustively documented is not necessarily more tragic than one whose surviving records contradict each other. A god whose motives can be summarised in a wiki sidebar may be less powerful than one whose motives are half-lost, half-lied-about, and partly unknowable.
Lore can deepen mystery. It can also domesticate it.
Lore is not story
The simplest version of the argument is this: lore is what has already happened. Story is what is happening under pressure.
That is not a perfect definition, but it is a useful one. Lore gives us histories, cosmologies, factions, lineages, catastrophes, prophecies, rules, institutions and buried causes. Story gives us desire, action, conflict, reversal, consequence, recognition, failure and change. Lore is the sediment beneath the road. Story is the person walking it, bleeding slightly, trying to decide whether to turn back.
The two are not enemies. Often they need each other. A character’s choice may only make sense because of the world’s history. A war may only feel tragic because we understand the myth that sustains it. A city may only feel alive because its streets imply layers of use, conquest, trade, worship and neglect. Lore is often the material from which story is built.
But material is not architecture. A pile of bricks is not a house. A thousand years of invented history is not, by itself, drama.
This is where some fantasy franchises, games and fandoms get into trouble. They confuse density with depth. They assume that because a world contains a large quantity of information, it must therefore be rich. But richness is not the same as volume. A fictional world can be enormous and shallow. It can have twelve empires, seven ages, five magic systems, three dead creator gods and a downloadable glossary, and still fail to produce a single human moment worth remembering.
Conversely, a world can be relatively spare and feel immense. A half-seen ritual. A name nobody wants to say. A monument without an inscription. A character who flinches at a song. These can imply more than an appendix.
The question is not ‘how much lore is there?’ The question is ‘what does the lore do?’
Does it thicken the atmosphere? Does it sharpen the conflict? Does it make the character’s choice more painful? Does it give the landscape moral or historical weight? Does it complicate what we thought we knew? Does it make the world feel old, contested, wounded or alive?
Or does it merely answer a question nobody needed answered?
FromSoftware and the lure of the incomplete
This is why Dark Souls and Elden Ring are not straightforward examples of the problem. In some ways, they are the best defence against it.
They are, obviously, lore-heavy games. The player moves through worlds of dead gods, ruined dynasties, cryptic factions, half-remembered wars and proper nouns arranged with the calm hostility of a medieval theology exam. Much of the explicit backstory is scattered through item descriptions, environmental cues, enemy placement, architecture, boss names and fragments of dialogue. George R. R. Martin has described his contribution to Elden Ring in terms of worldbuilding, backstory and imaginary history; FromSoftware then took that inherited material and made a game out of its aftermath.
Yet the reason these games work is not simply that they have lore. They work because the lore is fused to the act of play.
In Dark Souls, you do not merely learn that the world is exhausted. You feel exhaustion in the loop of death and return, in the hostile indifference of the architecture, in the way triumph is always provisional, in the grotesque comedy of dragging one’s battered little body through another cathedral full of historical consequences. In Elden Ring, the shattered order of the world is not just a premise. It is a geography. The Lands Between feel like a place where cosmic law has broken into regional weather.
This is lore as atmosphere, not lore as lecture. It does not stand outside the experience, waiting to be consumed later. It presses in from every side.
Of course, the fandom around these games can still produce the more exhausting form of lore culture. There is a familiar ritual now: the game releases; players discover a sad knight, a suspicious tree and a corpse wearing someone else’s hat; the internet assembles; three weeks later, somebody has produced a diagram proving that every woman in the setting is either an aspect of the same goddess, a jar, or both.
I am not sneering at this. Some of that work is genuinely impressive. It can be a form of collaborative criticism, close reading by other means. But it does subtly alter the relationship between mystery and answer. The game says: here are ruins, traces, echoes, contradictions. The lore machine says: here is what happened.
Sometimes that is satisfying. Sometimes it is like pinning a moth.
The best FromSoftware lore remains powerful because it resists final settlement. Not because there are no answers, but because the answers do not exhaust the experience. You can know more about Lordran or the Lands Between and still feel that knowledge is inadequate. The past has not been explained away. It continues to rot beautifully underfoot.
The wiki is not the work
The more general problem is not really lore itself, but wiki-fication: the habit of treating a fictional world as a database whose highest purpose is completion.
The wiki is an extraordinary tool. It is also, as a model of reading, a dangerous temptation. It encourages a particular kind of attention: classificatory, connective, chronological, hierarchical. Who is related to whom? Which events are canon? Which source supersedes which other source? What is the official name of the war? Was this character present at the battle? Is this helmet the same helmet? Did the prophecy refer to the moon, the false moon, the dead moon, or the moon that was technically a metaphor until the tie-in comic made it literal?
Again, none of this is inherently bad. Continuity is part of the pleasure of large fictional worlds. The problem is when continuity becomes the substitute for judgement. The first question becomes not ‘is this scene good?’ but ‘does this scene fit?’ The audience is trained to experience recognition as meaning. A character appears, a musical cue returns, a planet is named, a helmet is lifted from a box, and the work receives applause for connecting to itself.
This is one of the besetting sins of modern franchise storytelling. It is particularly visible in Star Wars, a universe now so heavily shaped by canon management that some arguments about it feel less like criticism than property law. Lucasfilm’s 2014 decision to rebrand much of the old Expanded Universe as ‘Legends’, while establishing a new continuity for future films, books, comics and games, was commercially understandable and probably inevitable. It was also a perfect illustration of how franchise worlds become administrative structures.
The interesting question about Star Wars should not be whether every story ‘counts’ in the same official ledger. It should be why this mythic space opera, whose original power lay partly in its speed, archetypal clarity and sense of glimpsed vastness, has become so dependent on filling its own gaps.
The Clone Wars are more interesting before we know exactly what happened in them. Boba Fett is more interesting before we have been asked to care about his administrative style. The Force is more interesting when it is mystical, ethical and dramatic, rather than an inheritance dispute with glowsticks. This does not mean later stories cannot work. Some do. But they work when they find drama inside the world, not when they merely convert implication into content.
There is a difference between expanding a world and explaining it down.
Warhammer and the honest excess of setting
Warhammer is a slightly different case, because it has always been excessive. Its scale is not an unfortunate side effect. It is the product.
To complain that Warhammer 40,000 has too much lore is a little like complaining that a cathedral has too much stone. The whole thing is built from impossible accumulation: ten thousand years of decay, corpse-emperors, fallen primarchs, machine cults, fungal hooligans, space elves, bureaucratic theocracy, Latin-ish nonsense, skulls on everything, and an entire aesthetic apparently generated by asking what would happen if a medieval reliquary developed a cocaine problem.
Its lore is also inseparable from its function as a tabletop setting. Warhammer is not only a story; it is a playground, product line, miniatures range, wargame, art style, publishing ecosystem and identity machine. The point is not simply to follow a plot. It is to choose an army, paint it, name things, fight battles, argue about rules, read novels, watch lore videos, and develop strong opinions about fictional logistics.
In that sense, Warhammer may be the most honest lore franchise. It does not pretend that the lore is merely serving a single story. The lore is infrastructure. It gives players reasons to care about factions, colours, battles and models. It creates a shared imaginative field in which other stories can happen.
But even here, the problem can appear. The Horus Heresy began as mythic backstory: the great founding wound of the setting, the half-remembered civil war that explained why the Imperium was so broken. Over time it became a vast narrative enterprise in its own right, with dozens of novels and a continuing apparatus of guides, curated collections and follow-up material. Recent official material describes curated routes through the saga and pivotal events across the Age of Darkness, which is entirely reasonable for a body of fiction that has become too large for casual entry.
There is a real achievement here. Many of those books are loved. Some are very good. But the transformation is still revealing. A mythic past becomes a documented past. A legendary betrayal becomes a shelf. The half-seen tragedy is made narratively available.
That is not automatically a loss. But it is a change. Some forms of grandeur depend on distance. Bring the ancient catastrophe too close, give every demigod a speaking part, every faction a trilogy, every mystery a campaign supplement, and the scale can oddly diminish. The mountain becomes a guided tour.
The Elder Scrolls and lore as literature
If Star Wars shows lore as continuity management, and Warhammer shows lore as infrastructure, The Elder Scrolls at its best shows lore as literature.
This is especially true of Morrowind, whose strangest texts do not simply provide background information. They perform the world’s instability. The 36 Lessons of Vivec are not valuable because they straightforwardly explain what happened. They are valuable because they sit somewhere between scripture, propaganda, metaphysics, confession, joke, spell and textual fever dream. UESP’s collected versions of the Lessons give some sense of their density and strangeness, but their real effect comes from encountering them inside a game world where religion, politics and history are already entangled.
This is lore doing something more interesting than filling a database. It does not merely say: here are the facts of the Tribunal. It asks: what is a fact inside a world where gods are political rulers, myths may be retroactive, official histories are compromised, and metaphysics has a worrying tendency to behave like rhetoric?
That kind of lore does not close interpretation. It opens it. It gives the player not a settled account, but a field of competing accounts. It makes the world feel old because the past has been fought over, rewritten, sanctified, buried and lied about. In other words, it understands something real history also teaches: the past is not simply what happened. It is what survives, who records it, who benefits from the record, and what cannot quite be made to fit.
The weaker form of lore is the opposite. It takes strangeness and renders it as bullet points. It turns theology into mechanics, myth into chronology, contradiction into error, mystery into ‘deepest lore’. It approaches a religious text from a fictional culture and asks which parts are canonically true, as if that were the only interesting question.
But the best question is often not ‘what really happened?’ It is ‘why does this world need to tell the story this way?’
Why fans love lore
It is worth being fair about this, because the appetite for lore is not simply a failure of taste. Lore gives people several genuine pleasures.
First, it gives scale. A good fictional world feels larger than the story currently occupying it. Lore extends the horizon.
Second, it gives continuity. To follow a franchise over years is to develop a relationship not only with characters, but with accumulated places, events, objects and references. Lore rewards memory.
Third, it gives community. Lore is something fans can discuss, assemble, dispute and teach. It turns solitary consumption into shared excavation.
Fourth, it gives control. Stories are often ambiguous, emotional and unresolved. Lore seems firmer. It can be organised. It can be mastered. It can be put in order.
Finally, it gives a way to remain inside the work after the work is over. This may be the most important point. When a game ends, when a trilogy disappoints, when a favourite character dies, lore offers continuation. There is always another source, another fragment, another theory. The world does not have to end just because the story has.
That is not contemptible. It is touching, really. A fandom’s obsession with lore often comes from love. It is what happens when people do not want the lights to come up.
But love can be bad at criticism. It can mistake more for better. It can treat every blank space as an insult. It can demand that the work explain itself until the original sensation has been replaced by a dossier.
The problem with answers
The deepest problem with lore culture is that it often misunderstands what mystery is for.
A mystery is not always a puzzle. Sometimes it is a mood. Sometimes it is a wound. Sometimes it is the means by which a work gestures beyond its own edges. In horror, the unexplained can preserve fear. In fantasy, it can preserve wonder. In science fiction, it can preserve sublimity. In myth, it can preserve sacred distance. In games, it can preserve the feeling that the world was not built solely for you.
This last point matters especially in games. Players are trained to interact, solve, optimise, complete. The form itself encourages mastery. Good game worlds often have to resist that mastery. They have to make us feel not merely that there is content we have not yet found, but that the world exceeds us in principle.
That is why environmental storytelling can be so powerful. A ruined village does not need to explain everything to make us feel that something happened there. A locked door is not always an invitation to return with the right key. Sometimes it is a statement that the world contains interiors we will never enter.
Lore can support that feeling. It can place suggestive pressure on the world. It can make the visible surface tremble with invisible history. But when lore becomes too available, too complete, too taxonomic, it can flatten the very sensation it was meant to produce.
The answer is not always more explanation. Sometimes the answer is better silence.
What lore is for
So what is lore for?
Lore is for texture. It is for pressure. It is for making a world feel as if it did not begin when the protagonist arrived and will not end when the credits roll. It is for giving places memory, objects significance, institutions inertia, conflicts ancestry and choices consequence.
Lore is for the half-buried statue whose face has been scratched away.
It is for the song everyone knows but nobody explains.
It is for the holy book with three incompatible translations.
It is for the battlefield that is now a marketplace.
It is for the character who lies about the past because the truth would destroy the present.
It is for the sense that the world is not a level select screen but a living accumulation of error, reverence, violence, boredom, weather and time.
What lore is not for, or should not be for, is replacing the need to tell a story.
A fictional world does not become meaningful because we can name all its emperors. It becomes meaningful because something happens within it that could not happen in quite the same way anywhere else. A character changes, or fails to change. A choice reveals its cost. A myth collapses. A city falls. A god is exposed as a fraud, or worse, as real. The lore matters because it makes that movement heavier.
When lore is good, it behaves like geology. It sits beneath the surface, shaping the ground on which the story walks. When lore is bad, it behaves like homework. It asks to be admired for how much there is to know.
That is the problem with lore. Not that there is too much of it. Not that fans care about it. Not that fictional worlds should be smaller, thinner, simpler or less strange. The problem is that lore is increasingly treated as the proof that a story has depth, when often it is only proof that a story has appendices.
The unanswered mystery is not always a defect. The gap is not always waiting for a sourcebook. The shadow at the edge of the map is not always improved by naming the kingdom beyond it.
Sometimes the dragon does not need a family tree.
Sometimes it is enough that the bones are old, the villagers will not go near them, and something under the hill is still warm.