Cross-Cultural Communication

Why Your Narrative Design Team Needs An Anthropologist or at Least Some Anthropology

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Why Your Narrative Design Team Needs an Anthropologist

By Michael Kilman, M.S. Applied Anthropology

I’m an avid gamer and science fiction author. I’m also an anthropologist with over a decade of teaching, fieldwork, and consulting experience. So for me, worldbuilding is everything. A bad worldbuild kills my immersion immediately. And as audiences grow more sophisticated, I hear this more and more from gamers, readers, and filmmakers too.

Which raises a question: why do so many fictional worlds still feel hollow?

Part of the answer is that most narrative design teams are missing a specific skill set, someone trained to see culture as a living, integrated system. Characters across games aren’t just copies of western identity, there are distinct ways of knowing the world that don’t always translate easily across culture. That’s missing skill set is anthropology.

Below are six reasons why bringing anthropological thinking into your narrative design process can transform the worlds you build.

1. Holism: Everything Is Connected

One of anthropology’s foundational concepts is holism. It’s the idea that culture is an integrated system. If you change one facet of culture, you change everything. Think of chaos theory’s butterfly effect: small shifts ripple outward in unexpected ways.

Applied to worldbuilding, this means your fictional economic system, your family structures, your political arrangements, your religion, your ethnic identities, your people’s relationship to death, their biology, their environment, all of these are deeply interrelated. They shape systems of power, freedom, and oppression. When you’re building a fictional world, a holistic framework helps you understand how those relationships create meaning, consequence, and true complexity.

Anthropologists are trained to hold this complexity. We work at the intersection of biology, environment, social structure, language, and culture. This big-picture thinking is exactly what most narrative design processes are missing.

2. More Immersive and Realistic Cause-and-Effect

Creating a believable fictional world means thinking carefully about the causes and consequences of every major action. This isn’t just true for individual characters, but the culture as a whole. The most compelling games and narratives are often the ones that let player choices ripple outward in culturally coherent ways.

Imagine if your protagonist made an alliance early in a game with a faction. This alliance created real, culture-wide changes throughout the narrative.  This isn’t just a change in character relationships, I’m talking about changing the religion, economics, political system, or maybe even language of your world later in the game. That’s where anthropology comes in. Anthropologists have more than a century of research on how cultural change actually works and how it manifests across cultures and generations.

When I’ve consulted on these kinds of questions, including with a major tech firm on post-pandemic cultural shifts, we’ve drawn on real historical examples. The 1918 flu pandemic, for instance, fundamentally shifted American standards of beauty. It made sunbathing fashionable, and altered building architecture toward open spaces and natural light. That’s the kind of layered, counterintuitive thinking that makes fictional worlds feel real.

3. Anthropologists Are Intercultural Communicators

Our job isn’t just to study cultures, it’s to help different cultures and subcultures understand one another. We are a kind of intercultural mediator. That’s why tech companies hire UX and Design Anthropologists, and why I’ve worked with clients ranging from Native American tribal governments to Samsung UK on cross-cultural research questions.

Intercultural communication is a fundamental part of narrative design. If your world has diverse factions, ethnic groups, or political coalitions, an anthropologist can help you think through how those groups would actually perceive and misread each other. In fieldwork you learn quickly that even the most positive, and well intentioned changes you might make to a community meets resistance. That’s because, no matter how benevolent the change, someone will always lose and in ways you may never expect. Building that friction into your narrative design is what makes a world feel inhabited rather than constructed.

4. Diversity Is a Craft Skill, Not Just a Political Position

There’s a lot of conversation right now about representation and diversity in games and media. Culture wars are near constant in the social media sphere. But here’s the thing, lack of diversity isn’t just ethically problematic, it’s bad storytelling. The world is complex. Fictional worlds that flatten that complexity feel wooden and vacant.

The challenge is that writing cultures unfamiliar to you requires more than good intentions. True inclusion requires research, consultation, and ideally collaboration. Anthropologists can help mediate that process. We’re trained to identify the blind spots in our own cultural assumptions.

Have you ever considered what you think of specific accents? Why do you think that? Where do your opinions on different kinds of accents come from? These biases don’t just come from personal experiences, they’re formed over time, and through history and conflict. 

Anthropologists have also spent decades thinking about analogs and representations. If your fictional culture is standing in for a real one, you need to know what you’re doing. An anthropologist who has worked directly with those communities are ideal, they can help you navigate your own assumptions and open up your fictional world in a way you never considered before, a way that makes your story vastly more interesting and immersive.

5. The World Is Full of Untapped Source Material

Every culture is a dreamscape, a world made through symbols and imagination. One of the biggest missed opportunities in speculative fiction is that it only draws on a tiny sliver of possibility. The same alien invasion stories, the same European medieval settings, the same recycled mythologies, and gods, and political archetypes, and economic systems appear over and over. To be fair, it’s not that these traditions aren’t rich and wonderful on their own, it’s just that they’ve become predictable and stale, a singular worldview that no longer makes us question our own thinking with wonder. They just don’t stand out anymore.  

The world contains thousands of distinct cultural traditions, belief systems, governance structures, and cosmologies that most Western narrative designers have never even thought about. I made this exact argument in my TEDx talk, because, what we imagine matters.

Consider the game Never Alone (Kisima Inŋitchuŋa), made by and for Iñupiaq people, featuring the indigenous language and unlockable interviews with Iñupiaq elders. That game didn’t just tell a unique story, it expanded the possibilities of what games can do. It’s beautiful, and complex, and driven by the culture it comes from. There’s nothing else out there quite like it. It stands out because it offers another way of knowing/being in the world.

6. Anthropology Is a Toolkit, Not Just a Perspective

Everything I’ve described above isn’t abstract, it’s practical and in the era of AI, more necessary than ever. AI is capable of generating an incredible amount of mediocre and predicable media. Anthropology is an edge in worldbuilding and storytelling. It gives you concrete tools: frameworks for analyzing kinship and power, models for understanding how religion and economics interact, methods for identifying the cultural logic behind social norms that seem arbitrary.

My colleague Kyra Wellstrom and I built some of those tools into a book titled: Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers. It distills over a century of anthropological research into an accessible guide that doesn’t require wading through academic textbooks.

On my YouTube channel I also host live Worldbuilding Q&As every month called, “Ask an Anthropologist.” I also bring on special guests. There you can also find my social science explainer series, Anthropology in 10 or Less, and soon my new series launching this spring, Anthropology Through Science Fiction. I’ve been translating these same ideas into free, accessible content for creators. And in my worldbuilding consulting practice, I bring this toolkit directly to projects.

Ready to Build a Better World?

I’ve spent 11 years teaching anthropology at the university level, published research on how worldbuilding works as a pedagogical tool, and consulted for clients ranging from indie fiction writers to major tech firms. My fiction, including the dystopian sci-fi Chronicles of the Great Migration series and my dark fantasy novel Shades & Shapes in the Dark are built on the same anthropological foundations I’m describing here.

If you or your team is serious about creating fictional cultures that feel authentic and immersive, I’d love to talk.

Book a free 10-minute consulting call →

Or explore free worldbuilding resources, essays, and video content at loridianslaboratory.com.

Michael Kilman holds an M.S. in Applied Anthropology (focus: Media) from Portland State University. He is the author of the Chronicles of the Great Migration series, Shades & Shapes in the Dark, and Build Better Worlds. He is also known for his TEDx talk “Anthropology, Our Imagination, and How to Understand Difference.”

17 Things I have learned teaching Cultural Diversity and Anthropology

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Want more on Anthropology? Consider checking out our book Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers at Amazon.

This is a bit of a “Rules to live by” post I guess. I have spent the last eleven years of my life teaching both undergraduate and graduate students anthropology, culture, and diversity. In my classroom I try to make things as practical as possible. We can fill our students heads with theory all day long, but what I try to do is try to give a baseline understanding of how different cultures view the world so that when they encounter other people in work or out traveling the world, they can find a way to understand another person and prevent some of the conflicts and communication traps that we run into.

I find myself repeating a lot of the following over and over and so I thought maybe it would be useful to some of you out there. Of course, you can completely disagree with me (that’s kind of the point here) but these are things that if you apply them, you might be able to understand those difficult people in your life in a new way.

1. There is no glorious past when things were better. That’s a figment of the cultural imagination and based on the ideals we want in the present. There is no period in history, no culture in history that was ever perfection and/or paradise. Fantasies of the past are fun, but they are just projections on the wall in the great cave of our times.

2. Every culture, every religion, every language, is weird. We are all weird, our entire species is weird as hell. The only reason you don’t think your ideas/thoughts/beliefs are weird is because you are used to them.

3. If one group is disenfranchised, that means someone is benefiting. I.E. if Women are payed less, that means Men are paid more and reap the benefits. If people are treated poorly because they have darker skin, that means if you have light skin you benefit (even if it isn’t obvious). That’s what privilege is. It is not an attack on your character, people cannot help what system they were born into, but they can change it.

4. Everything has a cost, everything. Nothing is cost free. Every major world empire was built on, and is maintained by a river of blood. The very fact you live in this country at this time in history means you benefited from war, colonialism, genocide, ethnic cleansing and all other manner of terrible things. But so has every other great empire. The Romans, the Islamic Empire, the Mongolian Empire, the Chinese Dynasties, they all did the exact same thing. So why teach them? Why talk about our mistakes and terror? Because I believe we can choose to be different. The first step is acknowledging that our culture did some fucked up things to other cultures.

5. Communication is really freaking hard. Words are really powerful. Everyone has words and images that they are sensitive to and trigger them (obviously survivors of trauma like many of my friends and myself have to spend a lot of time working through this) Figure out what yours are and watch your reactions. Sometimes just watching and understanding which words hit you hard can be a powerful tool for healing. But do remember, the only thing you can control is you. Life and most the world doesn’t care if you are triggered.

6. People are allowed to change. Something someone did 10 years ago does not necessarily reflect who they are now. Social media has created a distortion of static identity. Digging up ancient photos and tweets is only really useful if people are still exhibiting the same terrible behaviors now as they were then. Most of us go through a long hard process of testing ideas. This is normal and healthy, until you let your ideas take over and make you rigid.

7. Ignorance is not the problem in this world. Everyone is ignorant of something fundamental. Ignorance simply means to not know something. The problem is willful ignorance. When someone presents you with a new idea or a challenge to what you think about the world, take a breath. Let the emotional outrage simmer down and then try to approach it with calm and detachment and weigh all the evidence. Sometimes you might still be correct, and sometimes not. This is an uncomfortable but powerful process.

8. Being socially active, being mindful, being able to give back, boycotting products or getting an advanced education are all a privilege. Not everyone has access to these things. Remember again, that the only thing you can control is you. But also remember that you are powerful and that individuals are capable of making great (and terrible) changes to the world. You cannot force responsibility on other people and you should always remember that people face different barriers in life.

9. Read lots and from a wide variety of perspectives. Try and consider that you might be wrong about everything once in a while. It’s terrifying but sobering. Consider how little knowledge is contained in the entire human experience compared to the vastness of the rest of the universe.

10. Make sure you learn the difference between something that is opinion or cultural options (i.e. Monogamy or Polygamy are the best kinds of marriage) vs something that is objectively and verifiably true (I.e. The Earth is round). While your at it, learn about the scientific method and what good evidence is. Most things on the internet are easy to debunk with a little effort and awareness of your own bias.

11. Take a moment before you blame someone else for your problems or the problems of your culture. Yes, sometimes things are out of your control, structural violence absolutely exists, sometimes crazy random shit happens, and some people are unlucky, but if you keep seeing the same pattern over and over again, you might be a part of the equation. On a cultural level, if we are scapegoating people, who benefits? Blaming other populations for our issues, historically always turns out to be shortsighted.

12. Apathy and greed are deadly and destructive. A society that bases it’s institutions on these things will always have very serious problems. Empathy and generosity go a long way.

13. Listen to people’s stories. Share your own. If you don’t represent yourself, someone else will. Stories are how we save the world.

14. Diversity and difference is one of the most powerful tools in the human experience. Why? Because different people and cultures think about things in different ways. That means that there are many ways to approach complex problems. Sometimes we can’t see how to solve something because we are too close to it (personally or culturally).

15. There is no such thing as a homogeneous culture. People are people everywhere you go. Just because someone has the same language/religion/gender/nationality/income doesn’t mean they have the same inclinations or hopes or dreams. Each one of my children have different hopes and dreams about the future. Why would a group living on the other side of the world be any different? Don’t put people in boxes or make grand assumptions.

16. The is no one size fits all solution to anything. There is no single solution to solve any of the worlds major issues. All of history demonstrates this.

17. You are the bad guy, the evil empire, the oppressor, the asshole in someone’s story. No one in history is perfect. The people we claim as saints were either assholes earlier in life and grew from that or we are missing information. Plenty of people think I am an asshole. Plenty of cultures think Americans are terrible. No one ever thinks they are the asshole and every culture thinks they are they greatest ever.

I could probably think of more, but those are a lot of the things I find myself repeating most often. You, of course, are free to disagree, and of course comment and discuss.

This essay was later adapted to, “How Worldbuilding Became My Pedagogy,” in 2026. If you found it useful, you might also enjoy the Worldbuilding series or the co-authored book Build Better Worlds: An Introduction to Anthropology for Game Designers, Fiction Writers, and Filmmakers. And if you want to bring these ideas into your own creative project, I offer worldbuilding consultations – the first 15 minutes are free.

Why Social Media Can Be Such a Dumpster Fire

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We have all had the experience right? Someone decides that it’s time to blow up your post about something you feel passionate about, or worse, something that you simply thought was funny. Next thing you know, it’s all out war on your page and you’ve spent 4 hours of your life you never get back, leaving you to feel emotionally and physically exhausted, if not in a terrible mood. 

But why does this happen? There are lots of articles that talk about confirmation bias and that people are more divided than ever before or how hard we cling to certain ideas, and so on… 

But after teaching a college course specifically on diversity in the modern world, I have come to discover a few things when having in class discussions about social media. Now I may not be the first to notice these things, but I think there are at least three major problems (feel free to comment if you see an additional one) that we face when communicating online that we should consider.

1.People have different intentions for the internet 

This one, in particular, was really hard for me. As a person who loves books and learning and the spirit of debate, I view the internet as a space to discuss important issues and try to learn from and understand people who are different than me in both philosophy and culture. 

For years I loathed it when people shared cat videos or jokes or posted memes. I would grumble to myself about “what a waste of an amazing opportunity” and yes, sometimes I would comment just to be a jerk. Or, someone would post something that was clearly misinformed and I would go on the attack, because, of course, I must. How else would they‘learn.’ 

Do you know what I learned from thinking and behaving that way? I was completely and totally wrong. Also, people think your an asshole and it’s counterproductive to any useful thing you might say. 

People use the internet for a host of reasons. It may be to share news, or keep up with family, or post information about their baby or their cat, or perhaps they like to joke or are looking to relieve stress after a hard day at work. Maybe they are promoting their new book, or using as a space to promote their business. Some people are looking to build awareness around particular issues and provide a space for discussion. I have to tell myself all the time that for some, critical debate is the absolute last thing they want to engage in at the end of their day (or the beginning). 

There is also another side of this. Some people use the internet because they want to troll and bully others. Their idea of humor is to harass and bully and get cheap laughs at the expense of others. So we have this group into the mix aswell, which further complicates things. A few weeks ago, when discussing this exact topic in a class, one student raised their hand and said, “But don’t you think it’s funny to write a bot program to troll people and have them waste all their time arguing with a mindless bot?” My response was, ‘well, I suppose that’s one way to engage online.’ But in reality, I think that is hugely problematic for a number of reasons, but I won’t get into that here. 

The point is, when you are on social media, it is hard to remember that people’s intentions and use of the social space vary greatly. We are not all on the same page, and so this alone creates conflict, confusion, and misunderstanding. 

2. There is no paralanguage, and so we put things on other people that might not be there. 

Paralanguage is the components of speech that help us to understand the meaning. It includes pitch, tone, speed, gestures, and facial expressions. It’s how we understand if the following phrase, “That’s so amazing.” is a sincere expression or a sarcastic one. 

We don’t have that in written speech. Grammar helps, and a good writer can create a scenario where you understand the tone and attitudes within dialogue, but even then, stuff can get lost in the translation.  Also, think how hard it is to tell if some people are joking or not. I am told often, that I have a dry sense of humor, and it’s hard to tell if some of my jokes are serious and that’s in person. 

So add this to a forum of total strangers. You don’t know any of these individuals, or you might know a few from previous online interactions. So, someone makes a statement like, ‘That’s so amazing,’ to something you said. But the context of the conversation is such that you could interpret it as either. 

In that situation, what your brain does is make assumptions. If you are in a bad mood, or you have had other bad interactions in this conversation, your brain may frame the statement as an attack or a comment in bad faith, which could launch a series of escalating replies and blow up the whole conversation, even if the person was commenting in good faith. 

I can’t tell you how many times this has happened to me on both Twitter and Facebook and recently even had to unfriend and block someone who took a comment that I said, as support, in a way where she nuked my page because she understood my comment as something completely different.

It is always always important to get clarification before you lash out at someone online, on social media or in anemail, because a lack of paralanguage will have our brain fill in the gaps. Depending on our history and our current experiences, we may completely misunderstand what the other person is saying. Remember when you assume you make an Ass out of U and Me (I have never stopped loving that play on letters). 

3. When it comes to issues of diversity people are both at different stages of understanding and different states of acceptance 

First of all, before I dive in here, there is a very excellent episode on the Netflix series “Explained” on PoliticalCorrectness that I highly recommend watching. It is a highly complex thing, and there are no easy answers there. The episode talks about the history of the phrase and some of the debates around free speech vs. censorship. But it does not provide you any clear answers, and that, in this case, is a good thing, because there are none. 

The internet is constantly alight with debates of diversity and inclusion. Regardless of how you feel about these conversations, they are, for the most part, productive and useful to ensure that people who are sincerely facing injustice and oppression, are opening other’s eyes to their experience. 

The problem with these conversations is multi-leveled. And when I say problem, what I mean is, why they are so combative and tense. These are important conversations. This is how society changes into something better. 

I will illustrate this with my own experience. I am a white guy, as white as you get. All my ancestors are white as the snow in the northern countries from which they originate. I am a Cis, I am straight, and I grew up in an all-white community. For the first 12 years of my life, before I moved to Colorado, I grew up on the east coast in Philadelphia, in what was possibly the whitest community you can imagine. Segregation in Philadelphia (and many North East Cities) is a real problem (See this for more). So, when I moved to Colorado at twelve years of age, I was shocked to discover there were still Native Americans alive. I had been taught, by omission mostly, that all Native Americans had died out years before I was born. 

Let that sink in for a moment. 

I could go in more detail, as to the various kinds of ignorance I had going into college, (middle school and high school was also an all-white experience)because, for me, college was terrifying. Everything I thought I knew was challenged. It was a kick in the gut, it was uncomfortable, but it was a good thing. Why? Because there are a near infinite ways of experiencing the world, and I had made endless assumptions that really, the world was simple, orderly, and experience was mostly universal. 

 I was, legitimately ignorant of so much of the rest of the world. And that’s a real thing. There are a lot of people out there like that. Even ones like myself, who became an anthropologist, who lived and worked with other cultures, took a long time to challenge all those deeply planted ideas. And I am a person, who is willing and open to learning and accepting that I might be wrong on things. The reality is, some people aren’t willing to learn. Some people are, what we call, willfully ignorant. In other words, no matter what you say, no matter how well you craft an argument, you aren’t going to change their opinion on something, even if you have all the data and truth on your side. 

Remember too, we are all ignorant of something, we all have sizable holes in your knowledge and experience. This is based on your gender, race, class, religion, family, language, etc. You cannot know everything, and it is not reasonable to expect someone, who grew up in vastly different circumstances to intuitively understand something you do. If you have never seen poverty for example, how can you understand what it’s like to live that way for your whole life? You can, but it’s no easy task, and you have to think critically about it. 

So, when discussing online, the first thing you have to figure out is, which kind of ignorant do you have? Do you have a person who is willfully ignorant? Or is this a person who simply lacks exposure? That does make a difference, and it is a big mistake to treat both kinds of people to ad-hominem attacks because both of those individuals have entirely different intentions when discussing. 

This comes to the next point, which is, even people who are willing to listen and learn, they can’t do it all at once. Keep in mind, that by the time you are an adult, your brain has been programmed to think in a certain way for at least eighteen years of life. Neurologically speaking, you simply cannot dismiss ideas overnight, unless you have a massive brain trauma that changes your brain chemistry drastically. 

Using myself again as an example, when I first discovered the Implicit Bias test, (the test that measures our subconscious assumptions about things like race and gender) I thought, of course, I would receive the coveted neutral result. Because I didn’t hate anyone or any group right? At age 23, when I took this test and got “A Strong Bias Toward Individuals of European descent,” I was shocked. But, this is entirely explained by the background I grew up in, which I already explained. After that, I went out into the world and studied anthropology. I learned about other cultures, worked with them, and lived with them. After a few years, I remember that test. Took it again, and got “A Moderate Bias Towards Individuals of European Descent.” It wasn’t until after graduate school, that I finally got a Neutral result. 

The point? If you are online, you cannot reasonably expect people to understand an issue overnight. You are fighting against years and years of programming and often, lack of quality education. People need time and space to digest things, to shift gears in their thinking. Acceptance of a new idea, rarely happens overnight and the older you are, the longer it takes because there is more social programming. 

Does that mean you don’t hold people accountable for saying or posting really awful things? Of course not. But remember what you are fighting against. Remember, that you may not win that discussion, but also, other people are reading and watching even if they aren’t interacting, so it’s still worth having those discussions if you have the intention and inclination to do so. 

To Sum Up

The internet can be the most amazing place for building ideas and spreading important social critique and creating a space for inclusion. But it can also be a messy imperfect mess that allows for long-established ideas, to persist and spread. We have seen some pretty terrible events in the last few years, like what happened in Charlottesville or a number other instances of social media being used to spread all kinds of nastiness. 

But, if you want to avoid dumpster fires on your social media, keeping some of the above things in mind, may help. In reality, though, it’s not possible to avoid problems, because well, people are messy creatures, and any social space is fraught with controversy and difficulty. But I hope this lengthy piece was useful to the few of you who got all the way to the end. I wrote it, because I believe, that we can do better. 

Note: Sometimes I have friends read my blog posts before I post them to get feedback.


This time around, a friend recommended this amazing Ted Talk titled “A Black Man Goes Undercover in the Alt-Right” I highly recommend as he covers a chunk of what this blog talks about long before I ever even considered it.