Coherent and Expansive Worlds

I have been looking further into expansive worlds and when done well how creative they can be. I have also been looking into having a fully inclusive world for games that I create. For instance a scene in my game 'Wylde' would involve the protagonist saving a young pregnant woman. In the next game which would obviously be completely different in terms of style, genre etc you play the woman's son and there would be a brief cameo from the protagonist in Wylde.

Recently Marvel have done this as they bought a lot of their character rights back and began to weave them together i.e in the Incredible Hulk film, the military use weapons designed by Tony Stark the main character in Iron Man. They are forward planning, interweaving their characters stories so that they can bring 'The Avengers' movie to life, a film in which several of Marvel's join to form one 'super-team''. They had been doing this with their comics for years and it's very commonplace for one comics hero to team up with anothers. The small and unobtrusive ways they have started to coalesce their 'Marvel universe' was done very well and at no time do any of the cameo's or linkages seem forced, indeed many of them would be missed by people who weren't 'in the know' such as the scene in Iron Man 2 when Tony uses Captain America's shield to simply prop up his laser.

When done well, they add an element that can be enjoyed by dedicated game followers. Another example of a coalescent fiction world done well is the universe that Stephen King has created.King is a master of his craft and as with Marvel the links he provides to his other works are subtle but extremely enjoyable when found. An instance of this is in Insomnia when one of the protagonists mentions 'some banker who get sent up to Shawshank'.

This is something that I would definitely like to explore with my own games, I think a single interconnecting universe can be much more intricate than one that is created and recreated each time a media comes up. The cameo's an interconnections I would use would be subtle but apparent for those who enjoy the games I would create. 

With my 'game document' I began thinking of a way to coalesce universes that may be very different.