worldbuilding is one of my favorite parts of writing and i would love nothing more than to just make sandboxes all day for other people to play in

Max speaking to one of my pet peeves here. Story gets metonymized into the marker of Serious Writerly Craftsmanship, as an understandable reaction to the amateur tendency of farting around ideaspace

But casting Story as the be-all end-all of fiction play really limits the imagination