It's also a kind of reading for world context the way you read a detective story for clues - Jo Walton called it "incluing" https://tor.com/2010/01/18/sf-reading-protocols/…
A good diagnostic question, in the spirit of Alan Kay “waste transistors” principle of personal computing is “what is this story willing to waste?”
What is it willing to feature “too many” of?
Culture = clever names.
More examples:
Futurama: Silly devices/gadgets/design fiction objects
Simpsons: Arguably the couch gags+intro mini-story that triggers the main story, like “they go to the fair and Homer buys 1 dumbbell”
South Park: “we learned something today” faux-morals
Rick and Morty: inter-dimensional cable and quick-sketched useless parallel universes which don’t do anything for the plot, like the farting-asses universe.
Best example might be the brilliant pizza-universe set. There is NO good reason for this scene
This is nifty and needs a name, like “spice note” or something: the fun flavor element which does a lot of the story work
Star Wars: spaceship design
Superheroes: costume design
aSoIaF: house banners & words
Agatha Christie: etiquette
Wuxia: special weapons & attacks twitter.com/vgr/status/133…
Tolkien’s secret sauce which he began doing even before he conceived of Middle Earth in 1917 while recovering from the Somme twitter.com/vgr/status/133…
Big mood? Generator? Flywheel? Root chakra? Idiopathy?
Principle needs a clear statement too: “every successful genre story has an unnecessarily overbuilt world id-element.”
I think it’s “leitmotif”. And then you have to break it down into the leit and the motif. The motif is the theme that people notice: eh pratchett’s puns and historical references. The leit is the motivating force behind them.
Are leitmotifs necessarily overbuilt though? To me the overbuilding is the key part. In your case I don’t think it is computer science concepts. It is wordplay (not just dad jokes). Whatever you have “too much” of for story needs in a sense.
Sometimes they’re the same, but not always. In Rick and Morty I’d say the leitmotif is the nihilistic disillusionment bits scattered in every episode, but the id-element is “cheap universes”. Relationship: a multiverse where universes are really cheap induces nihilistic stories.
I think we are saying the same thing but arguing about what to call it. There’s the “virtue” that shines through and the “vice” that necessarily tags along with it.
Main reason I don’t think they’re the same is that literary fiction usually has leitmotifs but not the abundance signals. Genre fiction is abundance-driven. Literary fiction seems to come from a place of scarcity.