intfiction.org

Hi.

Is anybody here interested in doing a "shared world" collaboration aimed at IF?

I am not talking about shared in the MMO/multiplayer sense, I'm talking about collaborating on creating a "world" - places, general themes, recurring characters - and then using those in our individual (or, by all means, collaboratively written) IF works.

I remember reading the Thieve's World anthologies (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thieves'_World). In these, different authors made up a world together, so that places, characters and events from one short story reappeared in another story by another author. I don't necessarily mean it should be a fantasy world, it could be any setting. I think it should be original work though, not adapting an existing world, if nothing else to stay clear of copyright issues.

I'm interested in seeing how - and if - this would work in IF. What are the previous examples of doing this?

One way of doing it would be just to toss ideas around and making up a world together, adding important characters and stuff in the mix, and letting everybody use these things in their own IF works. (Upshot: you don't need to be able to code at all to be part of this!)

Another possibility might be to share more than just ideas, to actually collaborate on (e.g.) locations, maybe even characters or even... well puzzles/quests/subplots/story fragments, whatever your take is - in (e.g.) Inform7 extensions or whatever works for your system.

Does this make sense at all? I'm not at all sure it does, but I think it's worth maybe running with the idea a little further than to just dismiss it straight away. Part of me feels like this is fundamentally at odds with how IF authors work, but on the other hand this seems like a perfectly standard procedure for RPG people. And if it works for (traditional, non-interactive) fiction and it works for role-playing games - why wouldn't it work for IF?

I have plenty of questions and some ideas, but I want you think about this so I'll shut up now.

So. Is anybody up for this?

Well, I loved Thieves World when I was a kid, and what you're talking about isn't too far removed from muds, which I also grew up playing, so it sounds good to me.

There are some practical obstacles though. The TW writers were all professional, and especially in the beginning of the series, highly experienced authors, and I daresay writing a short story is less work than writing short IF. So, keeping the project on track so it produces work is going to be one challenge.

Another issue I'm not so sure about is this: will a reader forgive a certain amount of inconsistency between stories in a shared world anthology, but less between the responses of two works of IF? Because you're dealing with a simulation I feel like the reader will expect a more consistent experience from one game to the next.

I think sharing code is one good way to mitigate that, but if you don't want to restrict authors to one authoring system (which seems like a good idea to me) you'll need to create some kind of specification people can code to.

At the same time, it'd be a shame to rule out quite different interpretations and IF experiences of the source material. Maybe only time will tell if this is something to address or not.

I actually know of a similar concept that worked very well for a long time: Reality-on-the-Norm.

http://realityonthenorm.info/

I think it worked so well because the first games established some very distinctive characters with distinctive personalities. Cardboard, yes, but interesting - and leaving room for added depth later, if necessary. The very first game established a tone. It didn't carry throughout ALL the games, but without that a first distinctive tone, it wouldn't have sparked so much interest.

Also, the style was kept graphically simplistic so everyone could join in, and the first few games were - inevitably - made by the same person(s) until it really caught on.

There was some inconsistency, but people really were OK with it. One of the most famous cases was the killing of a main character. That generated a LOT of discussion, but eventually people sort of wrote alternate timelines... or placed stories before the killing... and even tried to fit it in within a larger plotline. They also mocked the game which did it, which was indeed a game mostly fit for mocking.

Another cute example is that at a certain game, a new character appears. This character hardly talks at all, because the game's writer was, frankly, bad at writing. Later authors used this new character - every character was fair game to all authors - and made him a very, very quiet person, whose thoughts you could never be sure of.

There were some sets of templates (as it was mostly a graphical adventure) shared around for everyone to use - characters, places, objects... but you could always use yours, if you wanted to.

I think this is a good idea, and the question is: will it catch on? The answer, as always, is: no way to know until its tried. But looking at RON, a *successful* venture (up until the time it got too much - nowadays people feel daunted that to really know RON you have to play 30+ games just to write a proper game, which is really not keeping in style with the original concept anymore where pretty mcuh everything went... I guess it just evolved beyond people's control), I'd say it means some dedicated authors for the first couple of games, and the necessity of establishing *just enough*. Just enough locations to make a skeleton; and leave ample room for changes (the first RON game had a main street that was full of empty buildings that were later adapted into anything and everything). Just enough characterisation to make the characters stand out; and leave ample room to play with (character-types would be fine).

And naturally, the lighter the tone, the more participants there will be - at first. And then things would just develop. Characters would come together, good stuff would keep, bad stuff would be scratched (there's at least one character in RON who just never really got used for anything, Thakbor). The game world and history would evolve of their own accord.

There has to be brand recognition between the individual games.

Narrative style among different authors is heterogeneous, so the thing which is usually the strongest reason one keeps buying the next book of a series doesn't apply. Next in line would be character recognition. That's something which should be settled in advance. All characters, even the important NPCs should be fixed. Individual authors may explore their properties to the grain, give them a twist here and there but not change them completely. In contrast, recognition based on locations is weak. Common rules are the weakest property to recognize IF, I think. It may however break the atmosphere if the rules between different games change too much.

Interesting idea. I am personally overstuffed with projects and regularly am forced to let things I've promised and am interested in, slide. But I'd love to see the results.

BTW this has been done before, just as a matter of history/interest. I remember a game called Shades of Grey (I think it was done with AGT) that people were collaborating on way back when I was last active on r.a.i-f. Possibly it has been done again since — I wasn't paying as much attention later on.

P.

I'm also curious how this would work in terms of continuity between games, and whether this has an impact on the type of games you'd write.

For example, stories with very different endings become a bit of a problem, it's like they break the continuity themselves, and you end up with conflicting realities even from a single story. And I guess any major changes really would tend to either need to be placed in a timeline or would mean a forking off of reality.

Personally I don't have a problem with inconsistencies at all, I'm fine with seeing people reinterpreting and changing things from one story to the next. But I guess some people would prefer to have a more robust world to deal with.

I'm more concerned that things just might get very silly, that it just becomes an exercise in throwing in references to other games so that they just don't make sense at all if you're not already familiar with the other games. I guess it's all about finding the right level so that each story still is a story in its own right.

So, what do you say, you want to give it a shot? How would we do this?

Start with the world? The stories? The format?

Again taking RON (an example of a successfull foray into this very matter which somehow no-one is picking up on) as an example, continuity wouldn't be a big issue. If a character were to be killed off, you could write a story set prior to their death. Or you could bring him back, using that as a storyline.

Surely the point of such a venture would be to allow for a game-world that could tell many stories of many genre. Detective, humour, satire, wacky, horror, slice of life. I know this seems unlikely, but if you create a playground for authors, their first impulse is NOT to come up with stupid ways to ruin other people's fun. If those issues do come up (as in Davy Jones' death in RON) and the group builds around it, even to make fun, it will create consistency.

Consistency, in these things, isn't - can't be - something you drum up from the start and hope everyone will stick to. The ball must roll - one game, then two, then three. Consistency will be emergent, if people don't go overboard - and if they do, well, it can still be part of a consistent game world. Ron's "Nihilism" episode didn't stop the later episode "The Postman Always Rings Twice", nor did anyone go "Oh my god, this has completely ruined the theme", nor "How can we follow up on this?". Instead they took the one single objective thing that happened in that game (a silo's door became glued shut) and ran with it.

EDIT -

In reply to your last question, I'd avise to start with a game, providing a skeleton of the setting. Then another game, using different parts of the skeleton.

Shades of Grey was a single large game in which different sections were written by different authors, as I recall. Peter Pears's RON reference seems indeed a better example of a direct antecedent. Advantages of the multi-game shared world: the idea automatically has legs, i.e. it's a series; each work can have its own genre/tone (as PP mentioned) without too much clashing. Advantages of the single game shared world: less commitment required from each individual author; collaboration is foregrounded and less like an afterthought; it's more likely for the shared world actually to be completed and released, IMO.

Remember that in shared-world anthologies there's usually an editor or two who can help tie things together with their own stories, a general rule that one author can't outright kill off or drastically change another author's creation without consultation (it's not like each author wrote their story in isolation, only discovering what everyone else wrote when the book was published), and typically some kind of genre. Like in Thieves World, 'slice of life plus sword and sorcery' might describe it -- as odd as that sounds, it worked for what it was.

However, gaps might be more interesting left unfilled for other authors to take care of. Genre enforcement would be limiting. And I would be all for killing off someone else's important characters *with consultation*, as you put it, of their original creator. I would advise against too much editorial power.

Again, I go to RON for inspiration. See their FAQ:

http://realityonthenorm.info/about.html

...for how the community dealt with:

Davy Jones' death
The identity of the Bum

And the general pointers for newcomers. Not to hammer RON in, but I have to insist on a major point - it worked, and it learned from its mistakes. We would be wise to see what they DID learn.