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?