Response to The Cloud

Amagi Games' question was: How could many people all work together on that one (or several) gaming worlds?

Gosh, I just wanted to post a comment to The Cloud on Amagi Games [1], but it got a bit longer. This is just an initial brainstorming about what came on my mind. I'm glad about any responses.

Wenn Interesse besteht, lasse ich mich auch zu einer deutschen Version breitschlagen.

First of all, there are people with different motivations, say specialties. What comes to my mind is the following:

• Groundbreakers: They bring on all the fundamental concepts, radically new ones. They can make the setting unique, quirky and new.
• Reassemblers: They build up on the stuff that has been there in many worlds before. They find new ways to form them into something new (or pseudo-new). They create the basic stuff, the flesh of the world, where most of the action takes place.
• Writers: Compelled to tell stories, these guys can form the ideas of Groundbreakers and Reassemblers into a solid gaming world. Take the ideas and create text from it, put in all the flavor and make it accessible to the gamers.
• Critics: Yeah, right ... Critics always pop up, and it's good they do. They point out the weaknesses of the world, logical problems, lack or over-presence of tension, the boring and the unrealistic (feeling) parts.
• Tinkerers: Pick up the output of critics to rework the world. Fix the links, straighten the different elements out and work them into a whole. A brave task, and probably the part we lack most.
• Artists: People looking at the published texts and adding to them music, illustrations, pictures, maps, diagrams, overviews, whatever. They make the world more compelling and easier accessible.
• Controllers: The world is done (it's never done, I know), what now? Where does it go from here? No gaming world should be static and people will start planning the future of the world, or futures of single items in the world.

So, what needs to be done is: get all these different people to work on a single project at the same time (that is, almost at the same time). Since a gaming world is highly nonlinear, there is no reason to stick to linear creation (like forum threads, books, ...). You need a good platform to satisfy all the needs of the different people. That is:

• Groundbreakers: Brainstorming functionality. You got an idea, post it and see, what the people think of it. (Compare to Ubuntu Brainstorm [2])
• Reassemblers: Structuring possibilities. Parts of the world are items (which have a description, properties, etc). Items can contain other items, such as Europe contain Germany with in turn contains me. That's not enaugh. Items should be linkable with a short description of the relationship (hate, cooperition, established by, ...). Now if I got an idea, what if somebody else already did something similar? What if I need a nemesis for my new guild? The answer is: tags. Add tags to all your items, make the tags searchable. People are compelled to add tags, since this will add to their item's popularity (more people will find it). Tags and relationships also allow to automatically generate a structured graph of all items in the world to produce an overview of all (or parts of) the stuff. The graph-feature should be easily accessible and generated on the fly according to selected tags.
• Writers: Online text editing might be helpful, especially for short descriptions. A style guidline for different items: sources, desciptions, characters, histoy, ... and templates for these.
• Critics: Note feature for every item. Diskussion forums. Text marking feature (to mark critical passages).
• Tinkerers: Revision and note features to allow for easy edits and the possibility to follow changes (should be distinct from evolution of the world over time). They need to be able to use all the stuff described beforehand very quickly to see the weak points and smoothen things out.
• Artists: Possibility to upload pictures and associate them to one or several items in the world. Put items on an uploaded map, just like various google services. So to browse the world, you could simple browse the world. Pictures could be shown on the map. A music database should allow for tags of different moods, location, situations.
• Controllers: News, a blog, whatsoever. And of course a possibility to semi-secretly discuss changes and have brainstorming-functionality, just like the groundbreakers.

The main goal is to modularize the process. Not everybody wants to write a whole chapter. But many people like to write a small story or description. It is satisfactory to see, what other people made out of your ideas. It probably is totally different from what you expected, the more small tasks you have, the more will people inspire each other (compare the Universalis [3] story game). If everybody can contribute what he wants, in small pieces and an easy fashion, you can get many more people to contribute. By making the process of contributing easier, you get more people to work on this long-term, instead of leaving frustrated by totally linear methods.

We also need a way to linearize the produced content, since creation is very non-linear. Maybe this can be done automatically via graphs, but it could get tricky. You could have another type of contributor called "editor". They would sort the items into blocks (say by topic, location, whatever). They should be able to do all this online, without need for an Office app. The platform should automatically print to pdf the newest version, without comments but with pictures and a short overview of the item's relations, after the editor has grouped / blocked and sorted items of a "source book". The problem with this approach is, that parts of the world will never enter there, because they probably will miss some of the items (by chance). Maybe this is not a problem at all, since parts might not be that good. So they will probably filter the weak parts.

This could be further strengthened by allowing users to rate items in the world and add comments (like: Wheew, we had a great time entering the thieves guild and meeting their weird leader. Also, look for their nemesis merchants guild!). This would also encourage people to produce better content and tinker more around. Everything should be revertible to protect against saboteurs.

What sort of rules system should be used (if any?)? If the world has monsters, I probably want stats. This is not crucial, since some systems are very flexible and intuitive about stats, but others are not. And omitting game play stats might irritate them.

How could Adventures or Adventure ideas be created and accessed in a similar fashion?