Help Formulating an Experiment in Game Design

[Justin D. Jacobson]

This is an idea I've been toying with for some time. I'm sure, like me, that many of you have participated in round-robin writing endeavors. The structure varies but follows the general design of one participant writing a portion of the story (usually limited by word or page count), who then passes it on to the next person, and so on. This is a valuable writing exercise on several counts. Notably, it forces you to break free from your typical habits because you're picking it up in media res. I'm curious to try and apply the concept to game design.

Here's my rough outline of how this experiment would proceed: (1) Participants are selected on basis of experience, skill, and variety (of design philosophy); (2) Each participant is assigned a component of the game's design to be completed in a specified order; (3) After a participant completes his assignment, he passes it on to the next designer to complete his assignment.

Here's my draft of component assignments in order: participant responsibilities (e.g., GM authority), character creation, scene framing, conflict resolution, advancement rules, setting, editing, illustration, layout/design, publishing.

I think the endeavor would yield several beneficial results. For the participants, it would exercise the creative process, forcing them to find solutions within artificial parameters. Additionally, the end result would be informative. It would shed light on the collaborative process and the nature of game design generally.

Here's my questions about the endeavor:

1) Is the very idea folly?
2) Should assignments be done randomly? by request?
3) Should I change the order of development? Setting first?
4) Other suggestions?

[Nathan P.]

Heya Justin,

I think this would be a neat project, personally. I think the structure of it could go a couple of different ways, depending on your goals for the project.

Invitation-only - you contact designers that you have an interest in seeing be part of it, either because of their known design chops or because you want to see more from them.

By request - you take "applications" and, if there are enough, select from among them.

Free-for-all - you set up guidelines, and either have people do teams, or have people select a "chunk" that they want, and then randomly assign. So once someone finished the participant responsibilities, it goes to a random person who indicated character creation for the next step.

I think the last way would also have the advantage of allowing flexibility in the order of the "stages." Whoever starts a game starts with whichever stage they want, and then they say "Ok, send this to a setting guy" or "send this to a character creation guy," and so on.

Anyway, I hope some of that helps.

[Thunder_God]

Also, the "stages" have inherent assumptions on them, that there is advancement, that there are scene-framing rules or guidelines.

Seems cool, but here's a question, the third person on the line gets both previous parts or only the one previous part?

[Justin D. Jacobson]

Also, the "stages" have inherent assumptions on them, that there is advancement, that there are scene-framing rules or guidelines.

Fair enough, though theoretically the designer assigned to, say, character advancement could write as his entry that there is no advancement. Essentially this merely indicates that the uberdesigner gets to decide on the elements. (That wouldn't have to be me.)

Seems cool, but here's a question, the third person on the line gets both previous parts or only the one previous part?

Well, the round-robin writing exercises I've always done have been the former. I think doing the latter would result in a horribly chaotic final product.

[Thunder_God]

I agree, wanted to make sure as the round-robin I'm familiar with has every person only getting the previous section. We usually do it as a fun-ny activity with one-liners.

[Callan S.]

It'd be interesting if everyone did all the sections, after seeing what everyone else has done. Like your assigned a section, you do it then you move onto the next one and see what someone else has done (while what you did is passed on).

Specifically I'd be aiming for the contrast that inspires 'Oh no, that's not how you do it, this (write, write, write) is'. In other words, I don't think people would agree with each other and I think that could be very useful for inspiring work.

[Jason Morningstar]

This is a fun idea.  One possibility would be to treat it like an open source project and have versioning, so that anybody who wanted to could "fork the rules" and add a new component - resulting in multiple versions of the same game.  If you did this, the strong branches would be built on and perhaps see publication, while the entire enterprise remained open and non-exclusive.

[Seth M. Drebitko]

I think the idea of this is very intresting and like the idea of setting up an assembly line style way of content creation. My only suggestion is that I feel the publishing aspect should not be a single persons job, instead a ransom model style of putting your finished work out might be very interesting. That's all I have at the moment best of luck on the project, if you need any one for setting I might be intrested in joining up.
Regards, Seth