Collaborative Community Game Design

[thereformant]

Hi,

I just discovered the forge today and have spent 3 hrs reading so far..absolutely great site. As you can tell im new so i apologise if this is off-topic but this is the forum it seemed to fit best into.

The question is have there ever been any attempts to collaboratively design an RPG, what i envisage is a community designed game hopefully released under some kind of open liscence that could be a sort of indie competition to d20 system (although i was kind of thinking of a game inc setting not just system).

Obviously there is some very experienced designers here and do you think that the community could benefit from such an approach, do you think the resulting game would be any good?

One approach i thought of inspired by open source software is to allow submissions of material from the community, these are then both playtested by the community and marked for inclusion in the final project by a core team. You would also of course need several individuals to write the copy..make sure everything is consistent etc.

I know this might sound like developing a game in a very piecemeal kind of way and may not be hugely applicable to some elements of the game (ie you probably want the actual mechanics to be very consistent) but this could work for a lot of other elements of the game.

Anyway I hope this ramble has expressed what i actually had in my head enough for you guys to get what im talking about.
regards,
Dave

[Aknaton]

It would be fun to test using a Wiki to design a collaborative community game. Read more about Wikis at http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?WikiWikiWeb.

[simon_hibbs]

Most Open Source projects start with a functional code base that is then open sourced. Contributions are then integreated by the orriginal author, core team, or whatever. There are some notable exceptions, but not all that many.

I've been involved in abortive collaborative game design projects before, and they all failed. I found that most peoiple contributing to the discussion were not actualy prepared to contribute actual release-quality submissions, yet still expected their opinions to have the same weight as people who contributed polished text. It real was a bit like cat herding.

I think your best bet would be to work up a foundational set of rules, define a 'table of contents' of desired sections and features, and then open it up. Perhaps develop the core with a small team of 2 or 3 people before opening the project up.

Basicaly you need to establish some basic elements of the game design very early on and stick to them, and you have to offer something real that people can contribute to. There are loads of game systems already out there people can use and adapt themselves and your project needs to offer some attractive 'bait' to draw in quality contributions.

I don't want to be negative, just realistic.


Simon Hibbs

[Paul Czege]

Hey Dave,

I just discovered the forge today and have spent 3 hrs reading so far..absolutely great site.

Welcome to The Forge, and thank you very much for the nice words.

...what i envisage is a community designed game...

One of the things The Forge is founded upon is the very strong belief that functional excellence in game design is facilitated by actual play...not just playtesting of the game being designed, or similar games, but of all kinds of games. This is why the Actual Play forum is so prominent here. The Forge isn't so much about game design as it is about game design informed by a community of experimental play.

My personal opinion of communal design, to be blunt, is that it's the ghetto of game creation efforts. Designers with vision and passion are busy elsewhere, so communal design efforts are the haven of those with less motivation, of those who've lost touch with the source of vision and passion and so cling together like a support group.

I submit to you that the source of vision and passion for game design is experimental actual play, and suggest that you not allow yourself to be distracted at this point by your ultimate interest in being a game designer, or part of a dynamic game design community. Instead, commit yourself to actual play. Find someone's game that they've posted to a thread in Indie Game Design, play it with your group, and then post about it in Actual Play. Or find a game in the Forge Resource Library and do the same. Or play The Pool, or InSpectres, or My Life with Master, or Vin Diakuw's Reverse RPG, and post about it. And then do a different game. And then another one.

You will be eventually overcome with vision and passion of your own. It is inevitable. I discovered the proto-Forge at the Gaming Outpost three years ago, and at the time was only interested in learning how I might have fun gaming again. With the publication of My Life with Master, I have been forced to admit that I am now a game designer. So to you, I recommend a crash course in actual play.

Paul

[M. J. Young]

I have seen a couple of collaborative efforts on forums, at Gaming Outpost (which is where much of what is now here began) and also here. I have a different take on why it doesn't work.

You start with one guy who has what he thinks is a good idea but he doesn't know what to do with it. Now, that means one of two things:[list=1][*]It isn't really so good an idea, because if it really were a great idea he would already have ideas that sprang from it to make it work, or[*]He lacks confidence in his own ideas and ability to bring it to fruition.[/list:o]Either is a bad starting point; and from there it gets worse.

Maybe the idea falls flat; no one bites. But usually a couple people find interest in it; and it's still nebulous enough at this point that they can add to it and mold and direct it, and so they do. These new ideas start to inspire other people, and it snowballs into a rather large group contributing ideas to the mix. But it's still all, what do you think of this?, and before long, there are conflicting ideas in the mix, and someone has to decide which ideas are going to be included. That means you start to fall into one narrower vision of the game.

Now, a narrow vision of the game is important to its playability; it can't be created without understanding what it's supposed to be. But yesterday this game had a dozen possible directions, with people interested in each of them; and today it's got one. Those people who were interested in something that's been cut--well, they either drop out of the project, or they stay with it in a considerably less enthused interest level.

Eventually you cull the group to a couple of guys who are pretty close to the same vision for the game; but they are also aware that a lot of the ideas they're using aren't really their ideas. They usually don't have the same love for and dedication to such a game as they would for something that expressed their thoughts a bit more exclusively.

Now, I collaborated on the creation of a game. I think it's a vary valuable thing to do. However, I know first hand its hazards. You either wind up with something of a tug-of-war between the collaborators, who each have slightly different vision for the game, or you have a sort of mutual admiration society where all contributors see each other's work as exactly right and no one challenges or questions anything. The former approach can produce really good games if the collaborators hold together and figure out how to mesh their disparate ideas into a coherent system, or really terrible games if it becomes a mish-mash of everyone's incompatible ideas. The latter usually produces a game with very narrow appeal, unless it happens that the designers have the kinds of tastes, insights, and perhaps experience that enables them to produce something that goes beyond their own limits.

Either way, you want to find a couple of people who can catch your vision for the game, and who bring something to it that you do not have. E. R. Jones had a lot of creative insight and an extremely broad background in games that were then on the market, but very weak understanding of the probabilities in mechanics; I had a keen depth of understanding of game mechanics and a different sort of creative insight, but a narrower experience of other game systems. We had very different play and referee styles. We shared a vision for his game idea, Multiverser, which would let player characters go to any universe in any genre and become anything they wished. When it was done, He didn't speak to me for a year; but we produced something good.

I hope this helps.

--M. J. Young

[thereformant]

i see the general consensus is that its a bad idea, i guess i can classify this as "a nice idea in theory but doesnt work in practice".
Although Aknaton is right that using a wiki like that would be quite fun.

Dave

[talysman]

I'm surprised no one mentioned Enlightenment, the collaborative RPG we attempted to create here on the Forge. although I think we still have hopes of completing the game, there was a definitive drop-out effect noticeable as the competing rpg visions were slowly resolved into a group vision. in a way, Enlightenment suffered from exactly what M. J. Young described, although I'd add one other possibility as to what can happen to a collabrative RPG: the interest of the remaining collaborators may still be there, but it will be weaker than the interest the designers may have in their individual RPG products -- so the designers tend to spend more time on their personal RPG visions than on the group vision.

collaborative design of anything can fall into a trap like this one. I was involved in a group design project for an artificial (constructed) language. very early on, the project interest died down.

an easier approach would be for one designer to create the initial vision, which then inspires other designers to contribute. in a sense, that's what happened to D&D. different writers and designers added their contributions to an existing body of work.

[Bob McNamee]

Actual Play got in the way of Enlightenment here at my house.

I got more interested  in acutally playing other games...like Universalis and Trollbabe, than in Enlightenment. It wasn't quite playable, and wasn't as compelling.

But I do hope to get back to it sometime, I do think it has some quiet appeal, and cool gaming promise.

[Mike Holmes]

I have seen a couple of collaborative efforts on forums, at Gaming Outpost (which is where much of what is now here began) and also here. I have a different take on why it doesn't work.

I was the instigator of those projects on GO, and I also instigated Enlightenment. Further, Ralph and I created Universalis as a collaboration.

Count me as an optimist as far as collaborations go. :-)

MJ, you may be surprised to hear that one of the GO projects I turned into a yahoo group, in which we wrote a couple hundred pages of material for the game. That said, it did fall prey to some of the pitfalls of such constructions, and to date is not complete. So I agree that collaboration is problematic. But it's not impossible.

The way that Universalis worked was that both Ralph and I landed on essentially the same vision at the same time. So once we got working on it, it was merely a matter of hashing out how to fulfil that vision. The vision even changed during creation (considerably), but it changed as a process of communication between us. So we were never far from each other that way.

The point is that, as always, a vision is critical for a project, and that vision must be shared by any collaorators if it is to be truely collaborative.

Another model, whereby one person has the vision, and enlists the aid of others to produce supporting materials works just fine as well. You can't count on the quality or quantity if materials submitted, but then you're no worse off than the solo artist in the worst case scenario.

Mike