Ideas Are Easy

[ericthered]

Originally Posted by Frost

This would be the reason I didn't just go ahead and do it.

Having taken part in a few collaborative settings and being somewhat disappointed in how they developed, guided dictatorship doesn't strike me as particularly collaborative (even though it is a model I have used), question games tend to be somewhat unfocused and peter out quite quickly. Voting is probably either the best or the worst option it let's you have a certain amount of direction while still being collaborative but it takes a lot of work and can be daunting to occasional posters particularly if they miss the early parts of the process.

You have done a fair bit of this, which model do you feel worked best?

I think the best work came out of the submission threads in the voting projects. Which is unfortunately, an edge case. I've actually used the VUASO world in play, so by some standards that's the most successful, but I'm also not sure how well that hangs together.

The observation that the question game is a creative writing exercise is a pretty good one: in generates a seed, not a finished world. It also is good at unusual twists.

Guided dictatorship's main flaw is it often loses momentum as people loose interest in someone else's project. But it can get some real interest, as long as people feel that their input is being actually used, and as long as the problems to be solved are interesting.

I might favor a combination of the voting and dictatorship to create a shorter turn-around time, plus make multiple 'curators'.

The wiki idea is interesting, but I've never done much with it.

Originally Posted by RogerBW

A model that might be worth stealing and abusing is that of Microscope. I've only used it once; we ended up largely departing from the "this is now player X's turn" model, but it seems like a potentially viable way of resolving conflicts.

Microscope is very good at creating history, but terrible at creating setting. The two overlap to some degree, but you don't usually mess around with what is possible much: you start with a genre and work from there.

For some setting generation it might be worthwhile, but I don't think it would work well for the project that spawned this tangent. At least until the ground rules are in place.

Though you know, we do have half a genre selected...