Well, there's the ole GUE. (That's the "Great Underground Empire," for those few who've happened upon this site my somnambulistic means and have actually never heard of ZORK). All sorts of different game designers have tried (with WIDELY variable success) to set games in this vast, rather silly fictional environment, which is itself a direct descendent of the 'Colossal Cave' depicted in Willie Crowther's and Don Woods' IF UR-narrative "Adventure." There are also a number of fictional environments that have been used for series' of games (the ZORK-like 'Unnkulia' sequence being perhaps the most famous) but these have almost inevitably all been by one author. How come IF writers are so reluctant to give up their autonomy as to be unwilling to set their own games in a borrowed world?
Much as one might wish it were the case, the problem doesn't seem to be one of people being unwilling to sacrifice some highly personal vision for the sake of a type of collaboration that might be viewed as artistically less "pure," or whatever. I mean, how many haunted houses are there out there right now? How many doomed spaceships with desperate, imprisoned crews? In the most recent IF competition, there was even a game set quite unapologetically in the universe of the classic '80s roleplaying game "Paranoid.' Furthermore, some of these copycat-type games are awfully good. So, what's the hangup?
I suspect that the problem here (if y'all are with me in thinking that there is a problem, if perhaps only of the 'conundrum' variety) is an offshoot of the enormous complexity of most IF programming languages currently in use. There are simply very few people who are clever enough with these things to provide libraries of code of the sort that'd be adaptable to the needs of other writers. And those who do (e.g. the brilliant Kevin Forchione, code guru of the TADS community) seem curiously more concerned with providing basic tools for writers to cook up their own worlds.
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