In the world of commercial game design, success is always the result of collaboration. In order to produce anything with the complexity of a full-scale, marketable game for a console or the PC, there usually have to be (to give a rough estimate), at least twenty or thirty individuals - from lead designers through artists and musicians down to the guy who hits the company server with a hammer whenever it goes funky - all of whom are involved to one extent or another in the creative process. This doesn’t mean that a commercial game is simply never the brainchild of one particular individual, but at the same time the impression that is sometimes given that contemporary games are the work of auteur-type designer-geniuses (e.g. Will Wright, The Miller Brothers, Sid Meier, Steve Meretzky) is almost always misleading.
By contrast, one of the things that is usually perceived as a strength of amateur game design is that works of IF, freeware games, or small-scale ‘mods’ of previously published games like Half-Life or Tribes , really can be worked up all by one’s lonesome in a tiny garret, in conditions of hermit-like solitude. And this fact does, I think, play some part in making such games much more attractive to those of us who are interested in getting more out of this medium than the visceral thrill that comes from machine-gunning Nazis, Orcs and Aliens into oblivion on a nightly basis. Very little great art has ever been produced by committee.
All the same, it’s often seemed to me rather a shame that more collaboration doesn’t go on amongst authors of IF. Folk who write this stuff seem to have an almost perverse dedication to working in lonesome obscurity. I’ve tried to counteract this a little – with VERY limited success – amongst participants in the ADRIFT programming community, by setting up a page for authors interested in working on joint projects:
http://www.kf.adrift.iwarp.com/collabora...
So far (in about three weeks) there have been exactly two responses.
Perhaps the problem is that people have less than entirely clear how the mechanics of collaboration would actually work in IF. With this possibility in mind, I offer a few suggestions about the various ways in which your average IF-er might benefit from giving collaboration a try. There seem to me to be at least three strategies for using collaboration to make a better sort of IF game than any one individual could pull off by him/herself:
