Modes of Collaboration
1) CODER/WRITER collaboration: This is probably the most obvious way in which two IF writers can cancel out one another’s’ weaknesses. Some of us can write but have at best a feeble mastery of rich IF languages like TADS, INFORM and Hugo; others have the reverse distribution of blind spots. I’m involved in a collaboration right now that’s working something like this, with an online friend who’s a TADS whiz (though I suspect that she may actually be holding out a bit on me with respect to her own gifts as a writer). Mike Sousa and Robb Sherwin engaged in this type of a joint project with great success in their recently released game NO TIME TO SQUEAL.
2) CONCEPT/EXECUTION collaboration: This is much more common in commercial design than it is amongst IFers. The authors of design documents for major PC and console games rarely do much in the way of hard-coding, image-creation or musical composition; often once the initial concept for a game has been decided upon, such folk are kept around the design studio to act as little more than de jure authority figures and unofficial mascots. I actually believe, though, that there’s an important difference in temperament between the sorts of folks who can come up with carefully laid-out and original game ideas and people who can write inspired, more-than merely-functional prose.
3) STARTER/FINISHER COLLABORATION: How many folk who’ve started putting together an IF game have ended up leaving some two-thirds-finished artifact that’s full of potential to gather fungus on their hard drive, when all that it really needs is perhaps a long bout of proofreading, debugging, or editing to clear up the odd stylistic quirk? This kind of collaboration will probably always be rare, and has the potential to lead to some pretty strange results (one of the weirdest and most interesting SF novels I’ve ever read was DEUS IRAE, a collaboration between two great science fiction writers, Philip K Dick and Roger Zelazny, wherein one could tell exactly where one author gave up and the other took over). All the same, given the number of people in the IF community who spend hours and hours coming up with new code but somehow never manage to bring out more than about one game every two years, I’m frankly amazed that this sort of work isn’t done more often.
These are only some of the more obvious sorts of possibilities.
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