Collabworlds (What happens to them vs. The successful ones)

[Nannalu]

We've seen a few collaborative conworlds on the board, one I started myself and another I have participated in, but those died over time. The two alive today are Akana and CCC (I think it may be in hibernation but who am I to know?). Seeing as I struggle to type in length on threads, I'd like to open a discussion of our opinions and hacks on what we can do to create concise and well-rounded collabworlds. If it's not obvious by now —I want to start a new one.

Akana used relays and telephone games in its beginnings, and every so often I believe, and the CCC seems to have Zomp cracking the whip on participants.

So, question being, what makes a controlled, longlasting collaboration; and how can I (or others) use this to their advantage?

[Nannalu]

*bump* ANSWER ME

[gestaltist]

I have no idea, but I would gladly join the effort to create a collab world.

[communistplot]

A good collab is one that doesn't interfere, or at least interferes minimally, with your daily life. Something potentially quick but that, if it drags on, can be picked up again easily.

[Dewrad]

I'm only familiar with two collaborative works that have had long-term success (CCC is a bit too recent to say whether it's got staying power or not): Akana and Ill Bethisad. Neither originally began as expressly collaborative conworlds.

I think this might have something to do with it: both grew organically and (certainly in IB's case) slowly. Both might be worth examining:

Akana began as a reconstruction game: two teams created languages derived from two proto-languages, and the original idea was that they would attempt to reconstruct the other team's proto-language from the daughters. Initially, there wasn't even any kind of conworld/conculture that went with the languages- I think it was either Radius's or Zompist's idea to come up with a conhistory to go with the languages from our team, and the Isles languages followed suit. The actual reconstruction part of the game never really came to anything and the project just kind of died (although Rad at least continued to tinker with his daughter language Naidda for a while). Then Legion came up with an idea to derive a series of daughter languages from each other, kind of like a diachronic chinese whispers thing: it was pure coincidence that this ended up linked to Akana, I think either I or someone else suggested that my language from the initial game was used a starting point. Once all that petered out, we were left with a substantial body of languages and associated cultural/geographic information and people started just adding things to the world, to suit their own taste. The project had gathered momentum and became sustainable outside the narrow confines of an initial game or challenge. There was no initial master plan or overarching idea.

Ill Bethisad began as the work of one man, Andrew Smith, who created Brithenig. It wasn't even called Ill Bethisad at this time. A few people were taken with the concept and added their own Celto-Romance languages to the mix- Padraig Brown's Kerno, Geoff Eddy's Breathanach, Damon Lord (IIRC??)'s Brzhoneg. Still fairly disorganised, still people pretty much playing around in their own sandboxes. Andrew's initial concept was of a world not too different from our own, Padraig (and his healthy sense of surrealism) did a lot to sow the seeds of IB's distinctiveness from our world. I think I came in about this time with Arvorec, an actual Celtic-Celtic language, to balance the loss of P-Celtic. Others got involved, primarily with Romance bogolangs, and steadily the number of people working in the same universe increased. Then people with no interest in languages per se, but rather alternate history, or even alternate pop-culture started contributing. At its height, I think some thirty-odd people were working on their own aspects of the project.

Interestingly, in both cases, the projects took on a momentum that sustained them even after the departure of founding members. Andrew Smith became less active in the project fairly early on, and the roster of members has a lot of (inactives) next to early contributors (I'm one of them). Few members of the original reconstruction teams actively work on the Akana project now. Both took on a life of their own, and I think this is a strength: the projects were bigger than the personalities involved. To contrast, without Zompist "cracking the whip", I wouldn't wager high odds on the CCC project continuing at strength.

I've also seen a few failed collaborative projects: Arda is relatively representative. After a great deal of initial enthusiasm, interest simply waned and the project petered out.

So, what to take away: successful collaborations arise organically, with people able to contribute what interests them. A "critical mass" of already-created work is helpful, as it provides context and framing. A successful project can survive the founder's departure. It can take a very long time to become successful. Starting out as a collaborative effort might not be the best thing.

[zompist]

The most successful collaborative worlds are all commercial, or based on commercial properties (like fanfic), so one factor is familiarity.

Akana and CCCP have both had game-like events, which is a good way to motivate people and set a schedule.

As Dewrad says, interest tends to wane and only occasionally wax. Which is true of individual projects too, of course.

[LinguistCat]

We had a collab on the Conworlds forum called Jelly Donut World that got pretty far. But I think one of the things that helped was that as long as we didn't counter anything that came before, we allowed it to be as silly as people wanted to make it.

So, you may want to be a bit lax about what gets put in, though if you have guidelines from the start that everyone agrees on that might help too.

[clawgrip]

If you remember Kool Map Game, this was not really a sustainable conworld, as it has evidently died (I think from time to time that I want to continue it), but there is still a key point in why it got as far as it did: namely, that, because it had minimal realism and continuity, it gave people a great deal of freedom to do what they wanted. This freedom to put down whatever you wanted, not having to worry too much about what other people had done (sounds similar to vampyre_smiles's Jelly Donut World) allowed the world build up complexity extremely quickly. My experience working on it, I just spit out a bunch of stuff without thinking too hard about it, and then later went back to look at it and work out the details more carefully. With CCC, I feel like I can't do too much individual stuff, because I am worried about how it will affect other people's cultures and so on. Pretty much no one does anything on CCC until Zompist posts some new thread.

Unfortunately, this was also its downfall; a lot of people contributed only for a short time and then went away. Only a few people stuck around for a long time. Even so, the contributions and ideas all those people made early on made it easier and more interesting for me and others to continue working on it to build it up a bit.

So I guess a certain amount of freedom to do what you want, but also a certain amount of periodic games and scheduling to keep you going are needed.

[JT_the_Ninja]

I was part of a collaborative conworld called Our New World (Onwe for short) at one point...people just sort of lost interest, I suppose. Was great while we were all working on it together, though. We started to write the history/mythology, but then that just became something of a roleplay and I guess that turned off some folks. Ah well. I still have my stuff from that time and I keep meaning to develop it further...[]

[Bristel]

I was a part of the Etheria project, but there were only a few very active people, and it was slow-going for me, so I think I gave up on it.

[Torco]

I've seen a few collabworlds die: they mostly die cause someone stops posting and then someone else does and then people lose confidence in the collabworld such that it becomes the zeitgeist that no one else is going to post: It's a bit like a stock bubble deflating, I suppose?

Perhaps that's why commercial based conworlds tend to be much more stable: they have a lot stronger brand names than the ones without billions of dollars worth of marketing behind them.

What I've not seen is a semi-collabworld: one where one or two core conworlders do their thing always and minor collaborators come and go: Like, say, the conworld is focused on the roman empire but the rest of the peripheric cultures and stuff are worked on by whoever? maybe that's a more stable arrangement?

[gestaltist]

I think the biggest issue with collabworlds is congruence. Often there is no leadership or filtering, and the world becomes a patchwork of random ideas which is unlikely to have much appeal in the long run. If the leadership is too strong, creativity gets stifled and people are afraid to contribute lest they „break something“.

This is the strength of the commercial worlds: they provide enough backstory and framework to keep everything consistent, while having a low barrier to entry (if your fanfiction isn’t to someones liking, they will simply ignore it, no hard feelings.)

[Torco]

perhaps that could be replicated: someone might have like a moderately developped conworld and surrender it for others to build upon it... perhaps there could also be like a system for determining a few degrees of canonicity, perhaps where the imperator of that conworld <or the community or whatever> has to either approve of it or not veto it or something for it to go from noncanon to canon or whatever.

[Xhin]

Jelly Donut World!!!!!!!!!!!!

There were actually some non-conworlders involved in that. The world got so surreal it didn't matter.

Why don't we just start a new collabworld and test out you guys's theories?

[Torco]

We would need a hegemon for that xD

[WeepingElf]

I once was involved with Ill Bethisad, but Padraic Brown's sarcasm (or is it cynicism?) and the somewhat messy state of that world put me off, so I went my own ways. The result was another collaborative conworld of sorts, the League of Lost Languages, which, however, soon lost momentum, and attempts at reinvigorating it by starting a family-building project weren't really successful.