I am thinking of a competition which gives you a complete transcript and you make a game which that transcript is (one of) the solution(s).
Any thoughts?
That sounds interesting. I would enter.
I’m afraid the games will be very similar, becuase they’ll be extremely constrained and will share a lot of prose. Not sure there will be much interest.
Hmmm… Just to clarify, would it be one transcript for all entries? If so, I echo Victor. If not, that sounds like a lot of work for you, but it could have legs.
Yeah, hmm. This smacks a little bit of I Have This Great Game Idea, Why Won’t Someone Make It For Me. Because for most games, once you have a winning transcript you have a pretty solid idea of what the rest of the game looks like. Comps are most appealing when the authors get to be creative.
I can think of two ways of skewing the general idea to make it more fun.
Firstly, there was a WalkthroughComp a long time back, which took a slightly different tack - it gave you all the commands for a full walkthrough, but not any of the body text. Been long enough; might be fun again.
Secondly, I’ve been thinking it’d be fun to do a collaborative massively-branching CYOA in the Cave of Time / Pretty Little Mistakes / A Dark and Stormy Entry style, starting from a single beginning-to-end plot and having authors create branches first off that, and then off one another’s contributions. That’d be more of a project than a comp, but it’d incorporate the basic idea of starting out with a static story and then having contributors elaborate on it.
The walkthrough might be better.
Though i like the branching game. I’d be in it.
I like the idea of Walkthrough Comp Part 2.
We’re looking at asking people to write flash-fiction stories for QuestComp this year. Then designers will pick them (similar to the CoverStories comp) and use them as a rough outline for a game.
I would definitely be interested in entering in a walkthrough comp like that. It could be fun see what ideas people come up with.
The branching project sounds cool too. It could make for a huge game in the end, which would be neat.
How hard would it be to combine everything?
Depends on the system, how contributions work, and how much work the organiser is willing to put in, and what the nature of the project is. The thing dfabulich linked to seems like a more standard game project with designated roles, coherent tone and strong lead-designer authority; I was thinking of something where anyone could drop in and add as much as they felt like, with the person in charge being more of a facilitator and seeder than a lead designer.
You’d want multiple people to be able to work on it simultaneously, I think, so you couldn’t really do the IF Whispers-style chain system. There’s version control, but I think the hassle of figuring that out would put off a lot of potential participants. (Also, hmm. I was thinking Twine, as the shallow-learning-curve platform of choice, Twine’s IDE actually makes it a less-attractive prospect for the organiser side - it’d be more fiddly to cut-and-paste a big chunk of someone else’s content into a game.)
Isn’t this pretty much exactly what wikis are for? You wouldn’t have variable tracking, but neither does Cave of Time, right?
Yeah, this is my personal preferences showing - I would be driven absolutely insane by something without variable tracking.
Ooh yeah, another Walktrhough Comp. The first one had wicked results.
But if it’s to be done again, some advice for authors: please include the full walkthrough in either the game itself or a readme file distributed with the game. Very few of the walktrhoughComp games could stand on their own and were winnable w/o the walkthrough.
There have been several other group hypertext projects–so the programs to construct good group CYOA games exist:
encounters-in-hypertext.tiddlyspace.com/
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