An experiment I’d like to try someday is to create a website to make a truly collaborative game design. The idea is to let the crowd of visitors to the site decide everything that’s going to be in the game. At each step you first ask everyone to send in ideas and then have visitors vote on their favorite ones. The winner of the vote is kept and the design moves on to the next step.
For example, you would first ask visitors to vote for the genre of the game. Say “RPG” is selected, you then ask visitors to submit short “high concepts” for this RPG. Once you have enough high concepts, visitors can vote for their favorites. You keep the most popular concept and move on to the next step and so on. You could even do that with concept art, with visitors sending their drawings to be voted on as enemies, characters or environments.
I think it would be fascinating to see what comes out of a project like this. Since everything that go into the design is voted on by a big crowd, you automatically validate every concept — everything is focus grouped before it’s even designed in a sense. If you can get enough interest in this project, with a big community around it, you could probably show a publisher that there’s enough interest in the game to finance its actual development.
I don’t have the web development skills to make a website for this or the audience to get it started with bang, but if somebody has those things I’d love to help setting up a project like this!
February 5th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
This is strange, I was going to tell you how much I thought this should be done and the following link showed up on my rss reader:
http://www.gameproducer.net/2008/02/05/project-top-secret-is-looking-for-artists-now/
I don’t know if that’s what you meant.
February 5th, 2008 at 4:25 pm
Anyway… a racing MMORPG sounds boring
February 5th, 2008 at 8:04 pm
That project is kinda what I’m looking for, but it seems more “closed” from what I’ve seen. That is, it seems to be more of community working together to come up with something — kinda like an open source game design. It’s definitely interesting, but it favors a small community of amateur developers coming together to work on the game.
What I’m thinking is closer to the “You make the card” thing on the Magic: the Gathering site. Basically everything is open for suggestion to absolutely anyone visiting the site and everything is voted on by visitors. Rather than using a small community of dedicated volunteers, it’s about using tiny amount of efforts by many visitors.
Arguably, David Perry’s approach is more efficient. On the other hand, it favors creating a game that fits a self-selected community, rather than something truly mass market — as you say, a racing MMORPG doesn’t sound like the greatest thing ever…
But Perry’s approach has one big advantage: he’s actually doing it