Freshly Squeezed

Once again my post will be influ­enced by m64’s blo­g­post, this time around it’s more about what was said on #free­gamer at freen­ode (IRC) about the named post.

‘Shared Worlds’ might be a dif­fer­ent thing to dif­fer­ent people, but here it’s all about shar­ing assets, his­tory (I won’t say story) and contributors.

There are some obvi­ous prob­lem with making/creating this ‘shared world’ without think­ing; here I list the things that pops out of my mind:

• A lot of effort before any­one use it, if any will — wasted time for all
• Hard for people to con­trib­ute to a world that is “non-existent”  no bound­ar­ies will lead to an unat­tract­ive bloated world
• Will­ing con­trib­ut­ors without a com­mon goal, leads to end­less discussion

How can we rem­edy these prob­lems before they occur?

There are some as easy solu­tions as there are prob­lems; One is to use a pre-existent world, from let’s say a game that is FOSS and don’t have any con­nec­tion to a closed/owned world, the big­ger the game is the bet­ter. A prob­lem here could be cur­rent lead man­ager not agree­ing with this idea, to me that hangs on com­mu­nic­a­tion. So go out and find one for us!

Another way would be to set out from the real world, and adding some spice to it. Ima­gine tech­no­logy advances stooped in the early 1920, Titanic (still a boat) got to its des­tin­a­tion, the Eif­fel tower got blown away by gnomes who sud­denly appeared from below.. (this could go on). But this ‘solu­tion’ only solves the num­ber two prob­lem lis­ted. On the other hand it will solve any legal har­ass­ment, depend­ing in what we spice it up with. Any thoughts on this is greatly appreciated!

A way to simply solve the last of my lis­ted prob­lems is to get hold of a strong-willed lead, someone or someones who can hold fast to a vis­ion, pure blood into that, and make other people interested/fascinated. Is there a bet­ter way to make all who want to con­trib­ute, work toward a sim­ilar of not same goal?

Sim­ilar pro­ject that already are out in the wild got mentioned

They don’t really cut the cake but they are worth research: Biggest and best of the men­tions comes first Angels Fall First (AFF) — To me it is Star Wars and Star Trek sans ali­ens and Hol­ly­wood cliché, to bad this is not truly open for us. Second is the Tux world — to me this hardly even makes it to this list as it is some­what lack­ing in ingredi­ents, even white the aid of freedroid.

I almost for­got, go post your thoughts on the fgd forum too!

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