In the Trenches #5:

Community Building

by Laurel Stuart
March 8, 2002

I'm going to postpone my article on advanced room design for two weeks to discuss a different, more relevant topic instead. About a week ago, I decided to try an experiment as a game designer. I stopped by the CM "Noise" forum and invited the Castle Marrach players to help me build Devil's Cay, room by room. After all the recent articles Shannon and I had written about making Chat Theatres, it seemed like a good opportunity to see if we had provided enough information so that anyone with enthusiasm and familiarity with an actual Grand Theatre could in fact build one. The initial response I'd gotten from Marrach players was phenomenal, and slowly but surely, they are helping me create my darkly fantastical resort island.

There are both benefits and bugbears that come from Storybuilding as a large team as opposed to working independently. As a game creator, I'm giving away a great deal of my artistic freedom. I'm letting someone else decide what flowers are in the garden, and the dimensions for the tennis court. A professional chef has volunteered to create the menu available in the formal dining room. I'm sure they will do a better job than I ever could. Am I envious? A little. Certainly, I'm keeping the power to make changes, but the initial ideas — the artistic root to the theatre — will definitely be different than it would be if I was building everything by myself. I'm also relying on other people to follow through and keep a commitment to write the multitude of details in their descriptions for each of the thirty odd rooms in the initial version of the game. That's a lot of trust. My initial attempts at creating a Dev Team had mixed results. I know from experience now that building even one room in a Chat Theatre is a fair amount of work. Ultimately, I might discover that its more work than some of my volunteers were really prepared for.

So far, there seem to be at least a handful of folks who are really enjoying working on a game, and who show a lot of commitment and passion for community Storybuilding. We communicate via email, and I've seen some very good default details (Room Views) from a half dozen people. They are now moving into the more complicated work of listing all the individual details that appear in the default and writing the descriptions for each one.

My role has suddenly changed. I'm now serving as the leader of a large team of collaborating writers who are willing to follow my vision and create a new Skotos game "by players for the players". The reward, in the end, for all of these volunteers, is that they will be able to look at Devil's Cay as something they have a personal investment in, something that is more than just a new game. Having a new socialization-heavy game to stand side-by-side with Castle Marrach is appealing with Marrach players. That's great! Now, to find an additional thousand new players and entertain them enough for them to become subscribed members.

The failure of Galactic Emperor: Succession as chronicled by Shannon in this week's Trials, Triumphs & Trivialities had a number of valuable lessons for me, as an apprentice Game Developer. Most importantly, it reinforced to me the importance of having a game focus and establishing that critical mass. Devil's Cay is very much a socialization-based RPG, and no matter how ingenious my setting and theatre design, it will fail if I cannot convince players that they want to be there, role-playing with one another.

That's the godsend about Community Building; it helps reach critical mass. If I have 40+ folks already interested in the game, who feel an emotional investment to it by launch, and each of them just tells one friend about this wonderful Chat Theatre they contributed too, that's 80 players willing to make a character and explore. Every one of the volunteers in the building process will want to see their work not go to waste, so chances are good that they will be willing to serve as an informal PR network and help spread the word beyond just Skotos' established player based that there is a new game, a great game. It's my responsibility to not let their enthusiasm go to waste. We have an informal, unstated social contract: they will help me build my objects, and I will provide them with an engaging text-based RPG that will keep allow them and their friends to role-play in a fun, fair environment. I'm making a commitment to see the project through and not get their hopes up and rob them of the time-energy they are offering me free of charge to Storybuild for me.

This community of volunteer Storybuilders should become the nexus of my community of Story players. Community is the lifeblood of a socialization-based game. Right or wrong, players become emotionally involved not just with their own characters, but with other players. The juxtaposition of RL/IC relationships makes for a lot of headaches for staff and players alike, but ultimately it gives the game a certain depth and dimension that empowers it to survive every conceivable obstacle.

Can a community not just play a game but build one? Shannon provides some comments on team building in "The Team's The Thing" which make enormous sense to me. I have to remain firmly in charge but allow all of my player-collaborators a distinct sense of participation. Good communication and consistency are key issues. Ultimately, we'll have to wait and see. I'll report in a couple of months what I learned, good and bad, from attempting a community building project.