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Obduction Backer |
Joined: Mon May 15, 2006 10:02 pm Posts: 2266 Location: Tigard, OR
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With respect to Shevek, I did not mean to derail this discussion into a "problems with the Myst Online forums" topic. Though, many thanks to Natales for the support and comments on my own efforts.
To put us back on track, I'll pull over two comments from the Guild of Messengers. In a topic titled "Ideas of articles / brainstorming session", AlKaera wrote:
AlKaera wrote: And as an aside to that, the other comment is about the 'Gene'sis' age spoken of and the help requested in all the PMs. My take on Shevek's idea is different than how the GoW ages being created. The difference is collaborative involvement ie many independant age creators (and community ideas) working on the same age. Ahra Pahts is individual creators working on individual 'storefronts' separately, without general community input, in a collective environment created before they started their individual efforts. Do I not understand this properly? To which I responded:
Marten wrote: You make a good point, and I suppose I have not really thought about it from that perspective. However, I'm still skeptical that the community will rally behind Shevek's idea. That is not a fault with Shevek, nor with the community really... it is human nature. People embrace the ideas of people who've proven themselves... people will usually ignore a good idea from someone they do not know, and will sometimes even support a very bad idea offered by someone they trust; the credibility of an idea does not stand on its own and people often do not base their decisions by the idea, but rather by the person who offered it.
To put this in full perspective, take a peek at what Shevek added to "Fan Made Ages Must Be a Joint Venture", here: http://www.mystonline.com/forums/viewto ... 817#268817
Shevek has a dream here, and it is the same dream that Uhuru and others were trying to express elsewhere before it turned into a debate. Each time, I believe the idea has been hamstrung by the proposer's relative obscurity (Uhuru has only 5 posts on this forum total, Shevek is now at 9 as of this moment). It's easy for the community to brush aside the comments of a new person because, after all, the new person doesn't really understand us yet, right? How dare the new person come in and tell us how to do things. Well, let me attempt to set forth the idea again, as an endorser (despite skepticism), and see if we can get anywhere with this.
THE IDEA: Synergy. That together we are more than the sum of our parts.
The efforts by individuals and groups thus far has been quite impressive. The Guild of Writers continues to evolve their capabilities, their understanding and mastery of the Art. And Pahts is a really nifty idea, and a good approach to getting different parties working in the same Age. What Pahts does not do, though... what should be the next logical step... is to bring the vision of participants together to focus on a real collaborative Age... something where everyone thinks of themselves as a team.
A collaborative effort does not mean that people have to stop working on their personal projects, nor do I expect collaborative efforts to replace all personal projects. And a true collaborative project isn't going to appear overnight. It's going to take some work.
The approach I would favor for collaboration is a standard "Waterfall" development model; all that means is that the project follows through a specific set of stages, in a specific order. The first stage is typically Planning, where initial ideas are tossed about to give a vague direction to the project. After Planning come the stages of Design, Implementation, Test, and Release. You'll note that Implementation doesn't even start until _two_ stages are done... the formative Planning part of the project, and the refining Design part. The point of the Waterfall model is to have everyone in agreement about what they're going to do, before they start doing it; this provides assurance that at the end of the process, the end result is what everyone will have expected (or close to it).
Shevek is essentially taking this approach as well - at this point, he's only asking people to think outside of the box, and to stop worrying about the reasons that most Age development is centered around single persons. He'd like us to come up with a vision of something grand... a project large enough that it would be unwieldy for a single person to try to develop, but that with a team is within reach. What can we come up with? With no obligation (yet), what if we just sit down and banter about what we'd like in an Age, what sort of place would we like to see? Could we get onto the same proverbial page with an idea?
It would be a starting point to working through the other issues that have thus far limited collaboration. We'd have a goal. Goals are unifying things.
It won't do any harm to think for a moment about reaching for the stars. What kind of star would you reach for?
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