New Campaign Setting (An Update)

After a few months of collaborating on the aforementioned new campaign setting, my partners have decided to step away from the project. While Tyrone Pugh and I still continue to discuss the project in depth, he has admitted to not having enough time to dedicate to the project. Chris, citing creative differences as well as frustrations with our process, decided to end his involvement with the project a few months back.

I intend to continue working on the project, as well as honor both Tyrone's and Chris' prior contributions to it. I felt that now was as good a time as any to address the status of the project and provide a few updates. I'm also going to take this opportunity to reflect on what went right, what went wrong, and what we could have done differently. This article will serve as a sort of post-mortem or retrospective of the project up until this point.

First, some history.

We've been working on the project for months now, we started in January of this year, and throughout those months we threw around ideas. Our goal was to put everything out on the table and pick the most interesting ideas, the ones we wanted to be champions for and to somehow try and make them work together.

Our process was mostly democratic, and over the last few months of our collaborative efforts, it was all over the place. Over the last 2-3 months, of our collaboration, when I first began to see signs of stress in the process due to disagreements and the lack of a unified vision, I took inspiration from how I've approach engineering projects and the development of features in development organizations that I've been affiliated with. There is usually a lot of structure around engineering projects with discrete deliverables, timelines, and accountability.

I tried to find some way to introduce more structure and accountability into the creation of this new campaign setting, hoping to reel in the conflict and refocus the team. As a result of this, as well as other pressures I was placing on my collaborators, I may have been responsible for hastening the schism in creative differences as well as stressing the working relationship between the three of us.

Democratic Creativity Doesn't Work

One take away I have from this project, which I will hopefully remember going forward, and could possibly write an entire blog post on is this: democratic creativity doesn't work.

Or, it does, just not on this project? (Although I suspect my original assertion is actually the more correct one.)

What, exactly, do I mean by democratic creativity?

Democratic creativity, as I define it, is the idea that all creatives on a project have the same weight in the decision making process.

When working with friends and coming at a project like the collaborative design of a campaign setting I wanted everyone to feel that they had a stake in the creation of the world and that everything was equal and fair. Everyone gets a say, everyone's voice is heard equally, and everyone's opinion matters and bears with it the same weight. One of the side-effects of this process is that it introduces a number of elements that ultimately become incongruent with one another.

In an ideal world this democratic process would work perfectly, only ideas that worked together would be produced, and everything would be lovely.

The reality of it is that a project needs a creative director. Someone who can guide the project and encourage the team to embrace complementing ideas and dissuade them from ones that are disharmonious with the rest of the project. A creative pursuit like this one can easily fall into chaos without someone acting in that capacity.

The creative director needs to be able to inspire and lead effectively, without brow beating the rest of the team. They need to be a true leader not just a manager. An individual in this role has more weight in the decision making process, but shouldn't be a dictator and other contributors should feel that they can present their ideas without fear of reprisal or ridicule.

A leader like this needs to be the person who supplies the primary vision and direction for the project, and acts as a beacon that ideas can collect around. Without that, everyone involved in the process ends up feeling lost or begins to develop their own vision for the project, one that does not necessarily match with others.

Perhaps more damning in the process of collaborative world building, and exacerbated by a democratic process, is a dysfunctional team where one or more members are unwilling to find compromise to road blocks encountered during the creative process.

It has been my experience, with this project in particular, that someone needed to become the primary stake holder and provide direction for developing the setting's themes and elements. Eventually I took over this responsibility, but it may have been too late and I still attempted to adhere to my earlier democratic beliefs with respect to the project's stewardship.

Democratic Creativity, Effort and Ownership

Related to the above observations on democratic creativity, another key aspect is the level of effort that everyone involved with a hobby project is putting in. I'm only addressing this as a bit of an aside because it occurs to me that this was also part of what stressed the project.

Everyone needs to be putting in the same amount of effort when it comes to a collaborative project like this. If you're someone who throws him-or-herself into your work, it means you might need to try to curb that impulse.

As soon as one person puts in more or less work than another the balance has shifted and it can generate feelings of inquitiy. I had a tendency to spend many hours of work on this project—I would wager that I spent more time on it than both Tyrone and Chris. I was happy to because I wanted to push the process forward but with their schedules and what they could commit to by way of contributions created a lopsided arrangement.

One of the issues that stressed our working relationship, I think, was that I found myself producing a lot of content for the setting, but constantly having my ideas met with resistance. When I asked for help from the others, asking them to produce proposals of their own it didn't occur to me that I was tasking them with more responsibility than they had initially committed to or even had time for.

I wasn't respecting my friends' time and I was making the project more of a burden rather than something that should have been enjoyable.

Constraining Creativity

I can be accused, rightfully so, of trying to add process to just about everything. Process creates a predictable way of doing things, however it is also a constraint to creativity.

I will dispute the fact that I attempted to add unnecessary structure to the creative process. In an attempt to make sure that only the best ideas made it to the top of the stack, I tried introducing what I thought was a way that we could quickly outline an idea, refer back to it, tweak it, and most importantly, make decisions about what we wanted to keep and what to throw away.

To this extent, when we began writing draft proposals for the campaign setting I wanted to keep things very broad until we began to settle on unified ideas. I suggested to the team that we define elements of the setting using bullet points. This way would achieve the broad strokes of the setting in as few words as possible and it would:

1. make it easier to read and understand the important aspects of the setting's nature, and dominant elements;
2. act as something that we could quickly refer back to (a cheat sheet if you will) without having to sift through pages of paragraphs;
3. allow us to rework ideas quickly and without too many dependencies.

I can't speak for the others on the project, but the few proposals that were built up in this manner greatly helped me. I could read through 10 pages of a proposal quickly, understanding the salient points summed up in each section by the bullet points and their subtopics. I didn't have to parse paragraphs of text that had unnecessary words in them.

These documents acted as campaign briefs, something that really helped me but were not embraced by everyone on the team. Perhaps they were seen as stifling the creative process? Maybe the structure didn't make sense? I can't really speak to why there was such a negative reaction to preparing briefs in this manner.

Creative Differences and Compromises

Another aspect that plagued our discussions was our continued disagreements over setting elements. Unfortunately, this began as early as the "Great City" concept submitted by Tyrone. As you may recall in an earlier post I talked about how we scaled the concept back. Despite my fascination with the idea, we dismantled the concept largely due to difficulties both Chris and I had with the idea while we analyzed it and tried to become comfortable with the idea.

Compromise is an extremely important part of any collaborative effort. You have to give a little bit of ground and be open to new ideas.

When were able to come to a compromise, the resolutions had the undesired effect of watering down the world to the point where it became generic and uninspired in some cases.

If we couldn't reach a compromise, the development on the project would stall. Without a clear way forward, tensions would rise and we would become frustrated with one another.

Image Credits

The image used for the cover of this post is A Dying System by Blake Rottinger