Virtual Worlds

An Experience in Participatory Authorship

Robert Aspirin created the idea for Thieves' World, a series written by multiple authors in a world that they created together, in the early 80's. Each individual author had the liberty to use the creations of the other authors, as long as he/she didn't do anything irreparable to those characters, such as killing them. In Thieves' World, however, the boundary between the author and the reader remained crystal clear. The reader was still the person that bought the book, and the author was the group of people who designed the characters and world which the book was about. Let's look at two shared world experiences that do play with that boundary between reader and author, one of which is old and one of which is new. The old is role-playing games which have been around since the 70s. In specific , the system created by White Wolf Games, known as the World of Darkness, seems a good one to look at. The new is a Multi-User Shared Hallucination, also known as a MUSH, that is based upon a world of someone else's creation, in this case, the world of Pern, created by Anne McCaffery.


These links are related in some shape or form to shared/virtual worlds:

Enter the collaborative labyrinth!

What else does this project cover besides virtual worlds?

Calgon, take me away!
Yes, Alex, I'll take Credits for $500.