Me and my friend are making a really bizaare game in the style of monkey island, and we need people to help us make the story, so we decided to set up an online thing where everyone adds a bit to the story and we end up with a really huge weird story which goes off on a whole bunch of really weird tangents. WE WANT YOU! Come and add your bit to our story. It''s all done online and automatically driven and stuff, so it''s easy. Click here to add to our story

I took a look at the page, and - just as I thought - the story is an incoherent mess. You need a tightly focused group that is motivated and shares the same goals and ideals to get a worthwhile sotry from such an endeavor. Right now, you have a sleazy pile of drivel, involving infidelity and Milo, a hosepipe and nothing else of worth.

I''d advise you to generate the major arc first, then look for logical points to present optional breaks and add them there in such a way that they reward the player and extend the main story, but are not intrinsic to completing the game.

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Thanks to Kylotan for the idea!

woah boy! I understand, and thanks for the advice, but this is more of a break from anything serious. we already have graphics, code and stuff, so making an incoherent game with all sorts of useless drivel is sort of what we were planning. Obviously we''re not going to get a proper story using this method, but we were actually curious to see how the story turns out. If nothing else, we''d get a bit of a laugh out of it and maybe some ideas for a more serious game. who knows?

I remember from back in the ''early days'' of the www - 1995 when message boards were rare - there was a page for contributing to a ''surrealist novel'' - basically an entry form where one could type in the next paragraph of the story - without having read any of the text that came before. Surprisingly, the read wasn''t too bad. The downside of using this approach for a game, is that you''ll have no idea how to put it what comes out to work. Surprisingly, a game needs rules for it to be a game and - more importantly - for it to be fun. The rules in a lot of computer games are pretty simple - kill or be killed - but there is a whole lot more to a game than meets the eye.

Some magazines have run features like this for a long time as well. They''ll get well-known authors to write a story together, one page per month with the author changing every month. It''s kind of a cool idea, although in my experience this kind of thing quickly deteriorates into the ridiculous.

We had one of these here a while back too : Exp. Drama.