Mission Statement?

The idea for the CGD and the original discussion surrounding it all came up in one of the regular chat sessions, and was further discussed in a couple of other sessions.

The "purpose" of the CGD -- as I perceive it, and I'm very open to other interpretations -- is to provide an opportunity for people who are interested in game design to effectively discuss and compare notes about designing games in the context of a group design effort. I see it as a thought workshop, an opportunity to kind of show our "processes" and reasoning behind designs, hopefully learning a lot as we read other people's ideas and processes.

The end result could be a game that only a big company like Ravensburger could produce in mass quantities, or it could be something simple and small enough that people could download it, print it, and play it themselves: to me it doesn't really matter much. The point of the CGD as I see it is an exercise in game design, a framework for discussion. In order for it to be effective we certainly need to work to create a playable and fun game or the exercise won't be a useful learning experience, but it doesn't matter much how realistic the game might be to produce just yet.

Future sessions can have more refined goals, if we want, from producing something folks can download and play inexpensively to producing something licensable; whatever you folks decide. For this first one, though, I see it primarily as a thought experiment and a sort of "school" where we're all students and teachers both.

Personally this first CGD is also about trying to get a usable methodology in place for being able to do CGDs. I'm unaware of any previous efforts where anyone has tried to get a dozen or so different designers to work together across the net to create a board or card game, so I don't know the "best" way to do it yet. My personal goal is to to suss out a methodology that works reasonably well so that future CGDs can work as smoothly as possible.

It's not unlike my early game designs (excluding stuff when I was a kid): I knew they weren't going to result in good games, but I also knew that I'd have to go through a few dozen crummy games in order to start getting some good ones. There was absolutely nothng wrong with doing those first designs, mind you; in fact, they were essential in order for me to work out the thought processes required to design decent games. Here I'm hoping to work out how a group of near-strangers who never meet can design games together.

As for amateur vs. pro, it's utterly irrelevant in this context. It's not obvious but this is a private group -- the public can't see this forum. The 22 or so people who have either regularly posted here or have been involved in chats can all see and participate, but no one else can. That means that if you can see the forum, you're invited to participate. :) Your thoughts are very welcome indeed. (BTW for those curious it's not a private forum to keep the results "secret" or anything, but rather is private to keep the signal-to-noise ratio up a bit, limiting comments from the "peanut gallery.")

To sum, as far as I'm concerned this CGD is an opportunity for people who love to design games to learn from each other, and secondly (and personally) is an opportunity to try to work out a collaborative game design process. The result is hopefully a fun game, but most importantly we will have all taught somethng and learned something.

How do others see it?

Last December I participated in the "Game in a Day" project at the London Dragonmeet RPG convention.
From a blank sheet of paper at 10.30am, we ended up with a nicely laid-out 24-page RPG rulebook by 10.30pm (with bonus John Kovalic "Dork Tower" cartoon too that was specially produced on the day!)
But the exercise wasn't to produce something to publish (although the end result was extraordinary, considering the conditions...) but to let a bunch of like-minded individuals see what could be done under severe contstraints.

The fact that no-one tried to kill anyone else was largely down to an understanding that the only way it could be done was to let people simply get on with things. Yes, I admit there were some heated arguments (often involving me, since I was the rules team by the end of the day ;)) but we all compromised in the end to produce something.

Now clearly here we are not operating under the same constraints (the time-scale most notably!) but a lot of the same aspects are still going to be evident. At some point we are going to have to create a template that we can all agree on, and then ask specific people (or groups of people) to make direct proposals regarding aspects of that template (I've made a bit of a start on that in the main thread).

Oh, and FL - please note that I am not trying to usurp the Project Management position here :) I think that the group discussions seem to have led to some very concrete proposals, but I feel we are now in danger of losing our way.

Dude, it's not even the tiniest issue. As I stated above I'm trying to figure out the best way to do this at the same time as participating in it, so any suggestions are absolutely welcomed. Personally I think things are moving along fine right now, and plan to steer the ship a bit around Wednesday or so, once a few more proposals and counter-proposals are posted.