Great point. The main rule I got from my creative writing student days during critique was to try to be quiet and write down your feedback for you to sort out later.
Yes, though that would probably be hard to pull off for newer creators, though I like it as it would be a lot more similiar to the classic writing group critique model.
Same. I feel that if I don’t at least have a fairly complete prologue and 1st chapter it needs more work yet. Though I have seen lots of forum posters posting shorter works these days, which is fine too I suppose.
My take on initial topic question:
To the initial topic, I guess I’d state the following: For myself at least, it often feels far more fun and less restricted to not have a forum thread, however, I usually do for a couple reasons that I’ll elaborate on.
When I first started trying to make these games or hobby projects in some cases the process was a lot of fun - I often would spend huge amounts of time on creating these and made epic amounts of progress, in my opinion. There was a lot of freedom to pursue mad tangents, which I did with great liberty . . . which sometimes (okay, often!) would eventually create problems still made some fairly fascinating areas for the games to grow. This was all done with various projects that were not posted on the forum, though some of my later ones I did add to Dashingdon. Ironically, as I included an email address where I could be reached, I did actually get some interaction and feedback on these - not a crazy amount, but enough to know that people were trying them and at least in someways liked them. Of course, I think back then, a few years back, maaaaybe there were slightly less new WIPS out? Idk? I also was more active on the internet overall, as twitter was still around so I was able to get some traction that way. Why didn’t I post to the forum back then? Well, I guess I didn’t really think they were polished enough - and despite their merits, as I think some of my oldest projects were some of my best, most of these early ones didn’t really so far make it to the point of completeness that it would feel honest and pragmatic to share them on the forum itself.
This changed with Sense & Sorcery and then later Dice & Dungeon Masters as while they weren’t initially as long as some of my prior works, they were both slightly more complete in a narrative way, though they were both a lot simpler than some of my previous attempts on these projects, thus why they were coming along better.
Now, I appreciate the feedback I have gotten on the forum and am very grateful for the readers and players that have given my storybooks a try. Most of the interactions have been pleasant with a few notable exceptions and overall, I’d take away the forum experience as some sort of CYOA-writer’s-workshop in a fairly lowkey way. That stated, there are both the very rare non-constructive bit of criticism that is energy draining (i.e. why don’t you write this in this or that way which totally wouldn’t make sense, but you should do it anyways, etc. - again, these are very rare!); there are also the occasional worrying over if the like count or interaction ratio is low, is the game worth it - again, energy draining, and probably pointless as the forum is an ocean of WIPs and unless you are previously published, have name recognition someway, or catch lightning, you’re not likely to get a ton of likes or interactions . . . but it wastes mental energy, which I guess is on the creator for worrying about those things but hard not too. And then there are the times when there is useful feedback (plot points that don’t match up, bugspotting, a creative idea that I missed, etc.) - these are the real reason for the forum, though, and this is stated with respect, this is relatively rare as well.
Still, that might be a reason for one to put their game up on the forum earlier rather than later, though probably a lot of the same could be done with the posting the game later on approach.
However, there are good reasons to put one’s game up on the forum despite the likely feelings of constraint and energy bleed that it can induce.
1 - As a Writer and Creator, you want your content to be seen. Hey, your content wants to be seen, at least I think so. From a poll I’ve run on here a lot of players on the forum state that they will only play a CS game if it is in the forum. According to that poll having your gamebook on Dashingdon or Moody without being on the forum is not enough.
2 - You never know how far you’ll get on the gamebook. Pretty morbid, but hey, we writers & creators are mortal. I don’t know - if I’ve put in hundreds of hours working on project X, I would think that project X has value and worth to me and if some accident or sickness or whatever were to happen, I’d probably still want people to have been able to read and play it in some form.
Anyway, obviously a lot of this is rhetorical, and I doubt we’ll have an exact yes/no to it all ever. I think its something every creator needs to decide on their own. Despite 1 & 2, I can state that all of the projects I’ve worked on without the forum have been a lot more joyful to work on, probably because there isn’t anyone waiting or . . . and this is the other thing . . . no timer waiting to close the games thread after 60 days.
Which brings up the question if some of the burn out and stress with forum wip life might be reduced by somehow mitigating that 60 day rule?
Note: Forgot to add earlier that I do find the forum polling feature very helpful and it has helped me a few times where the consensus easily identified and narrowed in on various things that I wouldn’t have so quickly on my own, such as one of my games needing more romance, for example, or this or that character being more likable. These instances can be helpful to make a game that will be more well recieved and it would probably be a lot harder to change course later on . . . though it does tend to change ones artistic vision somewhat.
