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Comments on How can Worldbuilding successfully support creative exploration?
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How can Worldbuilding successfully support creative exploration?
The Worldbuilding proposal currently includes this bullet:
We would accept a fairly broad range of question types. Within reasonable limitations, questions that require focused brainstorming or fishing for ideas, as well as questions that elicit well considered opinions and concept analysis would all be welcome here.
"Focused brainstorming" can work well or poorly depending on what "focused" means. I'm not sure how "fishing for ideas" would work. There is a spectrum. At one end are questions like "I have these constraints and have worked out X, Y, and Z but am not sure what to do about W". The question about how a fire-breathing creature safely breathes (air) seems like a good example of focused scope -- we have a set of requirements, a good level of background, and a clear goal. The question already has two good answers. And then, at the other end of the spectrum, one could imagine questions like "how do I make a fire-breathing dragon?", which sounds like the start of a discussion with friends or a Quora thread, but it's quite unbounded. When the question has 57 answers each addressing a different part of the problem and making different assumptions, that's pretty hard on the reader. It's probably even hard on the person who asked the question.
I want Worldbuilding to be able to support the kinds of creativity that don't always have a full set of starting requirements; sometimes you don't know what you don't know, and you can't specify what you don't know. Collaboratively fleshing out a problem space seems like something this community will need to be able to do.
How do we support that in a responsible way?
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Building on this answer, maybe we add a category -- maybe called "Workshop" -- with Wiki posts, where the object is to organize and bring together all the aspects of a larger project like, in this case, designing a fire-breathing dragon. The post could contain placeholders for aspects not yet worked out, and links to the relevant questions that exist. If you (generic "you") notice something needs to be addressed but you don't want to ask the question yourself -- maybe you're a passing chemist who doesn't much care about dragons, but you're contributing your knowledge that the stability of the chemicals involved is an issue -- you can edit it into the post. People can tell at a glance how fully baked the project is, and anyone interested can pull off outstanding parts to ask in Q&A.
There will probably be lots of discussions. Fortunately, threaded comments with thread names make that not a complete disaster like it would be on some other platforms.
In other words, use this wiki category to organize, and keep it separate from the Q&A.
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