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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?
3 answers
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.
We have to understand that a Q&A worldbuilding site isn't going to support all things all worldbuilders want to talk about. We need to focus on what fits well with our Q&A format.
One thing that just doesn't fit is a discussion. That means some things will be outright disallowed, and others need to be molded to fit the Q&A format. Your example of "How do I make a fire-breathing dragon?" would be too unfocused and broad to be allowed.
However, that doesn't mean the site is useless to someone that wants to explore fire-breathing dragon designs. This is accomplished by breaking down the broad discussion into more focused individual questions, like:
- What plausible biological processes can produce combustible gas in a dragon?
- How much [hydrogen, acetylene, methane, ethane, whatever] would it take to breath enough fire to kill a 12th century knight in armor? Just incapacitate a goat?
- What volume would that take in a creature to store that much gas?
- How long would it plausibly take for a dragon-size creature to produce the gas?
- How many food calories would it take to produce?
This technique might not work with really wild brainstorming discussions, but I think it can work with much of the possible content.
The problem will not be the inability to break wild concepts down into manageable more defined chunks, but getting people to actually do it. We can have pages of descriptions and examples, and people won't read them, ignore them, or do what they want anyway (I just want to talk about dragons. This site isn't my problem.). Then there will be endless time-wasting volunteer-dissipating drama about how we're unwelcoming to newbies (it has nothing to do with newbies other than they are less likely to follow the rules), stifling creativity, questions should never be closed, etc. We already get enough of this stuff with the existing more narrowly focused sites.
I don't see this working out.
Added
As was pointed out in a comment, the questions above used as examples of breaking a high level vague concept into smaller more well-defined pieces appropriate for a Q&A site would fit today on the existing Scientific Speculation site.
It think this could be done with most anything someone envisions being asked on the proposed Worldbuilding site. It would be an interesting exercise to see how that works. We could try it with proposed Worldbuilding questions. I think in the end it needs to be done anyway to create questions that result in meaningful answers.
What would answers to "How do I make a fire-breathing dragon?" be anyway? Start with a cow, add wings, and the rest is magic? That doesn't sound useful. I am realizing now that breaking things down is not only to allow utilizing Q&A appropriately, but it is also necessary to get any meaningful results regardless of the rules.
I'm assuming here that a community for Worldbuilding exists and the focus is therefore on "how to tackle certain question types". Not "are certain question types indicating that Worldbuilding is not fit for Q&A". For the latter, I have created a new question where we could offload those things to keep a focus on solutions here.
Handling input -> sandbox
I think the most powerful tools that Codidact offers are sub-categories and posting-types (like Q&A, Articles, Blog, Wiki, etc.).
The main input stream should go through a sandbox, as I suggested in the context of avoiding or improving the closing mechanism on Co:Meta.
The main Q&A section then is the corpus with the polished questions and are "answerable".
Broad questions -> Overview answers
I gather is worrying about too broad questions which have the notions of "require a book to solve" or "are generating ideas rather than answers - e.g. brainstorming" or "asking what to do instead of how to build".
The example with designing a dragon should be treated like this: "A broad question asks for an concise 10,000ft level overview of the topic, not for 1 million words on details".
Example:
"To design a dragon you need to consider: Biology aspects like body shape and appearance (coloring etc.), living conditions, environmental conditions, skills and abilities (speaking in human voice, magic powers for example), reproduction and growing up phase (parent's behavior), feeding behaviour, natural enemies, number of population and growth rate [maybe more aspects]. Not everything needs to be detailed and just can be made up but if you have further questions you can post them on aspects you would like to shed further light on"
So such a question can be answered properly in a few sentences and bullet points and is an invitation to post more questions at the same time.
Focus on the questions asked, not the questions that might be asked
My first idea was: "Yeah Wiki - great idea!" but then I thought, "No, Q&A should be focused on that what the users ask". If nobody asks for biology aspects then it does not make sense to prepare a wiki which could support any topic but will stay scarcely filled for a long time.
Extracting Taxonomy -> Resources and How-Tos
Also there is a certain taxonomy in the articles. A dragon is a creature in the broadest sense. All the aspects I listed in the answer would be applicable to almost all other "creatures" as well.
I am advocating to have a "Resources" section where for example a "How to design a creature" is placed. As article maybe, so it can be curated a bit more.
Perfect would be if there could be a list of all fitting posts with certain tags be shown below with a filter box. This way you have two approaches as a user:
- design a creature from scratch by the aspects shown in the general article
- filter for creatures like for example "dragons" and see what details are already existing.
Corpus size is limited not infinite
The field of Worldbuilding is actually not that big or at least there are "favorite" topics. Those are:
- space
- space travel
- space conflict
- planet design (primarily by visual effects, physics 2nd)
- creatures
- development of cultures/aliens
- sometimes flora
- absurd things
- How-Tos and best-practices in general
- Creative input
I think all those points are more or less self-explanatory. I don't think the list is complete, but there will probably not that much more points to add.
Category: Absurd things
This category contains questions like "Does Santa...", "If aliens would chew bubblegum, can they ..." and such things.
They are totally in the scope of Worldbuilding (The Art) because they define a scenario and ask a certain question or "challenge" to the scenario which is supposed to be answered by others. This is like a game. Most of the time, the most funny answer wins. Dealing with this just needs a sub-category "Absurd things" and the Q&A section will suffice for that.
Category: How-Tos (actually resources)
How-Tos and best-practices is two-folds: Q&A for the collecting and maybe articles to sort and collate topics more accessible. This category is probably the same as "Resources". So it should be easy to cover.
Category: Creative input
Creative Input now contains all the stuff that is not welcomed elsewhere: Brainstorming, fishing-for-ideas, asking what-to-do-next, asking for input on some world or story.
These topics are embraced here. They will live by rules like this:
- You can ask anything, but you cannot expect that you get answers.
- If questions stay dormant for too long (>6months), they will get closed (I mean really closed as of now, or even deleted as well)
- If you ask for brainstorming or special input tailored to your story, the answerers are not obliged to give you an exhaustive list or provide full ready-made text you can copy&paste. An acceptable answer is considered to at least provide "one" aspect. If more are delivered, you are lucky. After each answer you should give feedback if thise aspect already made your day or if you do need more input. Please consider to close the answer as soon as you got everything you came for.
These are not yet final. I used "you" and wrote rather "uninviting". That needs to be detailed. I did make some efforts on defining such rules in my proposal especially for brainstorming for "Creative Challenges". If you are interested have a look.
If there could be a real "technical" support/feature for a tight Q+A cycle, that would be great - I mean: The questioneer is actively queried if the question is done if an answer came in - it is not decided by the members when a question is done for the questioneer.
Questions accumulating answers
Questions that accumulate answers can have their own category, maybe "Absurd things" is already for that, depends on the topic.
If not, moderators could split or maybe close the question after a certain limit is exceeded. Or there is some feature to see only the three highest ranked and the three most recent posts and everything else is collapsed and can be loaded on demand or paged or whatever.
Conclusion
I think the tools Codidact provides are an excellent fit for supporting the needs of "The Art of Worldbuilding". There is no need to restrict everything by rules from the beginning. Also the hard topics can have proper, integrative solutions.
Anticipating overloaded broad and unspecified questions or answers all the time is an easy thought to fall for. Of course there can be guidelines what constitutes a good question. But if a question comes in that does not fit this scheme, it is not to be closed and shunned -- it is to be embraced and handled. At least by asking back what the exact nature of the question is.
The quick&dirty solution is to just prohibit them, to not need to deal with them further - but this would not suit the idea of "The Art" and and also does not suit how to treat people. Also I think it is not necessary. You just need to come up with ideas how to handle them.
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