The Written World is a new game project currently on Kickstarter where playlab London, the game’s creators, have created a “Massively Multiplayer Write ‘em up,” which is a pretty accurate and endearing description. It’s essentially a multiplayer story-telling game. If you’re intrigued and simultaneously confused, I know your plight. However, upon reading the project’s Kickstarter page I have a better grasp of the concept. It’s essentially an online game that resembles an Interactive Fiction story, but it’s taken the concept to a whole new level. It’s multiplayer and it’s collaborative (or competitive, depending on how you’re feeling).

‘At it’s heart it’s a game of Narrator versus Hero. The narrator controls the story; crafting a plot and presenting the Hero with encounters, and challenges. The Hero creates a character that she believes can make it through to the end.’

Essentially it’s a project where players can take the role of the narrator or the hero, and collaboratively create stories and play through them.

So, as the narrator you create a mythos for a character to inhabit and as a protagonist you craft the character. As you progress, based on the flair of your pen (or keyboard in this case) you gain ‘Force’ which allows you to change the outcome of the story. It seems like it’ll be really fun to play with friends and you won’t get that sneaking suspicion that you’re not learning anything when you play it.

It seems like an amazing concept and I still have a dozen questions about the specifics  and I’m curious to see how this would actually play out.

The game has currently reached about 40% of its funding target  and it has 7 days to go at the time of this writing. I suggest you drop by the page and dole out some support because this game looks unique and fresh and it’s certain to be an interesting experiment at the very least.

[The Written World]