Collaboration

The Pudding You walk into a board game cafe. You do not have a group. You have a game you want to play — say, Settlers of Catan — and you need three other people. In most cafes, you stand around looking awkward until you spot someone else standing around looking awkward, and one of you gets brave enough to say, “Hey, want to play?” It works. It is also painful, inefficient, and heavily biased toward extroverts. ...

The Pudding Somewhere in your closet there’s a binder. Maybe it’s a folder on your laptop. Maybe it’s a Discord channel with three years of session recaps that only your players ever read. It contains the best story you’ve ever told — and you told it collaboratively, across dozens of sessions, with five other people who each brought a character you could never have invented alone. It’s a novel. You just don’t know it yet. ...