Community Principles Powering the Largest Ever Hand Crafted Virtual World (CreateWorld 2018)
Channel: Mars Buttfield-Addison
Date: 2018-12-04

*…we think.

Westeroscraft is a project based on the block-based building game Minecraft, in which a few hundred unpaid strangers have spent the last 8+ years tirelessly recreating the world of George R. R. Martin’s A Song of Ice and Fire series block-by-block. Given that every piece of the world, even the terrain itself, was custom-made from scratch, several sources have suggested it to be the largest hand-crafted or contiguous virtual landmass ever made. It exists at the intersection of art and technology, and has been the topic of countless podcasts, articles, and Let’s Plays, was featured in TIME magazine in 2013 and is currently showing in the Victoria & Albert Museum’s Videogames: Design, Play, Disrupt exhibition in London.

Creating and promoting an expansive virtual world with a cohesive brand and vision, especially on free labour and across global timezones, is no mean feat. Westeroscraft is an open project like any other: people who don’t know each other each want to see the realisation of an idea, so they come together and combine their segments of work to make a whole. This produces the same benefits we see in comparable software or collaborative projects, but suffers from the same issues: agreeing on the end goal or big picture doesn’t mean there aren’t disagreements on the best path to take or the implementation of specifics. It has many of the same needs as other projects: comprehensive documentation, conflict resolution, and finding the right balance of quality control versus creative freedom, in a structure with ambiguous or nonexistent hierarchy. Common issues are also exacerbated by our being entirely donation-funded, meaning poor community culture could make the difference between being able to keep the lights (or in this case, servers) on.

In this talk, a contributor from the project will reveal the administrative and community management practices employed by Westeroscraft to address issues including:

- planning and organisation strategies,
- decision-making and conflict resolution examples and techniques,
- review/quality control, and
- community engagement and non-contributor inclusion;

and discuss their applicability to other community or open source creative projects. Also, pretty medieval castle pics.