Multiplayer Media | The Generalist

"Multiplayer media” represents the next frontier for creativity and collaboration. The greatest novel of the next century, the most immaculate film or game, will be architected by vast, opt-in networks. Rather than involving a few dozen contributors, thousands will participate, creating something closer to an artistic MMPORG rather than a humble gu... See more

By harnessing creative surplus, multiplayer media projects benefit from free or lower-cost labor at scale (think Wikipedia).

What was non-obvious was that (almost) everyone wanted to be a creator of some kind or another. A labor surplus was revealed, a creative surplus, that showed that even those with arduous jobs and serious responsibilities would make time for tasks that might feel like work in a different context.

To bring projects like the one described above to fruition, new infrastructure is needed that borrows from open-source software communities and beyond. You can imagine a range of tools, including recruitment and application management, process mining to identify new discrete stages in the creative process, and sophisticated forking tools.

Reimagining something as simple as a word processor for a multiplayer use-case hints at how multiplayer projects could flourish with better permissioning and definition.

It's remarkable that arguably the two most successful online multiplayer creations of the last twenty years relied on unpaid workers. Both Wikipedia and Bitcoin have scaled to absurd sizes on volunteers' backs, inspired to work without tangible reward. Many successful open source software projects have done the same.

By providing the platform to find an audience, social media allowed everyone to be a creator. You no longer need permission to share your thoughts with the world.

At the moment, Google Docs offers just three "roles": Viewer, Commentor, and Editor. This makes sense for collaborations below ten active participants; beyond that point, chaos reigns.

Returning to the mystery story mentioned above, you can imagine each collaborator being compensated according to the extent, impact, and difficulty of their contribution, earning a percentage of the upside from book purchases or the sale of film rights. In time, multiplayer media projects will sustain opt-in contributors at and beyond the levels of... See more