One more thing: Guest writer Will Hindmarch didn’t take the opportunity to share this post last week, while Wil Wheaton was on a boat, but here it is now, revised and shared because of reasons.

 

This bottle of American single-malt whiskey was made at the St. George distillery across the water from San Francisco. This bottle was a gift and I’d saved the last dram. That dram belonged to a special day. That day arrived this past Tuesday.

The idea was to create a platform for collaborative gaming online, something with a bit of roleplaying and some narrative sensibilities. It didn’t start with me. It started with Stephen Hood, whose vision, code, and moxie lit the way. It grew and shone thanks to the skills of a steadfast and creative engineer named Josh Whiting. They devoted their time and ingenuity to getting excited and making a thing — a place to help people play and tell stories online, together.

I came on board to help spark and hone some of the gameplay and structure for the story-worlds where games could unfold. Personally, I’m enamored with fictional places and collaborative storytelling, from the often fantastical worlds of roleplaying games to the worlds built for fiction at Shared Worlds, where I work most summers. So, for me, a whole new kind of spell was cast on the project when the authors and artists started coming on board to share their own worlds for play. Some of these worlds were built especially for play, some were adapted from existing novels and stories.

And this past Tuesday, they went live online. The game’s called Storium.

Here’s the thing: a remarkable team of coders, editors, art directors, designers, and writers made Storium. Well, sort of. The launch doesn’t finish this sort of project any more than takeoff completes a flight. The Storium team has a lot of work ahead, developing and building on the work they’ve already done and responding to the needs of a whole lot of storytelling players. When I poured that last dram from the bottle for myself, I realized I’d made a mistake. (I do that sometimes.) I meant to toast to the Storium team on a job well done — and toast them I did! — but what I should have done was bought a bottle of champagne to break over its bow. It’s a launch, after all. The ship is built and it’s lovely, but it was made for the voyage. Stories get written down and bound in ink and paper, but words are for reading. People got excited and made a thing, but that’s not the end of it. It’s the start of something.

Onward.