The first-ever IF Whispers project is now available for public consumption. What's that, you ask? Let's turn to the README.
The inspiration for this game was a thing called Comic Whispers, an Exquisite Corpse-like game played by various people on ifMUD and Livejournal. The idea behind Comic Whispers is that each participant creates one panel of a comic strip, having seen only the panel immediately before theirs.
It should be obvious that this idea can't be effectively applied to interactive fiction. So of course we had to give it a try.
Each person was given the previous person's source code, plus a file containing whatever dummy object definitions were necessary to get that code to compile. There were no explicit restrictions on what a person could add in their segment.
We allowed bugfixes in segments after they had been submitted, but no really substantial changes to game content, except for the addition, after all the segments were in, of various objects mentioned in room descriptions but not implemented.
The result is actually better than I feared it would be. The story may not make a lot of sense, but it's actually winnable, and even solvable. Hacks were necessary to link up segments; if we ever try this again, we'll be sure to create a better framework, probably involving a Room class that has exits defined for all the standard directions.
The participants were Carl Muckenhoupt, Serhei Makarov, Tama Wise, J. Robinson Wheeler, Alexandre Owen Muniz, Admiral Jota, Andrew Schepler, Jacqueline A. Lott and Sam Kabo Ashwell, Dan Shiovitz, John Cater and Duchess, and Mark Musante.
Tor Andersson has updated Cugel, his unified Mac interpreter.