GROUP GAMES: HOW TO MAKE IT WORK?

This is very interesting.
I haven't read on the subject and have only a few experiences working with other designers as a designer. It's definitely simpler when you're the only designer in a team.

I think that in a team of designers you have to put your pride aside and be ready to question your own visions and ideas, and give more weight to the general consensus than to anyone's individual view. It can be difficult to do so but don't get emotionally attached to your ideas, because the others aren't. You have to be open to discussing all kinds of ideas and alternatives and eventually some people will take sides or vote. What the game needs in order to be an overall satisfying product is greater than what the designers believe are the best ideas.

About involvement and responsibilities, I think it's fine for some to be less proactive as long as it is expected from the get go and everyone has agreed to it. If the terms of the partnership aren't clear right when you begin work, you'll have to suck it up when the others let you down. That's loathsome, but you usually can't do anything about it anyway. If partners show a lack of motivation or poor productivity I'd say it's best not to waste your time waiting on them. Seek new partners. Or quit that poisonous job and find another one. Or tolerate the situation, try to still be contempt despite the flaws but never forget that you deserve better than this.

I've had some very different experiences with team projects. I've got one team project that has worked more or less perfectly, which is great. Two projects that were really one-man projects that were seeking help, and the people offering help eventually flaked out, sometimes before actually providing the help (but sometimes returned months later). Several group projects that never got off the ground due to bad leadership. And one group project that miraculously got off the ground despite bad leadership, but was never going to get finished, until I got somehow conned into taking it over and doing the work of all the dropouts.

I can tell you one thing that doesn't work at all, which is to assemble a team of people and then not give them anything to do for the first two months because they're waiting on you to finish assembling scripts and a story outline. In fact, waiting two days to give them stuff to do is too long. Everything has to keep moving. If you lose momentum, you lose your team. Make sure the team members have a place they're all posting where they can see each-others' work, so that they feed off of each-others' momentum instead of always relying on yours.

In my successful team project, which is an online game that makes continuous updates, I joined the team several years after the game was already "released" and eventually became the lead developer of the game simply by outlasting everyone else. That said, many other team members stuck around for years at a time. Part of what encouraged this was probably the interview process - if you want to become a staff member on the game, you have to be a current player with a good amount of experience in the game, but then once you join the staff you're not allowed to log onto your player account until you finish about 50 hours of work. This is mostly meant to help curb cheating - it takes most people a few months, by which time the novelty of being able to cheat in a game they played for months/years has worn off. But it has the side-effect of both filtering out people who aren't serious, and giving a "sunk cost fallacy" type motivation to the ones who do join. If you put three or four hours into a project you could easily quit, but after 50 hours of work most people will stick around, even if they don't feel like doing more right away. Momentum stops being such a necessity because they've committed themselves by that point.

I'm not sure how you could use this kind of psychology in a more typical, offline freeware project. You don't have anything to withhold from them, so they have nothing to lose if they flake out immediately after you spend an entire day explaining their first assignment for them. I suppose you could offer to help them with something in return? Everyone has their own personal projects too, after all. If you help me with my game, I'll help you with your game. That's as good a relationship as any.

Edit: ...I'm confused, I didn't realize I had this much experience. When did all this stuff happen?

Why aren't you able to get a dropbox account? they're free, after all. it's a good thing to have, and can even be key to local collaborations, let alone long distance projects.

I liked how you just sort of added me as a lead designer when you made the game page for it. Clever strategy. Fortunately for you, my ego outweighed my common sense.