Boardy Games

FWIW, I'm not particularly happy with the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license.

If I am working on a game publicly, and soliciting input and ideas, that's not the same thing as saying "hey, take it and do what you want with it." Though I might be the most unmotivated game designer on the planet, any idea I come up with, develop and dub finished is mine, and I'd like to make it available on my terms. I will give credit where it's due, and if someone else did a large portion of the work, I'll offer recompense in proportion to the work.

The license of the wiki (presumably the license ONLY refers to the wiki, not to the forums?) limits my ability to participate.

Yeah, I'm a little uncomfortable with this as well, on reflection - the lack of a "non-commercial" and "no-derivs", in particular. It'd be a great shame if, towards the end of the design of Ninja Showdown, a small, careless games company (with a pre-existing paid-download PDF system) just lifted it and reformatted it, maybe giving it some bad artwork or a silly endgame, but making sure to thank us in passing in the small print somewhere. I don't have much of an understanding of the indie boardgames scene, but presumably having an unfinished, poorly-modified version of Ninja Showdown pop up in Boardgamegeek as "a 2009 LazyPDF Games production, designed by Mr LazyPDF, Simon Pettersson and others" wouldn't be very helpful.

What's your main argument for CCing the wiki content? That it gives clear permission for people to print and playtest our stuff, or to take it away and come back with a brilliant variant a month later?

I picked the BY-SA license because it seems to me like the most logical way for clearing away issues related to collaboration; if people decided to get fussy and the wiki was under full copyright, even with the change history, it could be very difficult to establish after the fact who contributed what and how much. I'd personally be afraid to bring a game idea to the wiki, solicit input, then take the result and publish it, even with full credits. The licensing scheme eliminates that problem.

I considered adding NC or ND, but NC is too strong--I'd like for Simon (or someone) to at least have the chance to publish, eg, Ninja Showdown and charge for it someday. ND alone doesn't solve Kevan's basic "copy-and-sell" issue.

Wolfe, the forum has no licensing; you retain the copyright to anything you post here. The wiki is potentially a much messier situation, since you have the potential to be constantly revising other people's work.

Two quotes here, from the Story Games thread that spawned this site and from its first thread:

Posted By: BrendanI'm interested in testing the idea-theft-matters hypothesis

Posted By: BrendanWhat I would not like Boardy Games to be

A place to get upset about ideas to which you are attached.

My hypothesis is that Boardy Games is a forum first and a wiki second. If you want to open a game up to the community, as Simon said he'd like to do with Ninja Showdown, post it on the wiki. If you want to retain ownership, confine it to the forum. (If you actually want to retain ownership, don't post it on the Internet.)

If people have better ideas about how to achieve collaboration without a loose CC license or a copyright nightmare, I'm listening.

Brendan,

I totally get you. Or mostly, anyway. My post wasn't meant as "this sucks, change it!" It was simply something that had bothered me since I read that, and I figured it was best to air it and get it out of the way. If you read my objections, and decide to go forward with it as you have, then fine. I've been heard, and you've made your decision.

Ideally, what I would like out of this community is where Simon or I or anyone can say "Hey, I've got this idea. Help me work on it?" and in the end, it's their idea. Anyone who works on it realizes that up front, and agrees to that before they contribute an idea. If I were to get a wild hair up my ass and design Ninja Showdown in a frenzied 24-hour rush of typing, Photoshop and pdfs, I would ask Simon's permission before posting it publicly, and if he said no, I'd be irritated, but I'd respect his wishes. If he decided to take the majority of my work and publish it with some small changes, I'd be okay with that, so long as I'm accredited for what I've done.

This would be my course of action even under your CC license. I'm aware that (assuming he posted his stuff on the wiki, thereby agreeing to the license) I wouldn't be obligated to do so. I'd be more comfortable if I were though. I'd definitely be more comfortable posting my own stuff if I and any possible contributors had to agree to a similar constraint. I am aware that unless I'm willing to prosecute and go through all the hassle entailed, that there is nothing to enforce any such agreement. Mr LazyPDF could come along and snatch this stuff under even the most stringent of licensing agreements.

So in short, I'd like this: The originator of a game maintains all creative and production rights, unless explicitly given up.

"Hey guys, take this and do what you want with it." Seems like sufficient phrasing to give up exclusive rights to a game idea.

I've been batting this around in my head for a while, and here's one possible solution I came up with. (Hint: it involves web software!)

I like the distinction between forum-for-discussion versus wiki-for-collaboration and I think I'm going to keep the current licensing setup. I'll add a note to the wiki that says "by putting your stuff here, you're opening it up; if you want to keep it, don't do so." But it would be very useful to have something in between, a place to post point releases that's a little less ephemeral than a forum thread.

So--getting back to some of our roots in the Dispatch--what would you guys think about a Wordpress blog? It'd be under full copyright, and instead of posting dated entries, we'd just create new static pages when we felt a game was fleshed out enough for a rules draft. People could still comment on those, and they'd be listed individualy in the sidebar instead of being lumped into monthly archives.

Basically, I'm envisioning the Boardy Games process like this:

1) Got an idea? Post it to the forums and solicit feedback.
2) If you get so much useful stuff that you don't feel you really have ownership anymore, collect it and post it to the wiki; anyone can come in and work on it as they wish. Your game is now under BY-SA.
3) If you get useful stuff but still feel like the idea is mostly yours, create a new page for it on the blog and revise it yourself as necessary. You can continue to solicit for help via comments there or on the forum. You retain full copyright on your rules drafts.

Is this clear enough, or overly complicated?

Personally, I think I'm just gonna respect your call about the BY-SA. Having B-G be split into a third venue just seems like too much. When I get more stuff together on my Interstellar Pig hack, I'll post more about it here, and I'll check the wiki if ever anyone posts that they're working on something there.

I appreciate your willingness to toss the idea around, though.

Adding a third medium seems needlessly confusing. Couldn't we just use the wiki for both types of rule publication, with each page clearly telling the reader whether they're looking at a free-for-all creative-commons game, or a copyrighted work that's open for discussion on the article's talk page?

I agree that a third medium seems needlessly confusing, but would tend towards "keep as much as possible on the forum" rather than "have two different types of things on the wiki". If something's just going up on the wiki so it can be discussed on the talk page, it seems like we might as well keep it here.

So what's going to happen here, Brendan? I'd really like to give the Ninja Showdown thread a nudge, to see if we can get it towards a prototype, but it'd be good to know what space we've got for writing up a ruleset and uploading some board and card sketches.

With the blog voted down, I'm going to keep the wiki BY-SA and the forum unlicensed (ie natural copyright). But what I AM going to do is login-lock the wiki: if you don't have a username (and I'll close open registration a week from today), you won't be able to view anything except the main, recent changes, and login pages. This should prevent casual or bot content-scraping, while maintaining the point of the license, which is to allow anyone who contributes to a game to republish it without worrying about which words of the text are actually theirs.

So the basic B-G advice stands. If you want people to contribute feedback and then assemble a game yourself, use the forum. If you want people to actively revise and upload their own content for your game, put it on the wiki.

If you think this is a bad idea, please speak up! Remember, you have one week to register yourself before you'll need to post here and request an account.

As for Ninja Showdown, according to Simon's comment of March 14th:

First of all, while I might do something with the idea, anyone stealing it would be a relief rather than an annoyance, since it would mean I don't have to.

Which I think is a pretty good vote for starting to work on it on the wiki as-is. I'm emailing him to get his explicit permission, but if he says no, we can always delete the page.

You all have my explicit permission to do anything you want with it (including publishing it, if it'd go that far). I'll try to contribute, but I suck, so don't feel held back by me.

EDIT: Also, could I have a wiki username? My email is simon and then simonpettersson.com, with an @ inbetween. God, I feel paranoid on the web nowadays.

One small thought - do we know what happens if someone wants to take a Boardy Game they've worked on to a large, old-school publisher? (Is generous CC-licencing a very bad answer to "So, has this game been published anywhere before?") Or are we planting a brave indie flag and saying that nobody should intend to go down this route?

I suspect that the CC license is a pretty bad thing to have to include in a pitch, yes. But even if Hasbro likes contributor X's version of the game you helped build, what are the downsides? Yes, contributor X gets the design fee, but now a large, old-school publisher is printing lots of copies of a board game with your name on it, and you haven't lost the rights to print your "director's cut" and sell it too (that's the BY and the SA). Reputation is currency, almost as much as real currency is currency.

Oh, absolutely; I'm just concerned that "yes, this game is has been freely available online for a year, and anyone who wants to sell it can do so" would be enough to kill the pitch. I can see the other side of that - "yes, it's got a cult following online, and you can be the publishing house that gets to print a designer-approved deluxe version of it" - but don't know enough about the industry. I suppose German publishers seem pretty generous about their games appearing on Brettspielwelt, so may not bat an eyelid at "game is already free online, and oh, you have to rerelease the ruleset under a CC licence".

Oh, I see your point. No, the point of the license was for collaborative purposes, not to plant the proud indie flag--but it's not like games in the public domain don't still get printed.

At Kevan's suggestion, I've renamed the "Discussion" page for wiki articles (which is a little redundant, given the existence of the forum) to "Brainstorm." If we're working on games that have already been wikified and licensed, it's probably good to get in a habit of making contributions directly there, rather than continuing to talk about them on the forum and having to remind ourselves to copy the content over.