Boardy Games

As Brendan has pointed out, this community is meant as an avenue to explore that very idea.

Practically, and somewhat cynically, nothing can stop anyone from stealing your idea, aside from not sharing it, EVER. The second tier of defense is a good lawyer, and the willingness (and funding) to use them.

Basically, protecting your idea while still sharing it isn't really doable unless you're Milton Bradley or such. On the bright side, the chances of anyone finding your idea on your blog or this forum and pirating it to your detriment is pretty slim.

As for experience.. I can't speak personally, except to say that none of the ideas I've ever shared publicly on the internet have been stolen. Maybe they suck, I dunno. I like 'em, though.

Standard disclaimer applies: I am not a lawyer.

I find the concept of idea theft by game-producing companies extremely dubious. Companies like WOTC, Fantasy Flight, Days of Wonder et al have R&D departments or contractors whom they pay to come up with games. I assure you that nobody who works in game design spends their time combing through blogs or wikis for the Next Big Idea; professional designers are far more convinced of the value of their own ideas than they are of yours. They should be. There are a billion game ideas on the Internet, and very few people who get paid to come up with them.

Slightly more likely, but not a lot, is the chance that some random non-corporate internet person will download your material, reformat it and try to sell it electronically (this is the Mr. LazyPDF idea we discussed in the wiki thread). Again, I'm not convinced anyone at all really goes around looking for game ideas, because most people believe their own ideas are better. (I certainly do.) If it were to happen, no license would give you any greater protection than the US's standard natural copyright, because they all work under the idea of "this is an implicit agreement for me to give up certain rights if you fulfill certain conditions." They create conditional holes in copyright, not extra protection on top of it.

I'm personally not worried about the latter kind of "theft" either, because nobody pays for anything you download and print yourself on the Internet unless they like the creator and specifically want to give them money. That's how the sale of IP works now: you build a relationship with a client base, THEN offer products for sale and profit from community goodwill. This takes an enormous amount of time and effort that Mr. LazyPDF isn't going to take, because "lazy" is right in his name.

Ideas are easy, and work is hard, where "work" is anything that doesn't involve dreaming up ideas.

It's perhaps worth considering the potential overlap with computer games, here - we've already got other threads talking about Game Maker and PHP prototyping. I don't think that "people believe their own ideas are better" extends to game programming - it's an area where there's a lot of pure technical skill, which isn't always matched by an equal amount of original game-design skill. That can be great if they're talking to you, but frustrating if they aren't, particularly if you've pre-emptively signed away your game design as "CC Attribution Commercial" and can't even make a grumpy blog post about it.

Kevan,

Most anyone who wants to program games is either very creative, or thinks they are. While there's an exception to every rule, I don't think the added consideration of game programmers does much to change the likelihood of IP theft.

In my particular case, I have a pretty heaping helping of pride in the value of my own ideas. My offer isn't necessarily because I don't think my ideas are better, but because the way my creative mind works, I think I work best in collaboration. Also, I want the practice of taking direction from someone else, subsuming my own desires for how things should work to meet the goals of others. Otherwise, I wouldn't bother with putting in the kind of intensive effort required for such a collaboration...

I don't know your experience with coding, but it is pretty intensive work. Implement a tiny feature, and often, if you weren't careful enough, you've got to track down everything you broke with the change. After that, you've got to test the change in half dozen ways, with different inputs to make sure that it won't break under certain conditions. Once you think it's good, you move on, and half a hundred changes down the line, you find the one condition that the tiny change way back then breaks under, but by then, you've forgotten it entirely, so you've got to dig through all your code to figure out what's going wrong, often times writing segments of code just to test where the problem is, but that need to be removed later.

No one does this without serious motivation. Either they're getting paid or they're really enthused about the project. My motivation is that I am excited by the idea of working with someone else to take an idea and make it into a finished product.

Oh, no, I'm a coder myself, and I didn't mean to write all of us off as unimaginative. I'm just saying that the "every game designer is either a commercial board game company or an indie PDF guy, and they all treasure their own ideas so won't care about yours" reassurance doesn't stretch all the way into game programming, where there's a dual skill set of "programming" and "game design", rather than just "game design". Everyone knocks out a Tetris or Sokoban clone to get the hang of a new language, and a few people deliberately try to cash in on good ideas by copying them shamelessly. The Venn diagram of board games and viable video games is very slim, but the posts about PHP and Game Maker show that we're at least on the edge of it here.

Fair enough. How about the 'big sky, little bullet' reassurance?

More specifically, the internet is a big place. The chances of the guy who is looking for boardgame ideas to steal to make into a video game finding yours, and yours being a game that can be put into video game format easily enough to be worthwhile, is pretty slim.

Also, I think my effort:result ratio argument is still pretty strong, regardless.

~Lance, who has never made a tetris clone, and isn't even sure what sokoban is

Boardy Games obviously does not have a high profile at the moment. However, Kevan's (Internet) games are played by tens of thousands of people and a number of competitors have already ripped off his designs wholesale for their own sites, so I can see how he'd have a different perspective from you or me, Lance.

I want to clarify again that I not going to auto-CC-license anyone's game designs--UNLESS they are actively seeking others' direct contributions and revisions by posting material on the wiki. If you are honestly worried about people taking your ideas despite natural copyright and profiting from them, please don't post them here--or indeed anywhere on the public Internet! This is an experimental setup to test the idea-theft-matters hypothesis; that means I'm prepared to accept either result of the experiment, and other participants should be too.

...apparently, I have no clue who Kevan is, then. If he's a high-profile dude, then that definitely changes things. I figured he was in the same boat as the rest of us, just a guy with a game idea.

It shouldn't change anything, I'm definitely in the same small boat in terms of boardgame or card game design (and really should get around to posting about some of the ideas I've been meaning to work on).

True enough. But if Bill Gates were to try to design a boardgame..

Extreme example, but still.

Anyhow... As far as I'm concerned, Brendan's said what needs to be said here. So yes, you should definitely get around to posting some ideas.

~Lance, who still doesn't know who you are