Every day or so I come up with an idea for a story and hold it underwater while it thrashes. After 101 words, most of them stop kicking and go away. Sometimes they don’t, and my life gets a little more interesting (and, hopefully, so does yours).
I’m interested in writing fiction. But I’m already pretty good at that, for certain values of “good.” I’m also interested, really interested, in game design. I don’t think I’m good at that for any value of “good,” largely because I’ve never finished a game design. I think it’s harder to design games than it is to write fiction; you don’t need more information, but you do need more people. I want to get better at designing games.
It is for these reasons that I’m launching Dispatching the Dungeon Master, a place to hold game ideas underwater and see whether they fight back. I’ve turned on both the comments and public draft submission on that notebook (both xorph.com firsts). I’m hoping that there will be other people who are interested enough by this to talk about it with me and each other. Idea springboards, isolated mechanics, design goals–I want to stick my hands in and splash around and see what floats, and I’d be very happy if you’d get your hands wet too.
Stuff on this weblog that I post goes under my Creative Commons BY-SA license, which basically means stripping everything away from its natural copyright except “give proper credit” and “license any derivative work the same way.” Your comments don’t fall under this license, because they’re attributed to you (that’s “otherwise noted,” as it says at the bottom of the
page). However, if I take what you say in the comments and turn it into a new post, it does go under the license–under both our names.
I think it’s a good thing to put work under the CC license. When other people can derive new ideas from the things you make, the value of both your work and theirs increases. The license doesn’t prevent you from making money off your ideas, and it doesn’t allow anyone to claim your work as their own.
Of course, how I feel isn’t necessarily how everyone feels, and I don’t want to prevent people from participating here because of copyright quibbles. So here are the ground rules:
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If you post a comment, you can add a note like “I’d prefer you not repost this,” and I (or any other potential admin) will consider it hands-off except for other responses in the comment thread. You retain all natural copyright privileges. Otherwise it’s fair game for reposting.
- Reposts of ideas will always be attributed to their original author, and that part of the post is licensed by them, BY-SA.
- Further discussion of those ideas in a post is licensed by the post’s author, BY-SA.
- If you submit an entry via the “Submit Story” link, and it gets published here, it goes under a BY-SA license in your name.
You can read more stuff about copyright or the Creative Commons at their official sites, if this kind of thing interests you. (It interests me!)