So, yeah, new software. Everybody who had contributed an article in the old days is linked in the sidebar now, and those are also your pre-registered usernames; the password is the same as the old admin one, but if you don’t remember it, let me know and I’ll email it to you. (Royce and Zaratustra, you’re registered too, I just didn’t have URLs for you.) Obviously you can change your password as soon as you’ve logged in.

All the old links should work, but let me know when you discover the inevitable things that slipped past me during the import. Registration is not currently required to comment, but that will probably change at some point in the future, once the spambots realize we’re a Wordpress blog now.

Games are fun! Let’s get back into this.

Okay, another idea! This one retains some of the competition of the EGP, while incorporating Royce’s “season” and Leonard’s “slow cooked” concepts.

We could work like the writing pool on a TV show–one season, multiple writers in a rolling sequence. At last count there were, what, five or six humans interested? I imagine something like this:

1. We assign random a keyword to each of the writers, then wait two weeks. First game submitted after those weeks are elapsed becomes the season premiere.
2. After that, games are released once a week, in the same order in which the initial assignment is submitted. If there are six writers, you’ll have six weeks between the time your first game is released to the time your next game is due. (If such a long gap causes interest to wane, maybe we can cut it to a semiweekly schedule.)
3. I try to come up with some way to reward playtest reports. A free fancy-HTML design for the game of your choice? $1 Amazon gift certificates?

So if Alice, Balice, Calice, Dalice and Zebulon are the writers, and they submit their first games in alphabetical order on Sunday, March 5, the season would look like this:

March 5: Alice
March 13: Balice
March 20: Calice
March 27: Dalice
April 2: Zebulon
April 9: Alice
April 16: Balice

And so on until there were twenty-something games, a decent number of episodes for a season.

Pros? Cons?

Here’s one way I can think of doing it. Somebody announces the week’s theme via a blog post on Sunday; we can set up a rotation for this. We also announce at that time any changes to the games’ material limitations–I assume we’ll be restricting ourselves to commonly available gamer paraphernalia (6d12 is okay, a roulette wheel probably isn’t) and any paper you can print out. Regular participants should post in the comments whether they’ll be designing that week, and new people are welcome to stand up and be counted too.

I’d like to be able to hold at least one midweek meeting online, but with players from literally around the world, that will likely be difficult to coordinate. Maybe we can set up a wiki talk page and require that everybody post a status report on Wednesday. People should also start sketching their games in the wiki at this point, if they haven’t already.

Games are due by midnight in your local time zone on Saturday night; they should be posted in the wiki under that week’s heading. We can take Sunday to write up some commentary on each game’s talk page, and whoever’s next in the rotation can announce the next week’s theme.

Things for consideration: should we bother with a voting system for Game of the Week or whatever? I have a feeling that would be more discouraging to nonwinners than it would be encouraging to winners; it’d be more helpful to require everybody to post some kind of commentary on every game, whether it’s just “this is good” or “you need to change mechanic x because of y…”

Also considering making it a requirement that for your game to be officially listed under that week’s entries, you must have playtested a previous entry during the week. I’m not sure how many of us have regular gaming groups and could accomplish that, though; either way, we should try to get in a significant amount of post-submission playtesting (for others’ games and our own).

I think we should establish a policy for draft submission: I’ll approve pretty much anything you guys submit, but I do have to manually approve it, and I can’t do that if I don’t know about it. If you submit a draft, email me or post a quick comment on the last extant entry to let me know. I only found out about Kevan’s and Ben’s posts today through Holly’s demands to see them!

At Will’s suggestion, DispatchWiki exists. There’s nothing in there yet, and I’m not sure exactly how it should be structured (if at all), but it’s open! Let’s make a mess!

Those of you who make use of Livejournal’s aggregation features will be happy to know that Ben has kindly created an LJ feed for the Dispatch.

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:

1. 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.
   1. Reposts of ideas will always be attributed to their original author, and that part of the post is licensed by them, BY-SA.
   2. Further discussion of those ideas in a post is licensed by the post’s author, BY-SA.
2. 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.

Otherwise, okay! Boring copyright stuff over! Let’s get back to talking about games.