Some thoughts, tips and ressources on make your work more open using open licences, resusable formats, useful markup and versioning systems.
In a recent SG thread, some of us started dreaming of a game design scene that embraces and adapts various tools coming from the open source software world to the area of game design and game publishing.
In the thread, WarriorMonk asked for a thread to act as a guide and ressource for people who want to try this, so here’s my first try at this. In the course of this “guide”, I’ll mostly follow the levels outlined in my earlier post, ie. going roughly from least-additional-effort to most-value-added.
This guide probably won’t go into questions like why somebody would want to do that, beyond “Some people want to make it easier for other people to use their work in their own. Here’s one way to do that.”.
(Disclaimer: IANAL)
The first step here is basially to give explicit, understandable and probably-legal permission for other people to use your work. While in most cases, like “Somebody wants to use my work in their home game”, just publishing your game for free on the internet might be enough, this would still prohibit people from (legally) republishing your stuff or reusing it in their own published work.
So to allow that and give others a sense of legal security in their reuse, an explicit open license is probably the best way to do that. For the kind of work we’re mostly talking about in game design, there are two licences currently in use to consider:
-
Open Gaming License
-
Creative Commons
Which licence to use is ... a complicated issue, somewhat depending on personal preferences, wether you yourself are reusing work published under one of those licences, your intended or suspected audience, and so on...
The OGL is (almost) exclusively used in the gaming scene, especially in the subscene of d20/D&D-descedant games. Its often described as complicated and opaque and as such is probably not the easiest to use correctly.
The Creative Commons licences are a family of open licences intended to be used for creative work like text, images, music and so on. It’s widely used both in and outside of gaming, has lots of material published under it and has been translated to a bunch of different languages.
Though I should say “them”, since there are several seperate licences, allowing for different types of reuse.
All CC licences allow the free distribution of the oroginal, unedited work and from then on vary what other uses they allow and under what conditions. (For more information on how CC licences work, considerations before using them and a tool to help you choose a license check out the Creative Commons website. )
If you’re aiming for maximum freedom-to-reuse, consider publishing your work under a CC-BY license or CC-0 license.
Personally, this one is an even bigger deal than the open licensing: Most rpg publishing today happens in print and/or using pdfs as the digital publidhing format. Both of those make it pretty hard to resuse content, as getting the necessary information out can be a lot of work. Scanning and running OCR software in a printed book is a lot of work, but extracting large portions of text from a pdf file isn’t all that much easier. (Especially with the complicated multi-column layout so common in rpgs.)
So if you want other people to reuse your work easily, publish it using other formats. For text, it’s pretty hard to beat a plaintext file for usability, but html files and its derivates (Like epub.) are nice as well.
If your work relies on image files in addition to text, publish the image files along with the plaintext/html files and/or zip it together for ease of download. Your image files should preferably use a high-enough to allow for print publishing and use some form of losslessly compressable image format like png, raw, bmp, lossless JPEG2000, etc.
For audio ... I have no idea what besides wav and flac one oughta use here, but I guess the people who consider publishing their rpg audio/video in a free/open way know what formats to use best. XD
Publishing your stuff as plaintext is great, but chances are it won’t look all that nice and be kinda hard to read. In print/pdf publishing, we use layout to make our work pretty, well-structured and easily readable, but to do so in plaintext world, we need to add some kind of structure or markup.
When doing this, we need to consider how our work might be used down the line:
- Will it be used to make print files?
- Incorporated in other work?
- Published on the web?
- Read in the plaintext version?
To cover as many possible usecases as possible, it’s best to use established and (mostly) standardized markup formats like Markdown or HTML. Both are widely used, so there are lots of tools to import them into layout programs, convert them into other, more specialized formats like LaTeX, XML or Mediawiki Markup or just publish them looking nicely.
(To go into more detail, I will now focus on Markdown, as it’s pretty powerful, widely used and easy to write.)
To quote Wikipedia:
Markdown is a lightweight markup language with plain text formatting syntax. It is designed so that it can be converted to HTML and many other formats using a tool by the same name. Markdown is often used to format readme files, for writing messages in online discussion forums, and to create rich text using a plain text editor.
Markdown has been in development for a while now and while there are a couple of different implementations of it out there, the core of its syntax has IMO been pretty stable now, with the various versions just extending that core.
Markdown was designed as an easy Markup that converts to (x)html, as such it thinks in similar concepts as html. It’s plain text with bits of syntax added which add meaning to the text and mark it up to signify information like “this is a link” or “this is a heading”. (Here’s a link to the original syntax specification.)
If you write some plain text, it will be valid markdown, probably a bunch of paragraphs.
This is one paragraph.
This is another.
This is a third,
Which consists of two lines.
Chances are you want to structure your text, for example by added headings. Here we once again see that Markdown is thinking kinda like html in that it has six levels of heading:
# This is a top level heading
This is some text under that.
## Level 2 Header
### Level 3 Header
### You can of course have multiple headers of each level
##### Or skip some.
Markdown also supports a different style for the first two levels which some might prefer:
First Level
===========
Some Text.
Second Level
------------
Sometimes you might want to emphasize something or make a bold statement. You can do that in Markdown as well.
I want to _emphasize_ that people are making **bold choices**!
You can do Blockquotes, email-style:
Some text:
> This is a Quote!
>
> > This is a nested Quote.
> > WITH TO LINES EVEN!!!
You can list things:
Reasons I love lists:
* Its a reason to use asterisks.
* Enumeration is fun!
* Also I’m a deeply forgetful person who relies on todo lists.
And of course you can also use links and images. After all, we’re thinking like HTML.
I sure love [Story Games](http://story-games.com/forum/)!
Especially it’s frontpage:
I think these cover the basics, you can also try this Markdown Tutorial or check out the Markdown source I originally wrote this guide in.
If you have something written in Markdown and you want to use it, there are tools to convert it to other stuff! One of the post versatile seems to be Pandoc, which can understand the most common Markdown dialects (As well as whole bunch of other stuff.) and turn it into html, pdf, epub, LaTeX, wiki syntax like mediawiki, dokuwiki or zim, plaintext, etc.
So now have, potentially, a work, published under an open license, in an easily editable format and know how to add some markup to that to make it look pretty!
Next step would be to put it in a versioning system like git and publish it on github or similar sites, but that’s a guide for another day.