As work continues on this game, I (Hamad) started thinking about what type of copyright to license it under. Since this project was motivated by open-source and OER frameworks, we always understood that we would choose some type of a Creative Commons license. Before this, I never really thought too much about the how’s and why’s of copyright nor used Creative Commons. Lindsey has created some projects which she has licensed under Creative Commons, and our in-house OER expert Pamela Thielman provided invaluable guidance as well, and I credit most of the information and analysis here to her guidance. My very first thought was, ‘if this is going to be completely open, then what’s the point of a copyright license anyway?’ Pamela pointed out that, A. anything that is created through funding by CUNY should have a Creative Commons license of some type, and B. any creative work is automatically copyrighted under the usual assumptions of use and distribution once it exists. A particular copyright license, then, is more like a communication tool that tells potential users what they can and cannot do with that product. Indeed, when I started the process of choosing a type of Creative Commons license, I was surprised to discover that you can just ‘grab’ the appropriate license and attach that jpeg file to your website or other tangible project components without ‘registering’ the project anywhere. Instead of relying on standard copyright assumptions, Creative Commons licenses give you a particular set of language within existing international copyright laws that is easy to understand and communicate to people who may want to use (or do other things with) your work.

There are several types of Creative Commons licenses depending on how you want someone to interact with your work. I thought that I would be able to easily make choices around how I want people to attribute, share, and remix the game, but I soon found out that I would need to think a lot more carefully than I had imagined. The Creative Commons license ‘picker’ makes the process a little easier by asking two seemingly simple questions: 1. will you allow adaptions of your work to be shared, and 2. will you allow commercial uses of your work? Since this work is open for all to use, adapt, and share, the first question was easy enough to answer with a ‘yes’. But Creative Commons actually allows for two ‘yeses’ – a simple no-strings-attached yes, and a yes with the promise of sharing it under the same license (‘yes, as long as others share-alike’). Answering this also partly depended how you answer the second question – will you allow commercial uses of your work, particularly if you don’t want to allow commercial uses and also want any derivatives of your work to do the same, thereby keeping the work free in perpetuity. This was difficult to answer, especially since the definition of free culture includes making your work available for commercial uses – in other words, someone remixing it and then selling it either to maintain costs (like printing) or turn a profit (example of an open-source work that allows for this is Cards Against Humanity). For us, this question pitted the ideal of free culture against what we understand is the ethos of OER – i.e., keeping OER work (even potential adaptations of it) within the free and open realm. After talking with Lindsey and Pamela, we decided that that ethos would be violated if we opened the work up to commercial adaptability. So we chose the options that would embed and keep the OER nature of the work intact in it and in any potential work derived from it: a noncommercial share-alike license. According to Creative Commons this is not a free culture license, but we believe it is a license best suited to OER works like this one. 

 

 

(Image credit: ‘Choose a license’ tool from creativecommons.org)

After a bit of a hiatus, I (Hamad) started working on the player manual. Lindsey and I had been discussing the ways in which the game would play-out, going back-and-forth about what rules to build around the game so that the experiences of most of the players would be balanced, and so that each faction and each player would have a chance to do well in the game. We wanted to have the fewest rules possible, given that the central mechanism of a role-playing game is the relative freedom players have to enact their characters. However, we also acknowledged that students often crave structure and guidance. So we agreed on a set of four hard-and-fast ‘rules’: players need to be in character during game-play, players cannot change factions, they can only use their character’s powers once per game-session, and the only time they cannot move about freely or interact with other characters is during closed faction meetings. The rest of the player manual recommends moves and strategies that may be helpful during specific parts of the game, describes how a game-session is structured, and lists and explains the different powers for each character. 

I then used Canva to design and produce a draft version of the manual. Choices about font type and color were hard to make. I recalled the color palette we had chosen for the poster at the CUNY Games Conference, and went with that, as some people commented that the color scheme was very 70s. I chose the typewriter font to mimic some of the archival resources (reports and memos, for examples, to the NYS Board of Higher Education), and to give it a dated, but official feel. Designing this in Canva was really helpful (and free!), but I soon realized that if we need to change something (even a typo) then I would have to edit the file in various places before uploading the final version – the master copy on Google drive, then the copy on Canva, and then the game website. I also kept the guidelines on accessibility in mind, especially color contrast, font, alternative-text for images, and creating accessible PDFs. The accessibility checker on Acrobat was super helpful and ran some accessibility scripts within the program, though I think this option is not available on the free Adobe version. Note: since we are trying to make this as OER as possible, I still need to figure out how to create and upload a template version of the manual for instructors and/or other game designers to download and remix. More on that later.   

For the past couple of weeks Lindsey and I (Hamad) have been focusing on the scenario game (the RPG) since we already know how to structure it. We’ve come up with an outline which we’re fleshing out day by day. In doing so, we’ve thought about and tried to solve many issues like:

• Should we base characters more closely on real people or create factionalized amalgams?
• What should the setting look like? A town hall or a committee? Should every character vote? Should there be other characters in other (non-voting) roles?
• What should assignments look like? Relatedly not every class using this game will have the same learning goals, so how do we generate a list of assignments that most classes would find useful?
• How would we get instructors who are not familiar and comfortable with the game’s content but into the game itself?

Some of the above questions were easier to deal with than others, and in general we found that they were all connected in some way. For example, the question of what kinds of characters to include was related to what types of assignments the students filling those roles would end up doing, and how that would satisfy the learning goals of the class. Specifically, if we correlated voting character roles with learning goals on research, then how could we incentivize non voting characters to also achieve similar learning goals? 

Thinking through these issues led us to create a complex structure for the game where we tried to work toward:

• balancing ‘what really happened’ with incentives for the players to also create their own story
• how each player would be motivated to achieve most of the learning goals in order to fulfill their character’s own goals
• creating suggested class sessions and assignments for instructors use so that they can focus on the learning goals rather than learning or trying to become an expert about the game’s content
• acknowledging that this game will not be a good fit for many classes, and, while keeping the learning goals broad enough, still tailoring them (and the game) to research and communication-oriented courses

Oh, and we also created a mock-up of the game’s website. Designing the site came with a whole set of its own questions and decisions, but more on that in the next post. 🙂