Creative Commons and the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge [VIDEO]

A few months ago, I was invited to speak in a round of lightning talks at Red Hat. The event was in celebration of the Creative Commons' license's ten-year anniversary, so my talk focused on the winner of the Thousand-Year Game Design Challenge, which was released on that license. They were kind enough to record the talks, so you can see mine above. Hardly the makings of a TED Talk, but I think it went okay. Here's the official synopsis from OpenSource.com.

Daniel Solis (@danielsolis), an art director by day and game designer by night, describes what sets ancient games apart from the ones sold in today's market. Beyond big boxes, colorful pieces, and lots of noise, ancient games employ three main criteria: access, elegance, and fun. Access—across language and geographic barriers. Elegance—applying a few rules that are easily understood but take a long time to master. And fun—we all know about that.

Solis tells us that while Chess is only 800 years old, older games like those from ancient Babylon are unplayable by us today: we simply don't know the rules! Interested by this, Solis started a challenge for anyone to create a game today that might still be played 1000 years from now. He asked contestants to use what he identifies as the base characteristics of long-lasting games: access, elegance, and fun.

The winner, James Ernest with Take Back Toe, went a step further: he licensed his game under Creative Commons, reminding players that long-lasting games encourage free sharing and collaborative learning.

The video and that bit of text above are both released under an attribution, share-alike Creative Commons 3.0 license from OpenSource.com.

Prismatic Art Collection Update

It's been a few months since I've talked about the Prismatic Art Collection, so today on Ada Lovelace Day, it seems appropriate to give you all an update.

Prismatic Art is led and organized by Tracy Hurley with a teeny bit of art direction from yours truly. The Prismatic Art Collection seeks to increase diverse depictions of heroes in popular art. Part of that mission involves hiring more women and artists of color, thereby increasing diversity among professional artists, too. I'm happy to say both objectives are progressing very, very well.

Since the call for artists in March, and successful Kickstarter in late May, the project is moving along at a steady pace. We've gotten into a nice rhythm where artists send early sketches to Tracy, she sends 'em to me for some quick feedback, and the artists then finish up the piece. The collection got a major donation of art from the game Farewell to Fear, which greatly enhanced our offerings. All the art Prismatic commissions or collects is then released on a very open Creative Commons Attribution license, so feel free to use them in your own products.

Most of the art up right now is black and white or small color character studies, mainly because that was fastest. We have some more pieces coming from some big name artists, including Hugo Award-winning Ursula Vernon and Julie freakin' Dillon.

Most of the the current funds are accounted for, so I'm not sure if the collection is commissioning anything new for a few months. If you have some art in an old sketchbook or unpublished character art you'd like to donate, holler at us on Twitter @PrismaticArt or email prismatic_art at sarahdarkmagic dot com.

ccoolbook on Pinterest: Creative Commons photography and art

Over the past few weeks, I've been curating ccoolbook a collection of creative commons licensed photography and art. I try to pull photos based on a theme each time I add to the collection. So far the themes have been:

Soup
Distance
Color
Autumn
Water
Landscape

Stuff like that. If you have any themes you'd like to see added to the collection, please tell me in the comments!

» ccoolbook

Vector Game Icon Wishlist?

If you ever need a source of vector icons for your board game prototypes, I highly recommend The Noun Project. They have an extensive crowdsourced collection of vector icons released on public domain or Creative Commons Attribution licenses. You can now also purchase attribution-free licenses for a nominal fee.

There are some gaps in the collection when it comes to common game icons. There is a meeple, but a very limited supply of dice and definitely no "victory points." I just uploaded an icosahedron, better known as a the 20-sided die or d20.

I'd love to upload some more generic game icons, but where to begin? What would you want most? I posed this question to my Twitter friends and got lots of suggestions.

• die faces 1-6, ?
• fan of cards 1-5
• players 1-5
• tiles in various shapes
• victory points in various shapes
• time: 15min, 30min, 45min, 60min…
• ages
• players: 1, 2, 3…
• bid
• most/least

And there were some other suggestions that stretched the boundaries of "noun" into "verb," so may not be allowed on the Noun Project. I'm checking with those in charge to get their say.

• gain/lose points
• gain/lose goods
• draw x cards
• keep x cards
• discard x cards
• steal cards from another player
• flip card
• pass
• flip

And of course, I'd be happy to make a whole bunch of these icons into one big dingbat font for a few bucks. If you know of a good Mac tool for making a font, I'd be glad to try it out. I've already used fontifier, but I wasn't quite satisfied with the results.

So, any other game icons you would want to see in this suite?

Get Off The Rock [New T-Shirt | Creative Commons Download]

I'm a big supporter of science and technology, especially teaching both at a young age. There are plenty of good general reasons to pursue science, but I think the ultimate goal should be space colonization. To put it bluntly: Get off the rock.

Get as many humans off the planet as possible, as long as possible, as soon as possible. Take a look at this time-lapse video of the milky way. It breaks my heart how much closer those stars could be now.

Sadly, I'm not going to go to space any time soon, but here's my tiny attempt at promoting space travel – Four simple words to keep it on top of mind. Clearly, I'm not as tactful as Neil deGrasse Tyson or Carl Sagan. :P

UPDATE: Want to use this graphic in your own stuff? Good news! It's released to the Creative Commons. Download the vector EPS below...

» Get off the rock (CC-BY-NC)

Stop piracy. Destroy the boats.

And because I'm a shameless capitalist, I made a t-shirt! This graphic is released under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivs 2.0 Generic (CC BY-ND 2.0)

UPDATE: An alternate is now available, for you more verbose types.

Classroom Activity Guide for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple

For all teachers, parents, librarians who want to incorporate Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple into kids' learning: Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause returns to offer tips and learning opportunities while guiding a whole class through the pilgrims' adventure. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games.

» Download Classroom Activity Guide for Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple
» Also see the Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Bajjutsu Master - Now in Creative Commons

You can now download a zip file containing the Bajjutsu Master icons and background in a variety of formats. All released under the following terms: Bajjutsu Master Icons and Background by Daniel Solis (http://www.danielsolis) is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License. (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/)

Furthermore, the rules text for Bajjutsu Master is also released under the following terms: Bajjutsu Master by Josh Mannon and Daniel Solis is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Both licenses allow you to share and remix either the work, as long as you attribute the original work to its author(s). You are not allowed to sell either work (without the authors' permission, anyway). Otherwise, happy downloading!

» Bajjutsu Master Icons and Background
» Bajjutsu Master Rules Text

Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Here's a resource for all teachers, parents, librarians, bookstore staff and who want to incorporate Happy Birthday, Robot! into kids' learning. Teacher and education consultant Cassie Krause offers gameplay tips, extension learning advice, and experience guiding a whole class in a single story. Best of all, it's totally free, licensed under Creative Commons from Smart Play Games.

» Download Classroom Activity Guide for Happy Birthday, Robot!

Introducing Content Licenses on Google Code

By DeWitt Clinton, Google Developer Programs

The Google Code team is pleased to announce the availability of content licenses for projects hosted on code.google.com. Projects owners may now select from either the Creative Commons Attribution license or the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike license to indicate the terms under which their non-source code materials may be distributed.



While this may seem like a minor change, it reflects the continued evolution of our mission to support best practices in open source software development.  As the open web increasingly relies on protocols and formats that reach beyond source code, we encourage authors to apply an explicit copyright license to the data, documentation, and related media that complements their work.

Please join us in the project hosting discussion group if you have any questions.