An Open Source Setting

The Prelude

Have you ever read a quote from someone that you can’t let go? I have. For years, this quote has kept me up at night, thinking in the shower, pondering upon what it could mean. What sort of profound quote could keep me up at night? Musings on the nature of the universe? Pondering the meaning of life? No. A quote from a reddit AMA about The Elder Scrolls, of all things, has been haunting me for years.

Ever since I first read this quote years ago, I’ve been thinking it constantly. Open Source, applied not to coding, but to a setting itself; the ‘bones’ that make up a fictional story. What would that look like? Is such a thing even possible?

A little background. Michael Kirkbride is a game designer most well-known for his work on The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind. He left Bethesda before the game was finished, though he continues to work with them to this day as a contractor from time to time. Though his time at Bethesda was brief, he contributed much of what makes the Elder Scrolls setting, well, Tamriel. All of the esoteric weirdness of its religions, its strange history, and so on.

Obviously, for all his contributions, Kirkbride does not own Tamriel. How could he? He did not initially create the setting; that would be Ted Peterson. Nor did he write the main questline of Morrowind; that credit goes to Douglas Goodall. Yet none of these people own the setting, in part nor in full. Instead, the setting is owned by Bethesda Softworks, which is in turn owned by Zenimax, which itself is owned by Microsoft. So, when we say “who made the world of Tamriel, and who does it belong to?” the answer is a lot more complicated than it may seem. The same can be said for any game setting, really.

So, what did Kirkbride mean by TES as open source? To my knowledge, he never really elaborated on it. He more or less, as he often does, dropped the idea into the world. Presumably, for nerds like me to obsess over for years. I am both a software engineer and a writer, so this idea of an open source setting sits firmly in the center of the Venn Diagram of “Claire’s special interests”.

I think Kirkbride was saying that because Elder Scrolls is a video game series, it is inherently a setting owned by everyone. That is, it’s not the writers alone that create the world; the players do, too. Your decisions in the games change the state of the world, which characters live and die, and so on. So, in Kirkbride’s view, video game settings are, in a way, open source. He wasn’t necessarily being literal; more that such collaborative storytelling is best understood as open source.

I, however, want to take this idea literally. Because I am a crazy person who loves making things overly complicated, obviously. In this article, I will be elaborating my idea for what a truly open source setting would look like, in terms of governance, ownership, and licensing, and if such a thing is even possible or desirable (spoiler: I think so). It’s going to be a bit dense, but please stick with me until the end!

What?

My idea of an “open source setting” is one where the setting itself is free for use. That is, the setting itself is maintained by a core group of maintainers, and any author that wants to use the world can. People should be able to make their own video games, tabletop roleplaying games, books, and so on using the setting as its baseline. They should even be allowed to sell these derivative works. However, the core setting itself will not change to reflect these derivative works unless the author of the derivative work and the community at large want the work to be incorporated into the core setting.

Before I get into more details, let’s define some terms.

“Open source” refers to software that is publicly accessible, modifiable, and available for redistribution. This is in contrast to proprietary software, where the owner of the software maintains the sole rights to redistribution and modification. An open source license are the rules that govern such software. A few common examples are the GPL and MIT licenses. In essence, they are an agreement between the creators of the software and the users; you’re allowed to use, modify, redistribute, even sell the code as much as you want, so long as you follow the rules of the license.

This doesn’t mean that open source software is necessarily “community owned”. Because of how the copyright system works (from my understanding), everything is technically owned by someone. Rather, an open source license is an agreement to allow free use of software within certain parameters. Open source licenses are legally enforceable; companies have gotten into huge trouble for including open source software in their codebase and not abiding by the terms of the license. For instance, the GPLv3 requires all derivative projects to share its license, so you can’t use GPL code in proprietary codebases.

Instead, open source projects are usually owned by a nonprofit, like the Free Software Foundation, KDE project, Linux Foundation, and so on. These are governed in many different ways, but there’s usually a group of experienced maintainers who get final say over what changes are approved or denied. Don’t like how the project is governed? Well, the license allows you to “fork” (modify) the code and redistribute your modifications as its own separate project — so long as you include the license of the original.

This is all a very truncated explanation of open source software that favors simplicity over accuracy, so please feel free to research the matter yourself. All you need to understand is that something open source is free to use and modify, in the context of code.

Generally, open source licenses are applied only to software. Outside of the software world, there’s something called Creative Commons. Intellectual property tends to be in one of two categories; public domain, or copyrighted. If something is in the public domain, there are absolutely no rules governing it. Anyone can use it for whatever they want, however they want. Creative Commons aims to be a sort of middle ground; you still own your work, but you allow others to freely use it, a lot like an open source license.

For instance, my entire blog is licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 license. BY means you need to attribute the creator. NC means you cannot sell any derivatives of the work. Share-alike means any derivatives of the material must use the same license. This means you can copy and paste this entire blog post, change it up a bit, and redistribute it, so long as you follow the above rules. It’s not quite the same as open source; there’s far less management, for one thing, and at the end of the day the blog is still solely owned by me (barring software used to build it).

Now, believe it or not, the idea of a shared writing project is not new. Collaborative writing has existed for as long as writing has, and has blossomed on the internet. Two examples, the SCP Foundation and Orion’s Arm, immediately come to mind. However, I don’t think either of them qualify to be considered “open source” projects; I’ll elucidate the reasons way for each.

The SCP Foundation is a collaberative horror writing project hosted on wikidot. It is a series of in-universe articles written in the style of classified dossiers of various paranormal monsters and artifacts. The wiki itself (and all articles within) are CC-BY-SA 3.0. This means that everything connected to the SCP foundation can be used in derivative products — and even sold! — so long as the original work (presumably, the SCP foundation website or the specific article you were inspired by) is credited, and your own work is ShareAlike.

When someone wants to contribute their creation to the SCP Foundation, they write it in a sandbox. Once the draft is ready, it is shared with the community — which then votes on the article, either a +1 or a -1. If a work is received well by the community, it is moved out of the sandbox and onto the wiki proper, making it official “canon” of the SCP foundation. This means that if the community likes something enough, it becomes part of the world.

Of course, this doesn’t apply to derivative works. Anyone could in theory create a project set in the SCP universe, as long as they credit the origin. Indeed, several video games have been made in the SCP universe. These derivative works are unaffiliated with the main SCP community, and thus aren’t necessarily subjected to the voting process. They can freely use the contents of the SCP wiki in their games, both commercially and non-commercially, as long as the SCP foundation is credited.

In many ways, the SCP foundation comes close to the open source model. However, the way the project is managed (by popular vote) is not, in my opinion, controlled enough to properly qualify. There are administrators who get final say over what is and is not allowed on the website, but ultimately the direction of the setting is set by the community. This is, of course, a good thing, and part of why the setting is so fascinating. But it also means there’s little overall direction for the project aside from ‘write more cool scary things’. Indeed, there technically isn’t even a shared “canon”; only many sub-canons, with writers using whatever they wish and discarding the rest. Not that there’s anything wrong with that, mind you.

But what I’m interested in is an ongoing project, that grows and develops in a way similar to open source software. A core team of maintainers, surrounded by a larger community of contributors, who write a core setting that is then available for anyone to use or change as they wish. The SCP foundation is close to that, but to narrow in its scope, at least in my opinion.

So, let’s look at the other example. In some ways, Orion’s Arm is the opposite of the SCP foundation. It is a hard science fiction setting, meant to be a realistic guess of what the future might look like. The project is maintained by a group of administrators. Any and all changes to the setting require approval of the site administration. Unlike the SCP foundation, all content on the website is owned by the Orion’s Arm project. This means that when you publish your work on Orion’s Arm, if the work is approved, it is now owned by the project itself.

This is pretty close to how open source software works, except for the fact that derivative works are equally controlled. Derivative works are approved by the Orion’s Arm Project. This means that, while Orion’s Arm is a collaborative project, it is not an open one. The contents of the setting are freely available, yes, and in theory anyone can contribute, but the work cannot be modified or redistributed.

My ideal open source setting, as I interpreted from Kirkbride’s quote, would be something in between. Open enough that anyone can use it and change it, but organized enough that there’s still some semblance of a core “setting” beneath it all. The SCP foundation fulfills the “openness” criteria, but there is no central canon. There is no consensus universe. Derivative works have been made, but they are narrow in scope and genre. Orion’s Arm fulfills the “organized” criteria, but it is not at all open, controlled instead by the contributors. Neither of these models are bad. In fact, I enjoy both projects. But this article is setting to answer the question: What would a truly open source project look like? And neither satisfies me in that regard.

How?

So, let’s talk about what my ideal open source setting would look like, as a project. First, let’s talk organization. Similar to open source projects, there would be a core group of maintainers, with the work itself being owned either by one individual or a nonprofit (preferably the latter). These maintainers would control the website on which the core setting is published, likely in wiki format. They would be able to approve and deny changes to articles, similar to how maintainers approve or deny pull requests on open source repositories.

Surrounding the core maintainers would be the community. These are the bulk of the writers, creating lore for the setting. Like the SCP community, they would write articles, stories, and so on, and contribute them to the wiki. Their proposed changes would be sandboxed until approved by a maintainer, and would then be integrated into the project itself. These proposed changes aren’t simply blanket denied, however; the maintainers would work with the contributor to get it up to the standards of the project.

Other minor changes, such as spellchecking, updating articles with new information, and so on would not necessarily need to be approved, and could instead work like Wikipedia (ie, anyone can edit it, with reversions being possible). Some distinction would have to be made between an addition and a revision to facilitate this.

The wiki would serve as the sole source of “canon” material. If it isn’t on the wiki, then it’s not part of the core setting. Everything published on the wiki will be free to use in derivative works, provided the original project and authors are credited by that work. In some ways, it would be a bit like fanficiton without the fiction; a central repository of knowledge on the fictional world, which authors are free to use or ignore in their own works as they please.

These derivative works would not necessarily be part of the core setting. Instead, they would in essence be “forks” of the setting; self-contained and owned by the original author, building on the setting itself. Take a hypothetical situation where an author writes a series set within a project’s world. The series goes on for many years, and over the course of its writing, diverges significantly from the core project. This is completely fine! The core project and the derivative series are entirely separate, save for their common origin. So long as the author credits the original project, they are free to sell their work and change it as they see fit.

What if someone uses the project in a way the original authors aren’t okay with? That’s what the license agreement is for; it can stipulate rules on what is and is not acceptable use. If a derivative work does not break the license agreement, but association with the project is still undesirable, the author could be asked to simply remove any prominent mentions of the setting. That is, they would still be required to credit the original work, but they might be barred from prominently featuring logos. Projects could give quality works a “seal of approval”; this way, anyone can continue to use the setting as they please, but the best works are allowed to use the trademarked branding of the project, such as logos.

Of course, sometimes an author wants to incorporate their work in the core canon of the world. To achieve this, a few stipulations would have to be met, I believe. First, the characters and plot of the book would have to be made freely available. This doesn’t mean the full text of the work needs to be free; rather, the author needs to allow the core project to use the events of the story, its characters, and so on in the core project. This would have to be negotiated with the maintainers of the project. Ultimately, a work can only be made part of the “core” setting if both the maintainers and the author agree on it, and the specifics of the terms would be unique to each work.

I imagine that, similar to the SCP foundation, there would be a section on the wiki for people to publish stories of their own. These would not be derivative works strictly speaking, as they would be hosted on the project’s site, but they wouldn’t necessarily be canon either; instead, it’d be a place to share creative works. Authors would be able to remove their work from the site, so long as it has not been incorporated into the canon. This can only be done under explicit agreement (a contributor directly submitting their work for review) between the project and the author. Once something is ‘canon’, it can no longer be retracted at will, but the maintainers will be able to remove works at their discretion (and agreement with other maintainers).

Ultimately, what I am envisioning here is something akin to the Forgotten Realms campaign setting; a world worked on by many authors, with their own individual interpretations of the world coexisting. Unlike Forgotten Realms or Warhammer or indeed Elder Scrolls, however, it would be owned and maintained by the community. Anyone would be allowed to publish their own stories set in the world, creating a truly open resource for any writers to use.

Will I Really Do This?

Maybe! Right now this is a theoretical exercise. An obsession that’s been lodged firmly in my cerebral cortex for years now. Something I needed to write down and share with the world. I do have a world in mind that I would love to turn into a full collaborative fiction project, but that would require collaborators. In short, if enough people find this idea interesting, I will make it a reality. And of course, if you have your own idea for an open source setting, feel free to use my ideas as you wish! I find this idea exciting, and I’d love to see more projects like SCP and Orion’s Arm in the world.