Why release a game as open source? In some of the discussions on the newsgroups, a few people have said that “open” games can serve to homogenize the gaming community, making it easier for gamers to travel from game to game. My hope for open source is exactly the opposite. I want full balkanization of games. You can take this game and chop out all the parts you don’t want, and put in parts that you feel it needs, and someone can come after you and do the same to your work. Any gaming group can take this document and add their own house rules to it—and then release those rules on the net for potential players to read and other groups to borrow and modify from.
My hope is that open source makes it easy for every gaming group to play a game that is designed specifically for them, because it was made by them.
