Player Rights and FOSS

Super Practica is free and open-source software (FOSS) licensed under version 3 of the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). So what does that mean? In short, it means that players of Super Practica have guaranteed rights.

The Problem #

It can be hard to appreciate the value of player rights, simply because they are so rarely respected that few have felt their benefits. Game developers regularly abuse and cheat their players, and players have come to expect this as an inevitable condition of playing games. I won’t recount here the myriad ways that players are abused. If you have played computer or video games before, you have experienced them.

The root cause of the problem is that game developers are empowered by copyright laws to control your computer use. Their commitment to do this is made explicit in the words “All Rights Reserved”. The rights they’re reserving for themselves are your rights to use your own computer.

This follows from a contradiction between the assumptions of copyright laws and the facts of how computers work. A computer amounts to a very efficient copying machine. At a deep level it stores and copies values to, from, and across registers, while output devices like screens only read these values. Software is instructions that make the computer do things by copying things, and is itself copied like anything else. A computer is literally unusable without copying. Thus, whatever their intention, copyright laws function to control all computer usage.

Accordingly, the prevailing game development business model is to claim a piece of your right to use your own computer and then to sell bits of it back to you. You can verify this by visiting any of the fake marketplaces where games or game content are fake-sold and reading the fine print of what it is they’re actually selling. Instead of the regular expectation of a purchase, being “you own what you buy”, you are sold a limited license to use software in limited ways. This is a small fragment your right to use your own computer being sold to you.

Reflect on how ridiculous it is that you should ever need to pay anyone for the privilege of flipping a 0 to a 1 on your own computer. This can actually happen when you pay to “unlock” something in a game. But virtual game items that you can fake-buy don’t actually exist. That’s what the word “virtual” means. Game developers do a good job of making virtual (that is, fake) worlds seem real, and they likewise do a good job of selling virtual (that is, fake) products.

This nonsensical situation where non-existent things can be sold at a profit can only be maintained by widespread threats of violence. The name for that violence is “copyright enforcement”. Industry propagandists will come up with endless justifications for massively restricting every single computer user’s computer-usage by generalized violence, but it is enough for me to argue the fairly obvious point that it does not benefit you as a player when people threaten you with violence and take away your rights.

Developers can of course be more or less ethical in using the powers governments grant them. They might not take every advantage they have over you as a player, and they might be lenient to those who share and hack the games they make. Not all developers are as bad as the worst offenders. But as long as a game developer reserves your rights for themselves, you can hardly trust them to not turn around and abuse you in the future. Without a guarantee of your rights, they will be constantly tempted to take away more and more of your rights and sell them back to you in smaller and smaller pieces.

The Solution #

What game developers must do to guarantee the rights of their players is distribute the source code of their game together with a license to do with it the things essential to freedom in using computers. This has been called variously “free software”, “open-source software”, and (my preference) “free and open-source software” (FOSS). Such licenses are called “FOSS licenses” (as well as “open-source software licenses” and “free software licenses”).

Super Practica is thus FOSS, and its particular FOSS license is the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL). (GNU is the name of the organization that wrote the license, and the acronym stands for a programmer joke that stopped being funny around the time it was written.) In its preamble you can read about the essential rights it secures for you:

When we speak of free software, we are referring to freedom, not price. Our General Public Licenses are designed to make sure that you have the freedom to distribute copies of free software (and charge for them if you wish), that you receive source code or can get it if you want it, that you can change the software or use pieces of it in new free programs, and that you know you can do these things.

It might sound dull, but it guarantees your rights. The vast majority of abuses players suffer at the hands of developers are rooted in the lack of just these freedoms.

What’s special about the AGPL as a FOSS license is that it most effectively prevents other developers from taking the game and redistributing it in ways that abuse players. This defends players who fund game development from their funding being used against them, and it defends me as a developer from unethical competitors gaining an unfair advantage. This makes it ideal for an ethical game development business model.

But the differences between FOSS licenses are usually less important than the minimal requirements they must fulfill to be considered FOSS licenses. If you want to defend your own rights as a player, the first thing to do is to look for and insist on FOSS licenses. One trustworthy place (among others) to find which licenses qualify is GNU’s list of software licenses.

This solution to guarantee computer user’s rights has been tried and tested and already works for a large “open-source ecosystem” in software. Software developers who want to be independent of their upstream tool providers already insist on their rights in precisely this way. For various reasons, game developers and players have been slow to do the same thing. But the good news is that this path to player freedom has already been cleared, so there’s no sense in being doubtful of something that already works.