Cory Doctorow business model as a writer

According to Cory Efram Doctorow Wiki page, he is a Canadian-British science fiction writer and very active as a blogger and journalist as well. He is pro liberalizing copyright laws and supports Creative Commons organization, using their licenses for his books. This author believes in free sharing of files and all sorts of digital media additionally, he uses the free sharing of his e-books as an opportunity for promoting his works and as a business model to sell more of the physical forms of his products. He is an opponent of copywriter because it would limit free digital share and makes many problems for users even who paid for those.

 The policy of Cory business model is in a way that he provides his works as free e-books on his website and over self-publishing tools. He thinks that people are still in favor of physical books and access to e-books make them more interested in buying the books. By utilizing the social media he handles the marketing of his books and uses the tools for promoting self-publishing.

Self-publishing is gaining more and more popularity everyday. Without involvement of a third party like publisher, author would have more choice and control over his product. Change of business models from traditional publishing to self-publishing by help of digital media makes publisher to think of emerging to the new era and change their policies. For instance, Penguin has just launched a self-publishing service some days ago although it has been already criticized for unfair service charges.

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Battle for Wesnoth community and campaign building!

When I was trying to learn about WML and how implement it into design our game campaign on Wesnoth, many times I needed to search on Google to find out about particular coding, the interesting point was that when I searched for it, usually the first result was from Wesnoth community rather than Wiki guidelines provided by the Wesnoth. Accordingly, this community is firstly very active and secondly has a relatively good coverage over the issues of Wesnoth game.

The Wesnoth forum is the place where people interact from playing the game to design and so on; they gather there to share ideas and solve the problems. As Guidelines of the forum describes, the common motivation for creation of the community is : “The Wesnoth.org forum board was created for the purpose of improving and developing Wesnoth based on users’ feedback, problem reports, contributions and user-made content development. “

There are some rules has been considered for users of the community but its extent is not limiting the coverage and cooperation of the members, instead, it would help the virtual community stay well-respected from various threads.

Some main points of the community can be mentioned as follows:

Many users of the community are the ones who develop scenarios and campaigns as well, so users of the service cannot be very demanding. They should be respectful to the community to get what they want as the guidelines suggest: “Ask, don’t demand”; shows that developers are volunteers and there is no hierarchy between them and any other users.

The communication happening in the community is straightforward; there is no formality and procedures in the way of communication. Chatting or messaging system of the forums makes the flow of communication go fast although; the way of communication must follow the guidelines which maybe limit the informality in a way. For example: “If you must use smilies, use them sparingly — excessive smilies will get deleted or your whole post deleted, and posts that contain nothing but smilies are generally frowned upon.”

The supporting system inside the community is very active, one can find almost all the subjects of problems by searching in the community or asking the questions right away, one of the negative points is that there are posts which are outdated and they are not compatible with the current version of the game however they still exist there and one might read a lot of comments to conclude that it is not the case anymore.

Some suggestions over a better campaign building:

To reach an efficient campaign buiding, if there are several people working together on different issues of a campaign; for example if one is in charge of story, one for map and so on…. there should be awareness about the whole process for all team members. The person who manages the codes should be aware of the available features on the map, and the the person who writes the story must be aware of the possibilities of units and coding, and so on. For example if the map is too big or too small for the existing story, the result at the end might turn out boring or not managable from the player pont of view. The problems might ocure at the time of testing which could be ommitted via a better communication in the community.  A better and informal cooperation among the members of the project make them aware of difficulties on the way of each level and help them understand the barriers to solve them.

Each and every level of campaign bulding should improve at the same time together. For instance, story, map design, units, coding and so on for the second scenario should be done after finishing and testing of the first scenario. If story of all the scenarios or maps are done before coding, many refinemnets and corrections will be required after revealing of problems in coding level. In each level of the work everyone would be more experienced of what can be done and what can be changed to make the game more interesting in the next levels.

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