[Moving topic from "Writers' Forum" to "3D Art"]

There is usually no legal ramifications from using usernames, but it is polite to ask. On the other hand, some usernames may be the person's real name, or the username is trademarked. Case-in-point, "Medicine Storm."  However, I would love for you to use my handle as a narrative element in your game. My only request is that "Medicine Storm" never be associated with narrative elements featuring child abuse.

Regarding the spambot necromancer; The first thing I thought of was those monsters "Bots" from Legend Of Zelda: https://www.zeldadungeon.net/wiki/Bot Haha! I can just imagine a spam bot being portrayed as a slimy half-witted blob that somehow has nercomantic powers.

On the "Necromancy" note, how does recovery after death work in this game? When the player dies, is there a cost to be resurrected? or is it just an instant free respawn thing? I wonder if bart, being a vampire, is cursed to be (un)dead but is one of the few people capable of resurrecting dead players. He can't come out of the basement or be set free (as his bloodlust would take over) but he is willing to bring you back from beyond the veil of death... for a price! *muahahahahh!* It's your story, of course, so just ignore me. 

"May I suggest that we move forward with getting the updated license descriptions posted to the site"

Trying to do that now, but the issue I'm running into is the suggested changes for that section still add confusion and often do not answer the question being asked. I agree the new language adds some important details, but until it answers more questions than it creates, it has no business in the FAQ section.

The old version says:

"This license requires you to release any modifications you make to the art work in question under the same license."

The new version says

"If you make derivative works, you must distribute them under the same license... The definition of a derivative work is not black and white and there is some ambiguity about how the term applies to using art works in a video game or related project. Creative Commons has attempted to provide some guidance on the issue here ... however they have yet to provide specific guidance for most common video game use scenarios .... One use case is clear and spelled out explicitly by the CC-SA-BY licenses: if you synchronize a moving image to a piece of music or sound effect licensed as CC-BY-SA, then you must distribute the resultant work as CC-BY-SA also. ...so long as you ... are prepared (and able) to release your project or parts of it as CC-SA-BY should they be deemed to constitute a derivative of the original work. Those working on projects for which this might be an issue (eg. closed source, commercial or non-CC-BY-SA open source development) are advised to seek qualified legal counsel before using CC-BY-SA 3.0 or CC-BY-SA 4.0 works in their project."

This, IMO, is overly verbose. We already disclaim this FAQ as not being legal advice and recommend reading the full text and/or consulting a lawyer. This extra specificity prompts the questions "under what circumstances would my entire project be required to be released under the same license?" and "what constitutes a derivative work?" 

The old language doesn't address these questions, but neither does the new language, so what is it adding? I do beleive we should work toward answering those additional questions, but until we can answer them, there is no point in listing details that only affect a minority of circumstances. The FAQ should be general recommendations, not an enumeration of edge cases.

Given our current understanding, does CC BY-SA require projects to be fully released -SA given the most common set of circumstances for said projects? Unless most projects would be required to be Shared Alike, then saying users must be prepared to do so is not general guidelines, it's niche. Nothing more than "Some projects as a whole may be considered derivatives of the artwork. See full license text" need be added. For GPL art, however, the extra warning may be warranted since the majority of projects could be strangely affected by the license GPL given the typical methods of packaging artwork in game projects.

I will continue to update that section of the FAQ, omitting the parts I mention above. I recognize those parts are important, but the changes so far will be no worse than the current version yet will not add undue confusion while we work out those details.

NFT's have a fantastic potential, but I personally believe that potential is not as broad as internet culture thinks it is:

The Good: Creating artificial scarcity in an artificial economy.

In the real world economy, scarcity handles itself. You do not need to destroy an apple every time someone eats an apple; the consumer destroys it themselves by consuming it. In artificial economies, like in video games, the items and resources in the game NEED to be scarce for the game to even function or be interesting, but there is no real reason the resources are scarce. In StarCraft, if all players automatically got infinite minerals with which to build infinite buildings and infinite units, it would destroy the gameplay. But it doesn't cost the players or the developers any actual resources or money to simply generate infinite wealth, infinite items, infinite units. The only thing stopping that from happening is an artificial limit in the code.

If you've ever played Old School RuneScape (OSRS), you may remember various seasonal items becoming highly sought after. These items often fetch a price thousands- or even millions- of times higher than their original market value. Having an item like a Purple Party Hat was a sign of prestige in the game. Why, though? 

Only because of scarcity. The seasonal items were only generated by the game engine for a special holiday, then never produced again. That means you can't grind monsters hoping for one more of them as a rare drop. The only ones in existence where the ones already in circulation. In fact, such items became the ONLY items that obeyed the scarcity rules of a realistic economy. All other items were effectively renewable and ultimately infinite. If the demand for copper ingots ever went too high, you could just go mine more of them from the game server's infinite supply of them.

The demand (and therefore price) of rare seasonal items in OSRS abruptly plummeted when someone found, and exploited, an item duplication glitch. The finite supply of certain Party Hats became infinite. It didn't cause any sort of real-world recession or something, but it did hurt a lot of gameplay and piss off a lot of players. The games we play may just be for play, but we all take our fun seriously. No one wants to play a game that isn't fair, and a thriving community of friends can quickly become an abandoned wasteland due to scams in an artificial economy.

If an item is intended to be scarce in an artificial game economy, there is no better way to enforce its scarcity than with NFT technology. If the party hats had been on a block chain, there is really no way that an item duplication glitch would have worked. 'Oh, you now have two Pink Party Hat #23 of 100?' That is an obvious falsehood easily detectable by both players and developers. The NFT can only belong to one item, not two, so the ownership of the item would collapse back into a single player's inventory and the duplicator/scammer would be found out and punished immediately. Without associating the seasonal "unique" items with an NFT, the game engine has no way to tell the difference between an illegally duplicated item, and a proper copy of the item that was fairly created by the game and legitimately owned and traded by players.

Magic: The Gathering (MTG) did something similar to this when they digitized a card game that previously had physical cards. The Physical cards of MTG are tangible items that just can't be magically duplicated. Scarcity handles itself so long as MTG chooses not to print infinite cards. When they ported the game to a digital format, there stopped being any real reason they couldn't duplicate cards infinitely. No player is going to invest in a $10,000 digital copy of an ultra-rare card unless they can be sure the game company won't just print millions of them for a quick profit and at the same time devaluing the player's investment. Making the digital versions of the cards into something like an NFT, the rarity of cards is assured. Players can see the public ledger of cards, how many are in circulation, and rest easy knowing that

1. the developers are not creating value deflation by producing more than they said they would, and...
2. other players are not able to exploit a glitch that duplicates rare cards; every card has a specific identifier that cannot be duplicated or faked.

The Bad: The thieves are self-righteous and the buyers are falsely entitled.

In my opinion, NFT's don't even make sense outside of the kind of micro-economies outlined above. There is a place for them in specific environments where they provide something those environments couldn't otherwise have. But placing artificial scarcity in a real-world global economy isn't leveraging an untapped market, it's creating an artificial market, with artificial demand, and drip feeding the demand from an infinite supply. It's begging people to donate to your heroic cause to stop the orphan-crushing machine to nobly save the orphans! It only works so long as no one asks why you created the machine in the first place, or why you can't just stop using it to crush orphans that were already safe before you came along.

I have no issue with people seeking to make a fortune from the perceived scarcity of digital art. The problem comes when the people who are selling the digital art don't actually have any right to sell it in the first place. Even when the artwork is Public Domain, it is a problem. Public Domain allows all uses, even reselling it, though, right? Yes, but the problem is twofold:

1. An artist who dedicates their art to the public domain wants it to be free, forever, for everyone. Selling it as an NFT is the opposite of that.
2. As mentioned by others above, the point of an NFT is scarcity. Taking a freely available public piece of art, and claiming it is scarce, is a lie.

If the asset were contained within a micro-economy (like in a game) it would remain scarce, because the enforcement of the uniqueness of that item is automatic and backed up by the bounds of the micro-economy. In the world wide web, though, there are no such bounds and the asset associated with the NFT is functionally indistinguishable from any other copy of that asset, which is STILL FREE and still in the Public Domain.

If the buyer knows all that and still wants to buy the NFT, what is the harm? Well, the problem comes from the tendency of bad actors to be rewarded for bad behavior. The kind of people who take art that isn't theirs, and sell it as NFTs, are the kind of people who portray the NFT as scarce, and imply the buyer is getting exclusive rights over the asset, like... copyrights. These aren't just isolated victims falling for these claims/implications. These are a huge portion of buyers who believe they have the authority to tell all others to stop using the asset, or that they are the only person permitted to replicate and license the asset for use. This lie, in legal terms, can be called fraud.

What's worse is that the people minting the NFTs often act as if they're doing the artist a favor by stealing their art and selling it. "You get tons of exposure!"

OGA has lost a significant amount of quality assets because the artists were so frustrated by bad actors selling their assets as NFTs that they decided to erase all sources of their art from the internet. If the artist wanted to make money from it, they could easily do so themselves. Minting NFTs isn't difficult. Perhaps that's part of the problem; there are zero checks in place to make sure the minter actually has the authority to use the art. Despite significant outcry, multiple NFT hosting sites seem to intentionally ignore that need and continue to promote the theft of art for minting NFTs. Why would they stop something that makes them money?

I'm not saying all NFTs are stolen or immorally used against the artists wishes, but that is a huge problem that needs to be addressed if NFTs are ever going to be more than a joke at best and an infuriating detriment to the reputation and livelihood of artists at worst.

The Ugly: Blockchains are Unsustainable.

Every time a piece of cryptocurrency, NFT, or other blockchain item is traded, the ledger for that trade is added to the blockchain. This means the older the NFT gets, the more it is traded, the harder it is to calculate the next transaction. The longer the chain gets, the more resources are required to process the same tiny token.

I don't know the exact numbers behind the resources being dedicated to crypto transactions, but I know it is way more than it should be, and only getting worse. There is a real, tangible energy cost to using blockchain technology. The framework behind the tech needs to be reworked on a fundamental level if we expect to use it for longer than the next 10 years. Otherwise, we will be dedicating so many resources to calculating the next set of transactions, that the value of the transaction itself will not even pay for its own cost. Kind of like the can't help myself robot spending so much time trying to maintain its own functionality that it has no time to do anything useful besides keep itself from dying.