I’m so excited about how the SCDC is doing! We’ve been getting press from all over the place: the two Swarthmore College newspapers, the Phoenix and the Daily Gazette, Lawrence Lessig’s site, Boing Boing (“a directory of wonderful things”), boycott-riaa.com, a random personal blog… All of these people from across the country are e-mailing and IMing us, wanting to work with us or start their own similar campus groups!
The most interesting conversation I’ve had today was with a grad student from UTexas at Austin, about the licensing practices of Role-Playing Games like Dungeons & Dragons. He had a lot of interesting things to say about the Open Gaming License, which is essentially like the GPL, and the more restrictive license D20, which lets you use the D&D brand name but doesn’t let you change the game in certain basic ways. Unfortunately it seems that the D20 license is taking over the industry, which reduces the diversity of games. I honestly don’t know much about the topic, but I expect to learn more about a lot of interesting topics like this through my work with the SCDC. These are certainly amazing times!
It’s really strange to realize that the SCDC is the first organization of its kind; that over all these years, there hasn’t been a student anywhere in the nation who cared enough about these issues to build a club to promote them. Swarthmore does have a somewhat radical, avant garde history though, which is easy to forget when we’re looking at it from the inside. Did you know that a Swattie may have been the first blogger? Here’s the article that says so, and here’s what the first blog looked like. I guess it just looks like a really basic webpage, kind of boring, but the bloggy content and the extremely early date (January 27, 1994!) is what sets it apart. Go Swat!