Designing Virtual Worlds

1. From publisher copyright to a free edition

The English original Designing Virtual Worlds was written by Richard A. Bartle and published in 2003 by New Riders (Indianapolis; New Riders was part of Pearson Education).

The original edition copyright © 2003 belonged to the publisher, and the author did not then hold the rights to dispose of it freely. The publisher later reverted those rights to him, which is what made a free edition possible.

With the rights back in his hands, the author released the complete text for free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0). That free edition is an informal download on the author’s own site, in formatting he describes as poorer than the published version.

Under CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 anyone may redistribute the English text verbatim, provided they give attribution, make no commercial use, and share no modified version.

2. The translation and its permission

The Chinese translation is a derivative work of the book. This is where precision matters: CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 grants permission to create derivative works, but not to share them — the ND (NoDerivatives) term forbids publishing an altered version; it does not forbid translating as such. So the text may be read and translated, but the translation may not be made public. What allows this translation to be public is the author’s own permission, not the CC licence.

We have obtained that permission from the author: to translate the free edition and to publish the translation publicly. Accordingly:

• This Chinese translation is published with the author’s permission, and is free to read;
• That permission covers this translation only; it neither modifies CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 nor entitles anyone else to translate or adapt the book;
• The licence for the English original is unchanged — still CC BY-NC-ND 4.0: verbatim redistribution only, with attribution, non-commercially, and with no derivative versions shared;
• The translation is likewise not for commercial use.

If anything about the scope of this permission is unclear, please contact this site first.

3. Other

The English text is authoritative as published by the author at mud.co.uk/dvw; the free PDF is his own release.

Book titles, terminology and the names of cited works belong to their respective owners. Credits and licences for the fonts used are on the front matter page.