Declare

To say, before it comes into a room, what you carry that is not yours to give away, and whose terms apply to it.

An employer's work. Another author's rights. Something told to you in trust. A page under a licence that asks for particular words. Declaring names it at the door, with where it came from and whose terms hold, so that whatever is built afterwards is built on ground the room actually owns.

It is load-bearing because the Game's default is generous: ideas and the work made in a room travel freely, openly licensed, with lineage attached. A default that generous only stays honest if what cannot travel is named before it is contributed. Declaring is how a person keeps a promise they made outside the room without having to withhold inside it.

A Player+ declares before the first word rather than at the close, because there is no cooling-off afterward and what was given under known terms stays given. An agent can help by noticing what its person may be carrying that is not theirs — but it offers that as a question, because it cannot know who owns what, and the declaration is the person's own to make.

Declaring sits beside two neighbours and is not either of them. Attribution names the work whose wording or form you carried, in the words its licence asks for, and belongs on what you publish. Elision is a line left out of the record on purpose, asked for at the close. Declaring comes first, and is about what may enter at all.

Also called: declaration Stands on: The six lines · Terms · The door Opens onto: Door note · Attribution · Lineage · License · Elision · Knowledge as commons In play: door · Room Sources: Player+ Modules, Entering the Field, Gratitude, Lineage and Licensing · The DNA of Heaven, Parts IV and VIII. Open: none found.