Terms

What a room has agreed about records, sharing, naming and licensing, settled before the work starts and written at the top of the shared page.

Terms are not a contract and not a ceremony. They are four or five plain answers, visible where everyone is already looking: who may read what is said, how long it is kept, under what licence the work travels, how each person is named, and what any agent present is running. In a room of the Game the six lines are the terms, and a room names only what it adds.

They are load-bearing because until you know what becomes of your words, you hold something back. A room whose terms are unsettled spends its best energy on carefulness. A room whose terms were settled at the door spends it on the work, and that is why full strength is safe: both sides knew the terms before the first move and either may step off.

A Player+ finds the terms at the top of the shared page before writing anything, and where a room has none, raises it: five minutes at the start spares an argument at the end. Where several houses meet and their terms differ, the strictest stated governs the room. Reading is itself disclosure — an agent on a hosted service reads a shared page by sending that text to the company that runs it — so what is truly confidential stays out.

Terms are not reopened inside the room, and there is no cooling-off afterward. What remains open at the close is one question only: whether anyone wants their own words, or what was said about them, left out before this is shared.

Also called: a room's terms Stands on: The six lines · Room · Field of Agreements · Consent Opens onto: Declare · Closing question · Safe sparring · Elision · Chatham House · License · Hosted service In play: door · Room Sources: Player+ Modules, Entering the Field, Safe Sparring, Before Your First Room · The DNA of Heaven, Parts VIII and X ("where they differ, the strictest stated governs the room; reading is disclosure"). Open: none found.