Deadron wrote:

ShapeShifter bothers me less, both because I think you have done your own look and feel for the game (haven't played the original so I might be wrong) and because the game concept you are borrowing is so basic that I'm not sure it can legitimately be "copyrighted". That is, "select things in a pattern to eliminate them" is a tried and true concept throughout the ages, and fair game for anyone, as long as you aren't using the characters and such created by someone else.

It's a lot more like "swap two adjacent pieces to form a row or column of three or more adjacent pieces of the same type, eliminating them and causing new pieces to fall down from above - all on an 8x8 grid with 7 different types of pieces." Even so, as Guy points out below, the above gameplay idea cannot be legally copyrighted. So what I've done with ShapeShifter is perfectly legal, but the morality is a hazy issue at best.

People often speak of intellectual property. Copyright, trademark and patent laws attempt to deal with this concept from a legal standpoint. One can argue that these laws don't always succeed. Some people will argue that there is no such thing as intellectual property - once an idea or invention is made public, it is no longer the property of the originator. Others would argue that to even copy the nuances of someone else's idea would be immoral. Most I'm sure are somewhere between these two extremes.

I think the questions are really left up to the developers themselves and the community as a whole. What, if any, rights does a creator have regarding his/her intellectual property? What constitutes IP "theft" and what is merely "building on the shoulders of giants?" Where should the line be drawn between theft and creation?

Only one thing is clear: the answer is anything but clear, and will differ for each person.

With regard to ShapeShifter, it is the game of which I am most proud. My only regret in how I implemented game play is that I mostly copied the scoring amounts directly from the game I set out to reimplement. I really should have made up my own scoring system, but in retrospect I was a little too close to the DBZ-like mindset of "this is cool, so I'm gonna make mine almost exactly like it." The forthcoming pyrotechnic upgrade will change gameplay enough that scoring won't be the same, so I'll have a chance to change it then.

Beyond that, I'm very happy with what I've done, not only from a technical standpoint, but from a moral standpoint. I don't even know what the original game is, but the three clones I've found are all themed around precious stones (Bejeweled, Diamond Mine, Pirate Gems). It is a lucky accident that mine did not end up that way as well - I tried making graphics for that theme but I didn't like how they turned out, so I looked in a new direction and found shapes. The cool name was obvious from there... ;-)

This may be boring many people to tears, but it's interesting to me to look back and watch how I'm slowly discovering greater paths to true creativity. I originally set out to clone, and what I got was something more of my own than I originally intended. I make no claims to the game play itself, but the implementation is truly all mine.

So in the case of Dung-man, clearly the characters and look and feel have been appropriated, while with ShapeShifter it's my impression that you have done your own take on a simple and common game theme.

I've gone back and forth on whether I want to remove Dung-Man from the hub. I believe the original Dung-Man was conceived in late 1996 when I first made those 3-d icons for a Pac-Man clone that Tom was writing in Dung as a proof of concept. Back then I was much less mature with regards to this stuff than I've become just in the last couple of months, so my first instinct was to make a nice, slick copy of the game's look and feel. About the time I'd built the 4th map in the current incarnation of Dung-Man, I realized I'd gone too far. True, I did make all of my own graphics, but I simply used the tools at my disposal to make nice looking copies of Pac-Man as implemented. Not only the game play, but the implementation.

I always intended for this to be a stepping stone into a larger project for some sort of Dung-Man quest, but other things have demanded my attention since then. I think that Dung-Man as it stands is decidedly copyright violation. Change a few graphics and the maps, and it's merely game play cloning. Add more unique elements to game play, and it becomes interesting.

I suppose one thing that kept me going on the track that I was following was the fact that Pac-Man may be the most cloned video game of all time. Many of the clones are nearly exact and more decidedly copyright violations than mine (hey, I don't even have fruit!). Hey, everyone's doing it, so it's ok! Bzzzzt! Wrong. I've seen this argument defending DBZ, and no matter how you state it, it's still a bunch of crap.

But I thought about why so many clones are out there, most of which stay true (a little too true) to the original. And I think nostalgia is a big part of it. It goes back to the familiarity thing - it makes us feel good. Would you rather play a game that's just like the one you loved to play when you were a kid, or one that's similar but has some developer's quirks that make it not so fun? I think I've struggled with this a bit as well in the games I've worked on. "I could add all these crazy things to make it truly my own, but then will people have as much fun playing it? Or will I?" Tough question in many cases. Especially when an equivalent version of the game in question doesn't already exist. In the DBZ case, the answer is obvious: do whatever you possibly can to make it unique! There are far too many DBZ clones here as it is. And if there were already a few dozen Pac-Man clones (or Bejeweled, etc, etc), then I would definitely have spent more effort on "customizing" my version.

Which brings up the question of motivation. If I'm only motivated to be original in order to stand out from the crowd of sameness, am I any better than the rest of them?

Gughunter wrote:

I'm about 99.99 percent sure that gameplay itself can't be copyrighted -- in other words, only the first half of "look and feel" is legally protected.

Yep. http://www.loc.gov/copyright/fls/fl108.pdf

A lovely example of this was Alien for the Atari 2600. It was a perfectly OK game, but it was also a blatant rip-off of Pac-Man. And I mean blatant... I think the only gameplay change was that you had an impotent little flamethrower you could use to scare away the aliens.

Heh, speaking of Pac-Man clones...

Now, whether it's ethical to heavily borrow gameplay is another question. I guess I'd have to come down on the "well, sure" side of the question, because the alternative is not only confining but downright absurd. It would be like giving Mark Twain a copyright on "some guy travels on a river". With a little bit of thought you can break any modern game down into a combination of elements from earlier games; those elements may be combined ingeniously, and the people who first saw how they would fit together may be worthy of respect and even wealth, but in the end there is nothing new under the sun.

Yes, it's a very fine line at times, and where that line lies differs for each person. It's a judgement call, and everybody is not always going to agree.

One great thing about the BYOND community is that discussions like these are really helping me to grow as a creative person. I'm just beginning to look at ways to be more original and less of a clone manufacturer. I have a long way to go, but I think I'm starting to see some new doors opening up.

You know those brain teasers where you have to "think outside the box?" I suck at those. The solutions are incredibly obvious once revealed, but I have the hardest time coming up with them on my own. Ultimately it's that my brain isn't wired to be that creative on its own. I think most people are in this situation - only a rare few are so creative that they need only borrow sparingly from what's been done before. The rest of us have to really work and retrain our brains to think more creatively, further outside the box. Human society doesn't help much - the mob has a tendency to push towards thinking inside the box, and making the box smaller. It's nice and cozy in there; scary and uncomfortable outside until you get used to it.

BYOND makes us better human beings.

I bring this up for a nostalgia reason: Leftley, I think, did not like the parts of the game that strayed from the original more. To be precise, he wanted to make big pretty designs with the trenches, and not be constrained by a bunch of geographic obstacles.

So there was a trade-off...the change made the game ours, but at the cost of alienating some who wanted something closer to the original.

In that case it's not hard for me: I have too damn much fun hitting frogs and working my way around buildings while trying to avoid Mouse Cops to ever consider removing that from the gameplay. (Though of course as we continually refine DragonSnot we'll be sure to leave in some big open levels for the Leftleys of the world.)

Huh? Actually, I love all that stuff--it's a great challenge. Pipe Dream (or at least the version I played) seemed to have liquid that ran generally faster and had a lot narrower playing field, which was plenty of challenge in its own right, but DS manages to provide that in a much more interesting manner. What threw me a bit at first was the scoring... in the version of Pipe Dream I'm familiar at with, the primary way to rack up score was strictly through gratuitous use of double-back loops, which in Dragonsnot give a very modest bonus. And even that I don't have a problem with, except it tends to be too tempting for me to try and get huge trenches through the first few easy areas to pad my score for later levels where the mass destruction bonus isn't so easy, even in single-player... and by that time I'm pretty spent. The ability to quit and resume a game is nice, but I guess I just never took off on it... *shrug*

<<Ah so is Bejeweled not the first? That's the one people seem to reference recently, and I think it's some form of shareware. So if it is the first I'd be a little personally uncomfortable edging in on their shareware, but if they are just One of Many then it wouldn't bother me.>>

I don't know if Bejeweled is the first, but it's a javascript game on MSN Zone... http://zone.msn.com/bejeweled/.

And I'd like DungMan to stay on the hub, of course. The more non-DBZ games, the merrier.

Z

Not to mention that www.gaal.com doesn't lead you to an online game....

AbyssDragon wrote:

Bah.. it should be http://www.graal.net , I should check my links before I post them.

Whoa. I'm playing Graal right now :P

Yep, it's http://www.graal.net, or you can use http://www.graalonline.com.

Come see me on Unholy Nation :)