Category: Geek / Technical

Categories
Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business

Copyright Not a Minefield Just for Indies

I originally talked about the dangers of working with existing protected works as an indie developer. Having the means to afford a legal team isn’t a guarantee of immunity, either.

In the Gamasutra news entry Ghost Rider Creator Files Suit Against Take-Two, Others, it seems that Gary Friedrich is literally suing Marvel, Take-Two, and others for making a bad movie based off his work. While the suit claims he has owned the exclusive rights to Ghost Rider since 2001, meaning that the movie was an infringement of his copyright, he is also accusing the defendants of “waste”.

Imagine if you owned the rights, trademarks and copyrights, regarding a popular character. Then imagine that someone makes a movie about the character, butchering parts of it, and then doing a terrible job of advertising. Now your own rights are worth less than they did before the movie was made because people associate this movie with your work. And you never gave them the rights to make the movie in the first place!

It just goes to show you what a minefield licensed properties can be. This situation reminds me of the SCO/Novell/IBM/Linux debacle.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Marketing/Business Personal Development

Chicago Indie Game Meetup Tomorrow Night

It’s been a long time coming, but the next Chicago Indie Game Developer Meetup is here. Check that link for contact information to learn the super secret location.

It’s at Rohit’s place at 7:00 PM. That’s all I can say.

Categories
Geek / Technical General

POTM for March: WordPress

The general idea of the Project of the Month is to donate some money to an open source project and write a blog post about it. Everyone knows about the major open source projects, such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, but there are plenty of examples of open source projects that impact you in some way that might not appear on most people’s radars.

This month I donated some money to WordPress, an easy to use and quite popular blogging tool.

Yes, it is quite popular, supposedly “the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world”, but I figured that it was still not a household name and so was a valid project for the POTM.

My blog uses WordPress, and I have been pleased with how easy it is to use, update, and modify. While the default theme was pretty ugly when I started my blog in 2005, there were plenty of themes created by the WordPress community, which is great because I didn’t want to spend a lot of time creating my own theme.

There are a number of plugins for WordPress, and some of them are very useful. From blocking spam to adding special links easily on your blog, there are plugins for any number of purposes.

Relatively recently, WordPress.com was launched, which allows you to run a blog without needing to maintain your own host. While installation is incredibly easy, you may not want the hassle of maintaining your own website’s security just to run a blog. If you already have a blog using another system, WordPress has plenty of import options. You can import LiveJournal and TypePad, or even use an RSS feed as the source, among other options.

The community is great. I had to figure out how to get an RSS feed to Larry for just the POTM entries, and the IRC channel was a great source of friendly assistance. I don’t know if I have ever felt lost using WordPress since there is almost always someone around to explain something to me.

Thank you, WordPress community!

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Marketing/Business Politics/Government

Zorro, the Public Domain, and Derivative Works

The other day I was thinking about Zorro. Frankly, I love stories about Zorro and The Three Musketeers. I have only recently started playing Dungeons and Dragons, and when I created my character, I decided that he should be a fighter with high dexterity and speed. He also gets a cloak and a wide-brimmed hat. B-)

Anyway, I was thinking about the possibility of making a game based on Zorro. If Zorro was created recently, then the copyright might prevent me from making such a game, but if it was an old creation, then it might be in the public domain, which means that I would be perfectly within my rights to create a game based on the stories of the masked legend.

So I searched online and found out that the earliest copyright date for Zorro was 1919 for the pulp fiction serial called The Curse of Capistrano. Shortly afterwards, a movie adaptation followed, and the successful silent film The Mark of Zorro brought the hero to the big screen for the first time. That link will take you to a page that will let you watch the film as it is in the public domain.

So the original story and the first movie are definitely in the public domain. So, anyone has the right to make a movie, video game, or story based on Zorro, right? I would think so, but apparently I might be wrong. I found a post at derivative work which linked to a BBC News report that Sony sent a cease & desist letter to Sobini Films for trying to make a movie about Zorro. Sobini sued and I haven’t been able to find anything about it being resolved, although imdb.com does list Zorro 2110 as being in production.

And I would totally go see it, too. It would probably be like seeing the remake of Planet of the Apes for my birthday…shut up.

Anyway, the point is, how does Sony think that it has the right to tell someone NOT to make a film based on a public domain work? And where does Sobini Films get off talking as if it has aquired the rights to a book in the public domain? EVERYONE has aquired those rights. That’s what the public domain means!

But is Zorro in the public domain? Is there anything about Zorro that isn’t?

I’m not the only one who has these questions. You can’t just trust that Wikipedia has it right, but Zorro is on the list of public domain characters. But what exactly does it mean that Zorro is in the public domain, especially when Zorro Productions exists solely to license the trademarks and copyrights in the name, visual likeness, and character? How can this group exist when Zorro is in the public domain?

I learned that the character of Zorro may have been inspired by people or stories that ARE in the public domain. The Scarlet Pimpernel is an older story that pretty much set the stage for the super hero genre. The hero was a rich person hiding his true identity with disguises. Zorro, Batman, and a number of other characters, especially in comic books, would follow this archetype.

But history also has some influence on the character of Zorro. Joaquin Murrieta was considered the Robin Hood (another legendary hero in the public domain) of Mexico, and “the fictional character of Zorro was in part inspired by the stories about Murrieta”. Now, Murrieta the person may have existed, but the legend surrounding him may be more fiction than fact. His story resembles Batman’s in that circumstances in his life charge him with fighting back against what he considered evil and protecting others from those same evils.

Can I create a game based on the original story of Zorro which is known to be in the public domain? I obviously can’t make a game that was inspired with recently created films, but couldn’t I make my own interpretation of the original story? Couldn’t Sobini Films create a Zorro of the future without a Sony coming after them? Why does Sony believe it has this ability, or specifically why does Zorro Productions believe it has exclusive rights to Zorro?

I did find this San Francisco Business Times article detailing the family behind Zorro Productions. It seems that if they control nothing else other than the trademarks for merchandising, movies, books, games, slot machines, etc, then they pretty much control new creations based on Zorro, even if the copyright status of older works has expired. I had emailed the company, and President and CEO John Gertz responded to say that even if some works are public domain in the United States, the copyright may still be valid in other nations. Interestingly, I learned that a number of the trademarks for things such as video games, board games, role playing games, candy, and all sorts of merchandising were registered fairly recently. Some trademarks have expired, but others have apparently replaced them. Trademark searches are definitely not for those with weak hearts.

So, what’s the status of Zorro? Is he in the public domain, or does some company actually have the exclusive rights to him? It seems that an indie game developer might be taking on a lot of legal liability by trying to make a game based on Zorro. Besides the existing trademarks, the copyright status in the country of a customer might turn that sale into an infringement that costs you big. Unless you are prepared to discuss the matter with a lawyer (and pay for such a discussion!), it might be easier creating your own characters and building up a following. I imagine it might be possible to create your own version of a character like Zorro, but then you would have to step around trademarks that simply use the text “ZORRO” on a video game. Batman is pretty much a Zorro-like character, but he is different enough that he can become his own trademark. No one really owns Robin Hood as far as I know. And there are plenty of other famous legends that are probably not locked away from the public through exclusive rights such as copyright and trademark.

Categories
Games Geek / Technical General

Engraved Note to Self

If you are a tourist in the Mazes of Menace, and you find a shopkeeper, do NOT, under any circumstances, take his picture with your camera. He doesn’t like it very much, and he has a problem with overreacting.

*sigh* YASD.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General Marketing/Business Personal Development

Great Games Experiment: Social Networking for Game Players and Developers

Great Games Experiment

What you see there is my badge for the Great Games Experiment, the social networking community centered around video games. It was created by Jeff Tunnell of GarageGames fame as a platform to get game players and game developers together, solving at least part of the problem of finding an audience for your games.

Since joining, I have submitted a number of entries for the games section and have created one group. Jay Barnson of Rampant Coyote has done such a great job of submitting RPGs that he was given the title of admin of the RPG tag.

Maybe I’ll get the “Obscure games that people didn’t play when they were new” tag admin rights. B-)

In an interview with Jeff, he comments on the benefits for indie members of the site:

Having indie games presented side by side with commercial games should get more recognition for the indies.

Er, why are indie games not considered commercial? In fact, when I am entering information for new game entries, I always find the publisher section weird. The choices are “none”, “indie”, or “commercial”, and if you pick commercial, you get to input the name of the publisher. Why do indie publishers have to be anonymous? Why are indies considered different from commercial in the first place?

Anyway, I’ve found the Great Games Experiment to be a great way to interact with game developers and players. It’s still new, but it is much more relevant than MySpace. And much more stable.

Categories
Game Development Games Geek / Technical General

Video Games as Educational Tools

Thanks to Slashdot, I learned about a News.com article entitled More video games, fewer books at schools?. Apparently some educators are proposing that video games should be used as teaching tools as much or more than books currently are.

Using video games as a tool to educate sounds like a great opportunity. Reading about economic variables can be mind-numbing, especially without context. It is easier to understand how supply and demand affect a business when you play one of the variations of Lemonade Stand. Learning about history is difficult if you treat it as a series of dates and names that you need to memorize for a quiz or test. It is easier to remember that Japan bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7th or that MacArthur said “I shall return” when driven from the Philippines if you play a game such as Koei’s PTO 2. Heck, I learned that Japan is in a timezone that puts that date at December 6th because of that game. Solving physics questions might be interesting, but calculating trajectories to launch bananas at opponents in Gorillas can demonstrate the concepts for you.

Good articles can provide balanced viewpoints, but this one had some strange quotes.

“But there’s still a question about the value to the extent that most of the world is not a video game. They’re not getting problems in real world situation,” [Dr. Joshua Freedman] said.

Most of the world is not a book, either. Children aren’t currently getting problems in real world situations anyway. I remember a physics problem involving a car approaching an intersection. You needed to determine if the car should continue, getting safely on the other side before the light turns red, or if it should stop to avoid an accident. I got the answer wrong. Why? Because the teacher did not tell me that the question was not about the safety of the car but about the red light. See, if you treat it like real life, then my answer would have been correct because I took into account the idea that if the light turns red when you are in the middle of the intersection, you’d be fine. The teacher assumed that as soon as the light turned red, the cross traffic’s light turned green AND, here’s the kicker, the cross traffic has instantaneous velocity. If this is an example of the real world settings children are expected to be getting, then I am sure that video games can do much better.

Technology taking over life is an article that touches on Hasbro’s new ION Educational Game System, but it mostly serves as a warning that technology is not a replacement for exercise or social interaction.

Well, neither is reading books, and yet I don’t see articles warning against the dangers of reading to the detriment of health or experiencing life.

I am not claiming that books are bad. I love reading books. I think that books are great for entertainment and learning. I just find it strange that when video games are offered as an educational tool, the arguments against it are that children aren’t getting real world situations or that they aren’t exercising or interacting. Even the person who argues for the need of video games in schools is quoted as saying something negative about them:

My 6-year-old, Julian, can step into a video game and a world of rules and figure them out. He’s not scared of the unknown or scared of failing. I think that’s something valuable that video games provide. But, I want him to experience much more, and [have] relationships outside of games.

And, of course, there are the quotes from the game-playing children who say some of the most uninformed things, such as equating entrepreneurship with hustling. These quotes are almost as bad as the news articles that use child game players to act as the balance to the arguments of psychologists and lawyers.

As I read the article, I got a weird vibe. It was almost as if there was a bias against the idea of video games being used to do more than subvert children. I don’t get it. I think using video games as educational tools is a natural fit. The Oregon Trail taught me history and geography. Lemonade Stand taught me about the challenges involved in running a business. Both expanded my vocabulary, as I didn’t know what it meant to caulk a wagon or what advertising was before playing those games. I learned that “inadequate” meant that there wasn’t enough grass to feed my oxen, which explained why they were dying whenever I got those messages. At the time, I had to look up these words in a dead-tree dictionary. I remember looking up scurvy in an encyclopedia when my character fainted from the disease in The Illusion of Gaia. And there were countless historical strategy games that led me to crack open my history books and read AHEAD of what my class was scheduled to learn in order to understand what really happened in the world I was participating in.

Books and video games. Why can’t they be complementary?

Categories
Geek / Technical

ComicJuice Announced

Thanks to my friend Larry, I learned about a cool new technology called ComicJuice.

Imagine a tool that allows you to create comics easily and share them with others. You can place images anywhere, stretching and shrinking the relevant panels as you go. Word bubbles can easily be created to match any scene. The video demonstration was impressive.

Even more impressive? The developer spent only four days creating it!

It’s a fairly new technology, and the results of the work are a little sloppy currently, but I am sure that they will only get better with time. I can see ComicJuice becoming the YouTube of web comics.

Categories
Game Development Geek / Technical Personal Development

POTM for February: Countdown Clock Extension for Firefox

The general idea of the Project of the Month is to donate some money to an open source project and write a blog post about it. Everyone knows about the major open source projects, such as the Linux kernel or Firefox, but there are plenty of examples of open source projects that impact you in some way that might not appear on most people’s radars.

For this month’s POTM entry, I decided to go with the Countdown Clock extension for Firefox.

Whenever I install Firefox on a new computer, I always make sure to install a few extensions, and Countdown Clock is one of them. Basically, you use it as a timer to countdown to some future time. You can countdown to a specific date and time, or you could set it to be relative to the current time. I don’t normally use it for long term countdowns, such as to my birthday or a hot date, but I do use it to timebox. Timeboxing is when you give yourself a set time, say 30 minutes, to do as much as you can at a specific task. For example, when I program, I sometimes have trouble getting motivated to do anything, and after three hours, I might have nothing accomplished. With Countdown Clock, I set it for 45 minutes, and it is almost like I am in college again, working on a paper at the last minute. All of a sudden, I’m focused, and sometimes I’m in The Zone. I can get a lot accomplished in that 45 minutes, knowing that I can take a small break once that time is up. I can also reset the timer again, getting two or more sessions of 45 minutes in an evening.

45 minutes also happens to correspond with how often I have to change a load of laundry, so I can work on game development and still know when to head to the laundry room. Timeboxing and clean clothes: a winning combination.

You can set Countdown Clock to popup an announcement, but I chose not to have the popup. The message still appears in the bottom corner of Firefox when the coutndown is finished, and I find that having a .wav file play is good enough for me. I chose to use a long screaming laugh from Gir of Invader Zim. You just can’t mistake it for some music or sound effect from an application I happen to be running at the time.

One of the side-effects of running Countdown Clock is that the bottom of the browser has the last message you asked it to say. It’s weird when it says something like “Get laundry!” or “Time to eat lunch!”, especially when the message makes no sense, but I like to set it to something inspirational. Currently I use “Don’t ruin your mind” to remind me not to idle away at pointless websites when I could be doing something on purpose.

Thanks go to the developer, Frederic Mercille, for making a wonderful extension.

Categories
Game Design Game Development Games Geek / Technical Linux Game Development

Open Source Game Development Discussion Podcast

Thanks to LinuxGames.com, I learned about the latest podcast of Open Source On The Air. This podcast focuses on open source game developers from the Thousand Parsec and Wesnoth projects as well as Kruel Studios.

I find it interesting that the developers pretty much agreed that quality artwork was their main concern. I suppose when you are all programmers, finding good code isn’t a problem.