DIGITALKOIFISH'S PROFILE

I think that there should have been a better response accompanying the denial. It wasn't constructive enough to help the person as a game maker, and a rude response is also very detrimental to this.

In terms of the discussion, effort is definitely about putting more than a few days' or hours' worth of work into creating the game. It's fine to mess around with a program and create something quick for yourself in your own time, but if you take programming seriously, regardless of whether it's a hobby or something you'd like to do professionally you should work in a manner that reflects that desire. That means, more than just four days of work. That means writing out a scenario script, ideating characters and plot points, over all researching, among other things before you even begin programming. Granted there are contests on this website that push programmers to develop things in a limited amount of time, this doesn't mean that people should be submitting games that are half hearted.

It is quite passionate to spend four days straight developing a game without food, drink, or sleep. It is also absurd and a little ridiculous. A decent game is very unlikely to have been conceived within four days' time. I've never observed this happening before, at least. Even the competitions here end up receiving works that are very limited in their scope and although they are fun to play, they aren't any where near feeling complete and fully fleshed out.

Effort is all about the work that's put into a piece, not the passion. Those are two different aspects to the human character.

Wow, everyone's so angry now...

See what I did there? I made a blanket statement.

comment=38644
That is not the same thing as plagiarism.

Yeah but the topic went from blatant copying to the question of originality. I was just rolling with the punches.

Oh and as an added note, when was the last time anyone here saw a completely original game on this website or any other amateur/indie game website with graphics/music/story or anything that wasn't stolen or re-appropriated from someone or somewhere else? I'd say that you'd be hard-pressed to find something like that anywhere on the internet. I'd say that only a slim maybe 5-10% of all the amateur games being made out there have everything made completely from scratch.

I think that this argument is more about unspoken rules and codes of conduct rather than anything legal or set in stone and to prove it, regardless of whether or not some new wave of thinking comes across the game making community there will continue to be games with graphics/music/sounds/parts of stories from other games. Lest we forget that a majority of these makers are probably under the age of 18 and most of them still have yet to finish puberty.

I doubt that half those kids have the time to sit down and write a complete story and make all the graphics for a game and do completely flawless programming. That's why rips, tutorials, articles, and all that exist. A lot of them don't even know what the word 'plagiarism' means nor do they understand the concept of giving credit to others or such.

If you want to get mad at anyone, get mad at all the people that should know better, and even then determining who to be mad at and all that is all subjective. If people are really that concerned about getting their stuff stolen, they should either not post their stuff online, or take better care of searching out all the people using their stolen stuff. Or maybe RMN and every other indie game website should have tighter restrictions and regulations about this kind of stuff.

A lot of this article seems to deal with the issue of cliches as well as the issue of plagiarism. When it comes to ripping stuff from other professional games, that is a matter that is in a legal realm all on its own; however, there is a little something called fair use which applies to everything and anything created by everyone.

It basically says that as long as you don't make any money off the property being used or pass it off as your own without altering it more than 20% then it is okay to use copyrighted works without the permission of the copyright owner. So it's basically alright for us to use ripped graphics from old SNES games because we're not making any money off the games we make and unless someone is passing off old graphics as their own then it's not a problem.

Because we as amateurs don't have the means nor the resources to copyright these kinds of things without getting into legal ramifications of our own, anything and everything that we make is liable to be used as well. People are free to use the things we create without our permission so long as we are credited for it as long as they won't be making money off it.

Now all this legal mumbo jumbo may seem unfair but to protect our rights as creative people, these clauses are put into action otherwise, someone could legally justify the use of the sleepyhead boy saves the world as being stolen intellectual property and sue for that. If we didn't have these sorts of fair use laws then we would be hurting because so many disputes over originality may arise from them.

The way I see it, we can't stop people from using graphics legally but if someone isn't getting credit where credit is due or if we don't come out and say "Hey, I was inspired by such and such and such games or movies or whatever," then it is our responsibility as civil people and as a forum/community of creative, and logical people to say something about it.

In laymen's terms, the ability to use the words "fair use" to justify using someone else's graphics or stories prevents someone else from calling you out on plagiarism because your idea is this much similar to theirs.