Protecting your ideas.

There has been a lot of discussion about this here at the BGDF -- just browse through the Game Design forum and you'll see lots of responses, or search for "copyright" or "patent" in the forums (click "Search", above).

The gist of it is this: ideas are incredibly cheap. I would not pay a dime for a dozen game ideas. If you're certain you have the next new craze in gaming -- the next Magic: The Gathering or the next Cranium -- then maybe you'll want to keep it under your hat. If, however, you have another cool idea for a boardgame, I am of the opinion that you are at no risk discussing it here.

Just as a touchpoint, we used to have live chat Game Design Challenges. Participants had a maximum of 10 minutes (sometimes as little as 5) to come up with a description and concept for a game that uses a theme and one to three mechanisms supplied right then. Within those 10 minutes at least two or three real gems emerged, really fun-sounding games that are ready to be fleshed out. That's how cheap ideas are. (Don't get me wrong: it takes talent to come up with ideas. It's just that it's not that amazing to come up with an idea for a game.)

The game is worth something when it actually works as a full-fledged, playable, fun game. This is, generally, a long ways from the initial idea. You've undoubtedly seen folks openly discussing their ideas here, and in part that's because they know that ideas are fun to discuss but are, essentially, valueless.

Perhaps more to the point of your background, boardgames have very little protection available, anyway. You can copyright the rules and your graphics, but the gameplay is wide open. Some people have patented their gameplay, but if you do a quick patent search for "board game" or "boardgame," you will see that the vast, vast majority of them never became games at all: they were just people who spent a lot of money out of fear. Except for games with physical mechanisms (like Hungry, Hungry Hippos), you will find that less than 1% of published games have a patent. As far as I can tell, no gameplay mechanism patent has been challenged in court, so it's quite possible that even those patents are useless.

To sum: I have over 100 ideas for boardgames in my notebooks that have at least some level of fleshing out. Those ideas, though, are currently completely worthless. The several games that I've fully fleshed out and am tweaking in playtesting are, on the other hand, extremely close to worthless. Just not as cheap as the ideas. ;)

And welcome!

-- Matthew

I agree with all of this. Ideas are not worthless, but are indeed objectively valueless. Even the uber-clever bit in a full-realized game is, more than likley something seen before, in some form.

But the value of a game is in the specific combination of all of the seperate elements. I, too, keep many specifics from these boards, but just because I don't want to bog them down with technical details, and generally don't want input into the pros and cons of a specific mechanism. After a game is complete, the gameplay can be judged in terms of one element or the other. But the work of design is something I don't want influence in, until a certain point has been reached.

But this is not because the ideas themselves are valuable. And the idea tha Hasbro or any other company has to steal someone elses ideas is ludacrous. They've got people with notebooks of ideas all their own.

Well, to be honest, I don't really believe the point I made about Hasbro designers. They just buy up a company, if they want a new product. why fool around with in-house designers when buying a new company is so cheap?

What country do you live in? Here in the good ole USA, anyway, you can sue for anything. And raise one hell of a stink on the net. And if the idea was posted here a year or two before the game came out, legal protection wouldn't matter nearly as much as public ridicule could. (Not that people don't come up with identical ideas in vacuums -- obviously they do.) Just not worth any of it, with thousands of ideas sitting right there, unused.

And amusingly, I'm a computer professional and a graphic designer. And I'm always accused of having too beautiful of prototypes. But it's simply much, much, MUCH faster for me to sketch, resketch, resketch, ad nauseum until the idea comes together fully than it would be to even draw it on the computer one time.

I'll note, though, that for things that require a lot of precision that I'm still working on, I will sometimes create them in the computer, print them out, paste them into my paper notebook, and notate them. :)

Me too, but most of it isn't text.

I did early-on, but found that there were too many wholesale changes from the early stages, making it not worth it, time-wise.

Indeed!

-- Matthew

It took me awhile before I caught on.

Well, maybe... but just here at BGDF I've been frustrated recently because the last THREE cool game ideas I had were each being considered by at least two other designers - independently, mind you. Some had the idea before me (and I found out after posting notes about my designs) and some after me (for an idea I hadn't posted yet!)

Maybe that just says something about my own lack of originality. But I've also learned that "an idea" is definitely not a game (as has been said before in this thread). Each game is different: Clark's bike-messenger game isn't like mine, all the "The King is Dead" games are different, and so on.

I draw two conclusions from this. One is that I'm unlikely to come up with anything that's actually unique. Maybe I'll get lucky some day, but the odds are against me. Therefore protecting my ideas is probably pointless, because they aren't uniquely mine to start with.

The second conclusion is that even if an idea of mine is stolen, it probably doesn't matter because the game that somebody else builds around the idea won't be like the one I build.

So I'm not gonna worry about it. :)

In the music world, subliminal imprints are cited as "influences" and serve to categorize a musician's style.
In journalists' circles, it's called plagiarism, and will get you kicked out of cocktail parties faster than you can say Jayson Blair.
I'd like to know what board game designers call it.

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the sun.
Is there anything of which one can say, "Look! This is something new"? It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time.
There is no remembrance of men of old, and even those who are yet to come will not be remembered by those who follow.

-(Ecclesiastes 1:9-11)

Again saying "wow I thought of that same game idea exactly 23 minutes before designer Y on BGDF did" means nada....

I hope you'll find, as you hang around here some more, that this isn't really how this community works. While we are technically in competition with each other for limited publication spots (for those who even seek to publish, which is not even necessarily a majority), this is actually a remarkably uncompetitive place. In the cases where you do see a post that reads "hey, I'm working on a similar game", I think it's more about seeking to compare notes and learn from each other's approach rather than one-ups-manship.

One caution I would offer to Vassoul about the "full disclosure" approach, however, is that it is extremely common for designers here (and maybe everywhere) to get inspired by an idea that they've read about, and to springboard off of that into their own design. They (we?) won't steal your idea per se, but may use the more interesting bits as a core element of a new game. So, you have to decide for yourself whether this kind of thing would bother you or not. Some people consider it flattering, and some consider it irritating.

To me, I keep in mind that the vast majority of games discussed here, including my own, are probably never going to see the light of day, so if someone takes my idea and runs with it, well, the chances of that actually hurting me in any direct way (by competing with my game for shelf space) are nil, so I take it as a compliment when and if it happens.

One last comment regarding companies lurking on these boards for ideas to steal. Put that out of your mind; that's not going to happen. I think the only companies that do in-house designs are Hasbro, Fantasy Flight and Eagle, and they're not hurting for ideas or submissions. Frankly, if companies were lurking on our site, I would consider this a very good thing. The whole problem with getting into the hobby industry is that the companies would rather, if possible, put Alan Moon's name or Reiner Knizia's name on the box than an unknown designer. Having some exposure might actually help more of us to get published. A good game will still hopefully make it through, but if a company wants to publish your game, they want to put your name on it.

That's how I see it, anyway...

-Jeff

WHSmith (and similar companies), though, know they're only going to sell stuff that people recognize. "Hey, that looks like that game I used to play with my brother," that kind of thing.

Why anyone would try to save a few bucks by buying a "generic" version of a game they'd never even heard of or seen before is a bit of a mystery to me, but why a publisher would risk a big chunk of money on publishing such a thing is beyone anything I can imagine.

And to Brahmulus: Jeff's absolutely correct. I've been part of this community since the beginning and there's no one-upsmanship here at all. Which is a huge part of why it's such a great community.

-- Matthew

Really, even the publication of a similar game isn't that big a deal. There are any number of cases on Boardgame Geek that describe Game A as being "basically Game B with minor changes", or "a new theme."

the style of the game counts for more than we're giving it credit for, I think. People will buy the same content repeatedly, if there's some stylistic changes. Monopoly, anyone? Risk?

Oh, and my personal theory is that ideas, when they formulate, bounce off the upper atmosphere like AM radio waves to a different spot on the globe. they used to land in the Soviet Union, but now, apparently, they arrive in LA.

Strange.

I recently got a patent on a game I developed. I wrote the patent myself, did the drawings myself, and did all the submission myself. All in my spare time. I initially submitted two independent claims, one for the game "apparatus" (a general physical embodiment of the game), and one for the "game play method". Ultimately the claim associated with the apparatus was rejected completely, while my claim for the game method (the more important of the two) was accepted.

Of course, not everyone will have the desire or time to go about getting a patent themselves, but I definitely would NOT have spent thousands of dollars to have a lawyer or one of those silly (IMHO) "inventor representative" companies do it.

I agree totally with FastLearner's statement; don't let fear drive you into getting a patent. The main reason I did it was simply because I wanted to see if I could. Frankly, it was vanity more than anything. However, the additional credibility it provides and the small additional peace of mind are nice too. But because I did it myself, the whole thing only cost me a few hundred bucks (small entity filing fees) and maybe 40 hours of my free time over a few months. And it was fun.

But the greatest benefits of writing a patent application were that it forced me to do a lot of research on the competition (what other games similar to mine already exist = prior art) and isolate the truly unique characteristics of my game and articulate them. This has helped me to become a better advocate of my own game with others, revise a business plan, better gague who my customers would be, what my sales channels should be, etc.

I can also recommend the book Patent It Yourself by David Pressman. Between that book, and simply printing off a dozen or so copies of existing patents for games like Cranium and others as examples (you can freely copy any language you want from existing patents - plagiarism doesn't apply), it was not particularly difficult to write a patent.

Cheers,
Bill