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Re-invention and plagiarism

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coco
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Joined: 07/27/2008

Hi, all!

It happened twice. :(

Only a few days after publishing TAIJI with bluepanther, a bgg user accused me of plagiarism because a very simmilar game (very, I must admit) already existed: TONGA. He was very rude.

TAIJI: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31926

TONGA http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/13069

And now I've released Domina 4 as public domain and a few days later another bgg user pointed me to this game : Blöff. This time he was a designer and a very kind person. He agreed with me it was just a coincidence.

Domina 4: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/39992

Blöff: http://www.boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/15055

I'm just to sad that I needed to share this with you. Does this ever happened to you?

Thank you.

Néstor.

Gogolski
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I just looked at taiji and

I just looked at taiji and tonga and with the pieces having both colors, I'm inclined to say that they are quite different! It is sad that someone should react that way...

Don't let it get to you! It's probably just jealousy or something...

Keep on designing, publisheng and most of all having fun and satisfaction!

Fred.

bluesea
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I just looked at Taiji and

I just looked at Taiji and Tonga:
If you look at the implementation here (http://homepages.di.fc.ul.pt/~jpn/gv/tonga.htm) for Tonga, there are fewer similarities. Tonga would actually play much differently using the stones on the diagonal as shown. A different game indeed.

The scoring of "islands" is similar, but it is an obvious solution to a shared design problem. I see coincidence of design.

The party accusing you of plagiarism should be very, very careful. This is not a word that should be used flippantly. If said party makes statements as such in public, think about contacting a lawyer.

InvisibleJon
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Ziggurat coincidences

In May 2002, I released a domino-stacking game called Ziggurat:

http://www.invisible-city.com/play/96/ziggurat

That same month - pretty much at the same time, another print-and-play free-release game designer released a game that used dominoes, also called Ziggurat:

http://www.tomgale.com/galegames/ziggurat-v2.htm

We quickly realized that our games were similar only in components and name, not in mechanics. We agreed to let each other use the name, and everything was fine.

jeffinberlin
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Joined: 07/29/2008
The more abstract...

I think the more abstract a game is, the more chances there may be that someone else is thinking of something similar, especially if they use components commonly found around the house (like dominoes, standard playing cards, etc.)

Your Blue Panther version looks very nice and has a higher BGG rating, so perhaps there is a little jealousy there.

It's difficult to accuse someone of plagarism, though, in this business, as there are so many mechanisms that are used multiple times and you can't patent them. When a game is published, you only hold the copyright to that completed game (that particular theme and mechanics combination).

There are so many games that have similar mechanics that were most likely developed at the same time, unbeknownst to the other designer. The innovative time track for Neuland and Thebes is an example.

Still, there are other games I really wonder about. Like the children's game from Selecta called Viva Topo that seems to have identical mechanics to Wolfgang Kramer's popular "Mitternachtsparty."

larienna
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What you call" Plagiarism" is common is game design

First, since most euro games are a combination of mechanics, It happen many times that this combination has already been used. The same euro mechanic also get's reused from a game to another.

Second, many games are remakes of a games that already exist. For example, I bought recently Shazamm and apparently it's a remake of an old pen and paper game with special powers added to it. I also got my hands on wizards which is a remakes on a old normal card game. So it's common to see games which are reimplementation of other games.

Finally, coincidence is another common situation. It happen once to me when my friend was describing how arkham horror worked to realized that there was a lot of things in common with my game: Investigator, money, city locations, etc.

VeritasGames
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Néstor, I wouldn't be

Néstor, I wouldn't be concerned about Taiji. I have a game called Linkstones that predates your publication of Taiji that I haven't published yet. It's part of our upcoming "Box of Rox" game set (I was waiting to publish it until I could bundle it with another game). I said, "Lee, what kinds of good abstract games can you design with game stones and a 10 x 10 grid". I came up with Linkstones as the first response to that.

You place stones on a checkerboard (one per space). At the end of your game you get 50 points minus one for every one of your stones that forms a corner with other stones of your color (i.e., that has a stone both above or below it AND one to the left or right of it).

Mechanically Linkstones is different than Taiji, but both are effectively chain scoring games with much similarity. That's part of the reason I liked Taiji so much -- I like that genre of games. Linkstones and Taiji are in the family of Go, Go Moku, Reversi, etc. Go is 2500 years old, there are only so many "stones on a grid" variants that one can come up with. Taiji could trivially be played with game stones of two colors, but is merely more convenient to be played with wooden pieces you designed. It's still very much in the "stones making a pattern on a board" family, so there will always be similarities to other games in the family.

In any case, I have no problems with borrowing from other designers as long as I have had a significant amount of additional materials or some twists that improve upon the original in some way.

My game Powerstorm, in its advanced version, had about a 20% similarity to Overpower, about 20% similarity to Wildstorms, about a 10% similarity to the Vs. System and about 50% all new mechanical implementations. Anyone who had played one of the other superhero CCGs games always said it played something like a game that they knew. People identify what they are familiar with. Powerstorm has no resource/energy mechanic, and yet people were always trying to find something to "tap". Why? They had played Magic the Gathering and were looking for similarities so that they could grasp the game better.

Taiji, at least, is novel because of the pieces you invented which allow you to play the game a little more easily than you could have with stones and a board. Take your innovation, embrace it, and realize that nay sayers are everywhere. Move on to designing your next game.

Regards,
Lee Valentine
President
Veritas Games Co. LLC

coco
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Joined: 07/27/2008
Thank you!

Thank you all for your support! This is one of the coolest places in the universe.

Of course I will design more games. Although I'm moving from abstracts to more thematic ones at the moment. Less risk of re-invention.

VeritasGames wrote:
Néstor, I wouldn't be concerned about Taiji. I have a game called Linkstones that predates your publication of Taiji that I haven't published yet. It's part of our upcoming "Box of Rox" game set (I was waiting to publish it until I could bundle it with another game). I said, "Lee, what kinds of good abstract games can you design with game stones and a 10 x 10 grid". I came up with Linkstones as the first response to that.

Hi, Lee! Good to see you again.

Do you mean you need a game that can be played with your Linkstones set?

Néstor.

Willi B
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Joined: 07/28/2008
Don't let it bug you.

I still remember the binary offering you gave to the continuous hidden movement problem and thought well of you ever since... I haven't used that idea, but I think there will be use for it in some design someday.

BTW - let me know if you ever brainstorm another idea on that one! I had to go in another direction, but I still love the binary thing you did... simple and perfect.

coco
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Thank you, Willi B!

Willi B wrote:
I still remember the binary offering you gave to the continuous hidden movement problem and thought well of you ever since... I haven't used that idea, but I think there will be use for it in some design someday.

BTW - let me know if you ever brainstorm another idea on that one! I had to go in another direction, but I still love the binary thing you did... simple and perfect.

Thank you, Willi B! I feel great now! hahaha :D

I'm happy you like the idea. I've been trying to implement that binary mechanic in a 'catch the thief' deduction game and I've found a very interesting way of using it. I'll let you know when its almost finished.

Néstor.

bluepantherllc
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Plagiarism

Disclaimer: Blue Panther is the publisherof Taiji.

We research titles before we publish. Did not catch Tonga. It happens. Sometimes people publish games to capitalize on other intellectual property (e.g. the recent online game Scrabulous ran afoul of the Hasborg machine)

Our first game was called Courtyard. Researched that one too. There was a game published in the 80s called Courtyard. Different mechanics, same name. Live and learn.

We live in a world where someone can patent the idea of "tapping" a card by turning it 90 degrees sideways. Where punching a game piece out of a credit card sized piece of plastic can be patented. In theory, does this mean I could patent the idea of cutting out the pieces of a game from a piece of wood? Where would Blue Panther be unless we held that patent?

There are perhaps millions of gamers, and some portion of those gamers want to design their own games. There are not nearly as many "game mechanics" ideas out there as there are designers. So it's reasonable to expect that somewhere, someone else may have thought of an idea similar to or even exactly the same as the ones those at BGDF have. The difference is that you took that idea and actually developed it into a game that's now on the market. That puts you in a much smaller group of people - those that have been "published" vs those that "have a cool game idea".

When I designed a more recent game, I started with the design idea of "Ticket to Ride with combat", although I did not know about TTR at the time. I wanted a game where you build routes, where turns move really fast, there are only two or three choices per turn, and each action you take makes a difference to the outcome of the game. This could be a good description of Ticket to Ride. I also wanted a very simple combat option (if you have more pieces you win) and a population control mechanic to keep the board tense (population limits). When I put these ideas toegether those ideas, along with the destination cards, I came up with Nepal. A new combination of some very common mechanics that many high-selling games happen to share. My first version of the game was actually playtesting before Ticket To Ride came out. So we have parallel evolution. The only difference is about 700000 more copies of that other game sold :-)

It's natural to have ideas start from somewhere else. When I explain a game to someone who hasn't seen it, I often start with "it's like Game X".

Plagiarizing someone else is bad. If it's truly copying then it's copyright or patent infringement, and you can be sued. Plagiarizing yourself can be good and very lucrative. It's the story of the movie sequel industry and several popular game franchises (e.g. Ticket to Ride: Country X and Age of Steam: Country X).

Nuff'said.

SJ

subhan
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Joined: 01/15/2009
repeat after me: game

repeat after me: game mechanics are not copyrightable in the US.
see: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
Very rarely a particular innovative mechanic may be covered by patent. Sometimes trademark applies (EG I think WOTCH has both trademark & patent on the 'Tap' mechanic from Magic:The Gathering, although I could be wrong on that)
In most circumstances, you are completely free to copy everything about a game, including mechanics, except the artistic of the game.
from the US Copyright office link referenced above:

Quote:

Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form. Copyright protection does not extend to any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in the development, merchandising, or playing of a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles.

InvisibleJon
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Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, nor do I even resemble one....

subhan wrote:
repeat after me: game mechanics are not copyrightable in the US.
see: http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.html
Very rarely a particular innovative mechanic may be covered by patent.
More notably, novel physical components can be *patented* in the U.S.A.. Examples: The tower in Dark Tower, the Pop-O-Matic bubble in Trouble and Headache, and constructing components out of bits of plastic cards (Pirates of the XYZ, Star Wars CSM, etc).

VeritasGames
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InvisibleJon wrote:More

InvisibleJon wrote:
More notably, novel physical components can be *patented* in the U.S.A.. Examples: The tower in Dark Tower, the Pop-O-Matic bubble in Trouble and Headache, and constructing components out of bits of plastic cards (Pirates of the XYZ, Star Wars CSM, etc).

Sure, but mechanics can also be patented. A number of companies have vanilla components and unique mechanics for which they hold a patent.

In response to the comments of others, plagiarism is trying to pass someone else's idea off as your own. That often has no relevance in the toy industry. When someone makes a toy knockoff they may not give a damn about intellectual credit for the invention -- they want to capitalize on a share of the market not necessarily claim that their version is original to themselves. Restaurants and other companies make nearly identical competing products all the time. It's business, it's predatory and territorial. It's damned unfair.

If you try to claim originality for someone else's idea, that's disingenuous and potentially unethical, but it's not always illegal, particularly for creating knockoff versions of unpatented games.

Regardless, in this instance the thread involves independently developed games, and even copyright law respects the concept of independent invention. Two nearly identical works can each be granted separate, valid copyrights so long as they were each created without any knowledge garnered from the other.

Plagiarism is more of an ethical construct than a per se legal construct. I could try to pass off some of Thomas Jefferson's writings as my own. By now they are fully public domain. I could get kicked out of university for that behavior, but not sued for copyright infringement.

Lee Valentine
President
Veritas Games Co. LLC

larienna
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Quote:It's natural to have

Quote:
It's natural to have ideas start from somewhere else. When I explain a game to someone who hasn't seen it, I often start with "it's like Game X".

I think it's the same for me. Either I get inspiration from a game first or eventually I find a game that looks close to mine.

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