The Ludologist

With the Tetris lawsuit of the way, the action has moved to EA’s lawsuit against Zynga for copying the Sims in Zynga’s The Ville.

Like the Tetris case, it comes down partly to the idea-expression dichotomy. (Better explained here.) You cannot protect the core idea of the game (semi-controlling little people), but you can protect the details of how it is expressed:  protection is afforded to the combination of character looks, menus, etc… all the small design decisions that express this idea.

Xio Interactive lost to the Tetris company because a sufficient number of small design decisions such as size of the playfield and color changes were similar to the original Tetris. The judge said:

“I find the following elements are also protected expression and further support a finding of infringement: the dimensions of the playing field, the display of “garbage” lines, the appearance of “ghost” or shadow pieces, the display of the next piece to fall, the change in color of the pieces when they lock with the accumulated pieces, and the appearance of squares automatically filling in the game board when the game is over. None of these elements are part of the idea (or the rules or the functionality) of Tetris, but rather are means of expressing those ideas.”

I am sympathetic to the principle that you cannot copyright a game idea.

On the other hand, this creates a counter-intuitive reversal in which the core innovative idea of a game is unprotectable, and only the trivial design decisions that follow are afforded protection. I think this makes some sense, but isn’t there something strange about it too?

In practice you see something similar in patents, such as in the Apple-Samsung case, where each patent is just a list of obvious or near-obvious concepts combined, with some vague specifics added (a database! a heuristic! a mobile device!), but where it’s the staggeringly banal specifics that actually make it patentable. Patents and copyright are obviously not the same thing, but there are some parallels here. Or this Google patent for face unlocking of devices, which has already been done a million times, except now it’s on a mobile device, with user switching!

Patent law is clearly broken, but I am not sure I would change copyright law.

It’s just that our intuition of what constitutes the “core of a game” puts emphasis on what we could call “the idea”, whereas copyright puts emphasis on what seems to be the shallow surface.

More sportsmanship discussion from the Olympics, here is gold-winning British cyclist Philip Hindes publicly admitting that he crashed his bike on purpose to get a restart.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=IO5QGCzZhb0
Hindes has since retracted the comment, but I have to say that it’s one of the less convincing crashes I’ve seen.

(Via Dylan McKenzie.)

Last week at the Olympics, The Badminton World Federation disqualified eight badminton players for losing matches intentionally in order to get weaker opponents in the coming round.

It is one of those questions: is it OK to lose a match in order to get ahead, or are you always to supposed to put in maximum effort? The Badminton “Code of Conduct” does state that you should always try to win a match:

BWF’s Players’ Code of Conduct – Sections 4.5 and 4.16 respectively – with “not using one’s best efforts to win a match” and “conducting oneself in a manner that is clearly abusive or detrimental to the sport”.

I can understand why it would be frustrating to pay money to watch such a match, but on the other hand the players really were performing to the best of their abilities in order to win the tournament.

I feel that it is the responsibility of the game designers, the Badminton World Federation and the Olympics, to make sure that the optimal way of playing the game involves winning every match. In this case, the players are really being punished for poor game design.

But part of the issue is also about the scope of “one’s best efforts”. The players’ best efforts were not going toward that particular match, but toward the overall tournament. It follows that we could imagine at least four different type of “best effort” arguments, from strict to lenient:

1. As a player you should put in maximum effort in every single moment in a game.
2. As a player, you should always put in maximum effort in order to win a match.
3. As a player, you should always put in maximum effort in order to win a tournament.
4. As a player, you can do whatever you want as long as it is within the general rules of the game. Win, lose, play well, play badly – it’s up to you.

As we can see, the BWF has chosen type 2: they will probably not punish a player for playing below ability when far behind in a set, or for not diving in order to catch every single shot. Conversely, they don’t acknowledge that a match in a tournament may be played for larger goals (type 3). A more lenient type 4 argument would say that players can do whatever they wanted within the rules (the famous spoilsport behavior).

Summing up, I was about to say that I intuitively support a type 3 argument, but do I really? For some reason I feel that losing on purpose is more acceptable in Badminton than in Soccer. Perhaps because Soccer matches are longer and involve more people, and hence feel more like standalone events? But I am certain that we are having this discussion only because the BWF made a poor game design decision.

The extended Mass Effect 3 ending is now out, and we can consider whether it was a good idea to complain about the original ending. Here is some of what the download gives us:

“Against all odds, and in the face of the greatest threat this galaxy has ever known, we survived.

We suffered many losses. The relays are severely damaged, but we won.

This victory belongs to each of us…every man, woman, and child. Every civilization…on every world.

Now, as we take our first steps towards restoring what we lost, we must remember what it took to win.

This wasn’t a victory by a single fleet, a single army, or even a single species.

If this war has taught us anything, it is that we are at our strongest when we work together.

And if we can put down our grievances long enough to stop something as powerful as the Reapers, imagine what we can achieve now that they are defeated.

It will take time, but we can rebuild everything that was destroyed. Our homes, our worlds, our fleets and defenses. All of this and more.

Together, we can build a future greater than any one of us can imagine.

A future paid for by the sacrifices of those who fought and died alongside us. A future that many will never see.

And while we still have many challenges ahead of us. We can face them together. And we will honor those who died to give us that future.”

Someone never bought into the whole “War Against Cliché” thing. And no further comment is necessary. 

The extended ending makes me realize how much I disliked the long morale speeches in the game … can I say openly that the writing above is sort of terrible? Here, the extended ending has simply amplified the worst things about the game. And I have very  little interest in having the fate of every single character spelled out for me. Did Grunt finally open the auto repair shop that he had always dreamt of? That belittles what I found interesting in the game. But again, this the Lost  ending problem: how do you wrap up a work with broad appeal, given that the audience may have very different investments?