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Darren New <dne### [at] san rrcom> wrote:
> > http://www.copyright.gov/fls/fl108.pdf
> That's kind of odd, given "look and feel" lawsuits covering everything from
> greeting cards to windowing interfaces. I would think the entirety of a
> video game (especially a casual one) would fall under "look and feel."
The look and feel of a product can be trademarked (tradedress). It does
not fall under copyright.
Look and feel is not about game mechanics, the way a game works and how
it's played. It's how it looks.
If you make a game that looks like, for example, a Barbie game (including
color schemes, fonts, character design...), the company that owns the
tradedress rights can sue you even if you never use the name "Barbie" or
any of the other trademarked names of the franchise. However, they cannot
sue you from copying the game mechanics of one of their games, if you use
your own original graphics, sounds and code.
A puzzle piece consisting of four squares is not distinctive enough to
be considered tradedressing, even assuming tetris was tradedressed (which
it isn't).
> I'm not sure this is talking about video games, given the rest of the
> paragraph. It makes much more sense if you read it in terms of something
> like board games.
And why would it make any difference, exactly?
--
- Warp
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nemesis <nam### [at] gmailcom> wrote:
> BTW, Pac-man was pretty casual: you inserted a coin, played for
> high-scores or until you ran out of coins. Most old arcade games were
> like that and at the same time were also pretty hardcore in the
> challenge level. COD is one such casual game today, except it's not
> nearly as hardcore in the challenge.
It's not so much about how easy it is to play. Certainly there are
blockbuster-budgeted ginormous multi-gigabyte games which are really
easy to learn and play, and can be easily played in short sessions.
Yet those are seldom classified as casual games.
Of course the definition of "casual game" is a pretty fuzzy one, and
no single definition is going to cover all possible casual games (which,
at the same time, also usually covers games which are not generally
considered as such).
Any definition would also have to be take the time period into account.
What was a "big" game 15 years ago (say, Doom) might not be such today.
(By today's standards Doom is a really tiny game in all possible respects,
except perhaps length.)
> > Try to find a tetris game for the iPhone or the Android. I won't hold
> > my breath.
> Touch interface decidedly demands new play controls, like pulling an
> elastic cord until you can release a bird. Old direction and buttons
> don't work for touch interface, you don't have tactile feedback for you
> actions. No, some rumble won't do it.
That's not the problem.
--
- Warp
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On 5/3/2011 11:15, Warp wrote:
> The look and feel of a product can be trademarked (tradedress). It does
> not fall under copyright.
In the USA, it certainly did before the DMCA. I don't know about nowadays.
The whole Apple vs Microsoft think was a look-and-feel copyright suit. Note
that the original look-and-feel suit that got to the supreme court here was
over greeting cards. The one guy did a bunch of focus groups and such to
decide what greeting cards to make. The other guy wandered thru the stores,
looked at the competitors, and told his artists to come up with similar
cards. (One of the judges who disagreed with the ruling thought it was a bad
idea to allow for uncopyrightable phrases like "I love you" combined with
original art to still be subject to someone else's copyright.)
> Look and feel is not about game mechanics, the way a game works and how
> it's played. It's how it looks.
Possibly.
> If you make a game that looks like, for example, a Barbie game (including
> color schemes, fonts, character design...), the company that owns the
> tradedress rights can sue you even if you never use the name "Barbie" or
> any of the other trademarked names of the franchise.
This is true.
> However, they cannot
> sue you from copying the game mechanics of one of their games, if you use
> your own original graphics, sounds and code.
I'm not sure this is true everywhere.
> A puzzle piece consisting of four squares is not distinctive enough to
> be considered tradedressing, even assuming tetris was tradedressed (which
> it isn't).
>
>> I'm not sure this is talking about video games, given the rest of the
>> paragraph. It makes much more sense if you read it in terms of something
>> like board games.
>
> And why would it make any difference, exactly?
Because you're trying to apply engineering logic to the legal system. That
isn't how it works. :-)
I'm just saying that what you can copyright on (say) a monopoly game board
is probably easier to duplicate without violating copyright than what you
can copyright in a video game. In monopoly, I can't copyright the layout of
the squares or the rules. I can copyright what the squares say, the text of
the rules, possibly the colors and their arrangements on the board. But
those are easy to change without affecting the play of the game.
It's much harder to imagine you've copyrighted the look and feel of tetris
but I can still make a tetris game. Basically, there isn't a whole lot I can
change and still have the same tetris. The pieces still have to be the same
shape, to fall and rotate, to disappear when they make a line.
Bejeweled might be sort of intermediate. What if they're not jewels? What if
I change the gameplay to make different power-ups? These are all the sorts
of things judges would decide, methinks.
One could easily argue, methinks, that the actual real-time interaction of a
game is part of the "look and feel" of a video game, when it isn't part of
the "look and feel" of a board game.
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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On 03/05/2011 05:00 PM, Warp wrote:
> Invisible<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
>> The other group comprises everything else. I call these "alpha games".
>
> The rest of the world calls them casual games.
I thought "casual games" just refers to all those pointless
browser-based Flash games that keep bored office workers amused in their
lunch breaks. (?)
> Try to find a tetris game for the iPhone or the Android. I won't hold
> my breath.
>
> (Explanation: There's a copyright troll named "The Tetris Company" based
> in Russia which sends frivolous copyright claims to Apple and most other
> game providers for any user-created tetris clone.
Some people really have nothing better to do, eh?
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>> The rest of the world calls them casual games.
>
> And the first batch is AAA games.
Well, *I* wouldn't use the term AAA in the same sentence as, say,
Cryostasis. It implies games which are actually *good*, whereas I'm
talking about games sharing a certain design idea, regardless of whether
they're actually any good.
Seriously. Cryostasis was hopeless.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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Orchid XP v8 escreveu:
> Seriously. Cryostasis was hopeless.
interesting. Some people were telling it was pretty good. What about
the plot? (I think they were praising it mainly)...
--
a game sig: http://tinyurl.com/d3rxz9
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On 5/3/2011 12:49, Orchid XP v8 wrote:
> games sharing a certain design idea,
OK. I wasn't sure what the design idea you were talking about was, other
than "we have architecture, and some semblance of a story."
--
Darren New, San Diego CA, USA (PST)
"Coding without comments is like
driving without turn signals."
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Orchid XP v8 <voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> On 03/05/2011 05:00 PM, Warp wrote:
> > Invisible<voi### [at] devnull> wrote:
> >> The other group comprises everything else. I call these "alpha games".
> >
> > The rest of the world calls them casual games.
> I thought "casual games" just refers to all those pointless
> browser-based Flash games that keep bored office workers amused in their
> lunch breaks. (?)
What kind of games do you think PopCap makes?
--
- Warp
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>> Seriously. Cryostasis was hopeless.
>
> interesting. Some people were telling it was pretty good. What about the
> plot? (I think they were praising it mainly)...
It had potential... but it failed to deliver.
For a start, the game is very slow and rather buggy, which is never
good. (I was running it with an nVidia GeForce 260 GPU and an admittedly
outdated dual-core CPU, but others have reported poor performance.)
The story looks interesting, but it doesn't really make sense. It looks
like you're learning more about the fate of the ship as the game goes
on, and by the end all will be explained... but it isn't. Things start
out sane enough, but by the end any pretense of realism is long gone and
you're just having impossible paranormal events thrown at you at random,
for no defined reason. And then suddenly the game just ends.
The concept of heat and cold is interesting. You walk into a dark,
silent, ice-laden room. You flick a switch, and it gradually turns into
a loud, hot, steamy, brightly-lit space. Which *could* have been quite
effective, if it wasn't done so poorly. When one wall melts completely,
and the wall right next to it is still perfectly frozen, it kinda spoils
the effect. And the "melting" is just some trivial texture effects that
don't look especially convincing.
This is focusing on the *good* aspects of the game. The bad aspects
include... everything else. Combat is awful. The whole game is set
onboard a ship, so all the levels look nearly identical; no exploration
value there then! What does that leave? The interesting story that
gradually stops making sense and then suddenly ends? Yay, great game.
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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>>> The rest of the world calls them casual games.
>
>> I thought "casual games" just refers to all those pointless
>> browser-based Flash games that keep bored office workers amused in their
>> lunch breaks. (?)
>
> What kind of games do you think PopCap makes?
I bought a game from them. It wasn't especially *good*, but I'm not sure
if it's what you'd call "casual".
--
http://blog.orphi.me.uk/
http://www.zazzle.com/MathematicalOrchid*
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