Crush the Castle developer's response to IGN's "In Defense of Game Clones"

http://www.jeffwofford.com/?p=989

by pertinhower • 14 years ago

52 26 14 years ago

I completely agree with the article. Are we going to start accusing every modern day author of copying Shakespeare because they share certain themes? What matters is the execution not the idea.

samineru• 14 years ago

I think if you fully commit to that idea we sacrifice the creatives to the engineers. I'd prefer a strict but short term of copyright, giving the creatives the incentives to innovate in the short and engineers the freedom to optimize over the rest of time.

Shoomz• 14 years ago

While the idea sounds appealing, look what it's done to the medical industry. I'd hate for gaming to get into such a slog of expensive/long/only big company's can play industry.

ZeroGravitas• 14 years ago

Why's he giving free advertising to IGN if he disagrees with their article?

I take it the accusation he republishes about his colleagues is true, that they "ripped off" another game to make Crush the Castle?

http://www.maxgames.com/game/castle-clout.html

Retric• 14 years ago

This raises a great point, is it OK to clone a bad game and make it fun? I would argue that the mechanics that make a game fun are more important than the idea so copying the 'fun' parts is probably worse than just copying the idea. It's also more obvious that your making a significant change.

Edit: The article suggests that angry birds differs because of the mechanics of a slingshot being more inviting. However an arbitrary score to advance vs. # of projectiles and targets killed makes is IMO a more important advance even if it seems trivial it makes a vary different game.

apitaru3• 14 years ago

Many of us here have experienced our work getting cloned by others. While I totally get that 'everything is a remix', I still can't help but feel that kick in the gut every time this happens. I am always bothered by how much I care. It took me a while to reconcile this emotional-jerk. Here's how I see it now:

John Cleese has a wonderful talk about how each project consists for 'open' and 'close' modes [1]. In one sentence - open mode is playing around with ideas and stumbling upon a gem in the rough, while closed mode is the execution of polishing that gem to perfection.

Seen through this framework, I would claim that 'cloning' is the act of jumping in on someone else's open-mode work, and forking a new close-mode.

Why do we care when someone does this? I think that as the open-mode is a highly creative process, it is hard to not get emotionally attached to the rough-gems it produces. Some will describe it as nothing shy of birthing an idea. In that sense, the kick-in-the-gut that I feel is probably the sense of loss associated with someone 'snatching my new-born'.

I'm not suggesting that cloning is good or bad, but just trying to provide a reasonable explanation to why we feel pain when someone clones our work - even though we know it's OK.

[EDIT: there are situations where 'cloning' is in essence thievery. And that's not OK. Where to draw the line deserves its own thread.]

[1] John Cleese on creativity http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VShmtsLhkQg

codehotter• 14 years ago

I do not feel the kick in the gut when somebody imitates my work. I suspect the feeling is in large part due to how you are socialized.

This is pure speculation - but it is probably important to our social status that we are recognized for our contributions. If others can shamelessly take credit for all our brilliant ideas, they will increase in social status, while we seem not to contribute anything. Thus it makes sense that we would have a deeply seated, hardwired resentment for other people taking credit for our hard work.

Even if somebody copies you and then attributes the work to you, some of the credit for the idea still goes to that person rather than to you. Attributions are often overlooked by 'the public' and the social status often still goes to the person they got it from.

The power of this kick in the gut may lessen the more comfortable you are with your position, and how well esteemed you feel by the people around you. You may be less opposed to having your work copied if you feel, on a deep, emotional level, that you are still in general highly respected for your contributions even if you 'lose' a few to other people copying them and taking credit.

Which reminds me of this comic by Jessica Hagy: http://thisisindexed.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/card2752...

apitaru3• 14 years ago

You make a valid point but I think other factors are at play in my case.

For starters, the comic you've linked to suggests that I don't come up with many new ideas, but a glance at my HN profile might reveal otherwise.

I think it has more to do with how long I spend in open-mode. I suspect longer than others. I like to marinate on my ideas. I try to give myself a lot of time to solve a problem. The result is a certain level of depth that I might feel extra ownership over. This is a side-effect and an unintentional one at that.

I'm now working hard on optimizing my work-flow to counter this issue. Some of it has to do with releasing things sooner than later (thus feeling less invested in them at that point).

blake8086• 14 years ago

This is incredibly insightful. I think you've probably identified exactly the main reason this bothers people so much.

stevenwei• 14 years ago

I respect folks that take an existing idea and evolve it. But for some reason the App Store in particular tends to attract a certain type of developer whose entire approach involves cloning other successful apps in an attempt to make a buck or two.

I have had my iPad app cloned (essentially screen-for-screen) and it definitely felt like a kick in the gut when I found out. The only consolation is that it's pretty obvious that nobody is downloading his clone and the developer most likely wasted his time that could have been better spent doing something original.

njharman• 14 years ago

I'm curious why you wouldn't feel flattered that your creation was noticed and worth copying? I would.

Do you believe ideas can be owned?

apitaru3• 14 years ago

> I'm curious why you wouldn't feel flattered that your creation was noticed and worth copying?

Because I'm human, I guess. Sometimes I'm flattered and sometimes I'm not. It has a lot to do with the nature of project, how it has been copied, who copied it, why they did it.

Understanding this, I'm now trying hard to position myself in situations where I'll be flattered when it happens and disappointed when it doesn't.

> Do you believe ideas can be owned?

I do not, hence the entire premise of my parent post.

tensor2• 14 years ago

Speaking of emotional-jerks, I cannot help but get extremely upset every time I hear how "innovative" angry birds is compared to crush the castle. Replacing a ball with a bird and shortening the launch mechanics do not to me represent the difference between millions of dollars and thousands of dollars.

It drives me crazy that our society allocates millions of dollars of resources in terms of profits for something like this. This is not genius. This is not innovation. It's polish and refinement on an ultimately inconsequential entertainment product. I understand completely why it makes money. But I still cannot help but be upset that things like this do earn obscene amounts of income.

Unfortunately, the markets reward only what people buy, not innovation, not what might change society permanently, nor good intentions. Sometimes it just rewards replacing art assets with birds and pigs.

geoffpado• 14 years ago

Polish and execution are everything. It's the reason Apple's MacBooks sell for much higher prices (and much higher profit margins) than similarly-specced (but lower build quality) PC laptops. It's the reason people are on waiting lists to buy Nest thermostats when the same people didn't give a second thought to thermostats before.

Rovio took a fun idea and made it much more accessible and marketable to people. That's not an easy job, and the market rewarded them appropriately.

jmvoodoo• 14 years ago

Well, there now seems to be case law on the topic: http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-06/20/tetris-clone-...

This could be interesting given the sheer number of clones on the app store. I wonder how many game developers actually have trade dress protection on their game?

mgcross• 14 years ago

I'm surprised the article didn't mention the Tiny Wings/Wavespark thing. It's a great example of how far execution and polish (and for that matter, timing, venue, art style, etc.) can take a relatively simple, but unique idea and mechanic:

http://forums.toucharcade.com/showpost.php?p=1604550&pos...

Zimahl• 14 years ago

There's a thick line of acceptable to unacceptable and developers know when they are stepping over it or not.

IMO, Angry Birds is fine. Different device, game play taken to the next level, different theme. While I have never played 'Crush the Castle', I imagine the boulders the trebucet threw had different results.

As for unacceptable, how about NimbleBit's Tiny Tower vs. Zynga's Dream Heights? Dream Heights isn't in the spirit of the first game, it's the same game with 'better' (I actually prefer Tiny Tower's pixel art) graphics, almost screen for screen[1].

[1]] http://www.slidetoplay.com/story/zynga-releases-tiny-tower-c...

Androsynth• 14 years ago

Thats not true at all. The article made a pretty good case that it is not a thick line.

As for Zynga, everyone hates them, therefore using them in an argument instantly poisons the argument. Its a variant of Godwins law.

j_s• 14 years ago

I found it most useful to diff the two:

http://diffchecker.com/pX8qoZsE

No doubt having watched so many of his game mechanics become a huge hit in someone else's game gives the author a unique perspective. His point in this response may have been sharper if he had re-done the graphics, rewritten more of the content to be more accessible, etc. -- though the more I think about it maybe that's part of his point!

jiggy2011• 14 years ago

This is going to be a much bigger problem for indies than it will be for AAA devs.

Treyarch aren't going to be worried about anybody cloning Call Of Duty, not because the gameplay is hard to copy or especially innovative but simply because they have put up big technical and artistic barriers to making anything close to their game.

Pandemic for example looks like something that could be cloned pretty exactly over a week or two by an MBA type with $1000 worth of outsourced developers. This doesn't make the game bad, it's just that some genres don't require much technical sophistication.

Having said that , minecraft clones do not seem to have been particularly successful in comparison to the original. Perhaps because minecraft is sophisticated enough that it would be difficult to keep up with the original. It would be interesting to see what the result would be if a AAA developer decided to release a huge budget but shameless minecraft clone.

Oxryly• 14 years ago

It took me awhile to figure out what this is. Jeff Wofford has cloned IGN's article and made small but important changes as way of giving IGN some of the medicine they are recommending for others.

gte910h• 14 years ago

What people call game cloning I call "entering later into a genre" or "reusing a mechanic" or even "reimplementing a game".

League of Legends and Champions of Newerth aren't "just" clones

Halo isn't "just" a Doom clone.

Bach Fugues aren't just clones of Buxtehude or Handel

Thunderstone isn't just a Dominion clone

Coincidentally, game mechanics ARE patentable. (Monopoly was patented, for instance). If you are that sure you're the owner of your idea, and want to lock of the mechanic from culture, fire away via your lawyers.

sehugg• 14 years ago

I authored a Windows shareware game in the early 90's that involved spaceships shooting rocks and flying saucers. It had a number of neat features, including ray-traced sprites, multiplayer, a tournament mode, customizable ships, and so on.

This eventually led to a legal setting where I had to answer questions like "is it true that when you shoot a large rock it splits into two medium sized rocks".

The answer to the above question is yes, for more than one game.

However, if I asked the question "is it true that you press Left and Right to rotate, Thrust to accelerate, Fire to shoot, and Hyperspace to jump to a random position on the screen", the answer would also be yes, for more than one game (Spacewar, 1962 would be one correct answer).

It'd be a sad world where my game didn't exist, because there was no one willing to make that exact game for 16-bit Windows in 1991. It would also be a sad world where we never went beyond Spacewar on the PDP-1.

This particular sword cuts both ways. As a fan of creating and not a fan of litigating, I'd rather err on the side of more and better games, rather than lock up ideas for decades with copyright law.

Pandemic 2.5 seems to have done well and is even going back up the charts. For games, doesn't a rising tide lift all boats?

Crush the Castle developer's response to IGN's "In Defense of Game Clones"

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