Wish I’d Thought of That: An Examination of Gamers and Copyright Law

I think I could be sued for putting this logo here. Really! Click the picture if you don't believe me.

Today’s post is going to be less composed of material cribbed from other sites and more of me directing you to visit John Vanderhoef’s excellent, excellent blog Press Start to Drink, where he approaches issues in the games industry from an academic perspective and generally presents extremely interesting reading material. 

The post I’m concerned with today is his entry Cease and Desist: Games Culture and Copyright Laws, in which Vanderhoef examines the rocky relationship that has developed between fans and developers in our age of game mods and vicious copyright law.  The post illustrates its point by examining three separate reactions game developers took to fans interacting with and expanding upon their products–one consisting of putting together a make-it-yourself toy of Marcus Fenix of Gear of War, one a game mod of SNES classic Chrono Trigger, and the last recreating the entirety of the original Half-Life with Valve’s publicly available Source engine. 

The only one of these not to end with the threat of a lawsuit looming over the offending fan was, perhaps predictably, the one involving Valve, the same company sensitive enough to its fans to make community-generated memes part of the gameplay in Team Fortress 2 (to say nothing of the phenomenon of Counter-Strike). The tragedy of the situation, as cited by Vanderhoef, is the fact that creativity is stifled in an environment where inventiveness has to be looked over by lawyers. 

There’s a reason why gamers get angry when they read stories about the actions of companies like Square-Enix and Epic Games–it seems like there’s a betrayal in arbitrarily limiting the enjoyment of the people who bought their product. My personal favorite game of all time is Baldur’s Gate II, which is approaching its ten-year birthday and is woefully out of date by modern standards.  It remains my favorite title because of the massive modding community behind it that remains active to this day. While the “vanilla” storyline is incredibly expansive and the choices offered within varied enough to encourage multiple playthroughs, the modding community only broadens the title’s horizons with new gameplay options, companions, and entire campaigns.

I *have* to take Minsc with me every time, though. Not because it's necessary, but because he's awesome.

 

Neverwinter Nights, meanwhile, took a route similar to Valve and was packaged with modding tools, effectively encouraging players to play with the game itself and increasing the title’s shelf life dramatically. The resulting examples of user-generated content was often hailed as being superior to the original campaign. Unsurprisingly, both of my examples are based off of Dungeons and Dragons, a series of products where users only ever need to buy the basic rulebooks and derive the rest of the fun by creating antagonists and adventures themselves. 

At the same time, it seems like these companies are only allowing their customers to play with their product on their own terms. Valve and BioWare explicitly released the tools used to tamper with their product to their audience. And as for Baldur’s Gate II, while it’s certainly possible that large mods existed during the height of the franchise’s popularity, most of what you can find out there today was created after Black Isle (the title’s developing company) was disbanded, likely making legal action tricky.

Valve Accepts OFLC’s Demands, For Now

 

 

An artist's depiction of what Australian gamers can expect from Left 4 Dead 2

Left 4 Dead 2 has been approved for release in Australia by the OFLC after removing much of the gore present in the original submission, according to Edge.com.

 The OFLC let the game through with an MA 15+ rating after fairly significant editing, with the quote in Edge’s article saying that it has removed “depictions of decapitation, dismemberment, wound detail and piles of dead bodies lying about the environment.”  The items that cause such effects, which include chain saws and fire axes, remain in the game as usable weapons.

Non-Australian gamers who fear that the worldwide release will be similarly bowderlized don’t need to worry.  According to G4 (who themselves are cribbing from a variety of sources), only the Australian release will be censored in such a fashion, so everyone else can hack the rabid undead into bloody giblets to their heart’s content.  In fact, even this bit of censorship is technically up in the air at this point.  Valve’s appeal to have the gorier version of L4D2 will come under review on October 22, and if it goes through a free patch will be released to add the juicy parts back in (unless we’re talking about the XBox 360 version, maybe–see the G4 article).

The reasons behind Valve’s blasé  response to this whole mess–the one I unprofessionally used to say that Valve didn’t have a backbone in my last post on this issue–becomes more understandable considering that the company predicts that the title will be the “fastest-selling product in the company’s history,” based on pre-orders.

EA Stands Up For Valve

Screen courtesy of, but not at all exclusive to, MTV Multiplayer

If for some reason all you Valve fans out there haven’t heard the news, the Australian Office of Film and Literature Classification has refused to give the upcoming title Left 4 Dead 2 an actual rating, effectively banning its sale in the country.  That’s not the news here, though—it’s that the game’s publisher, Electronics Arts, has stood up on its behalf and challenged the OFLC in an attempt to call the country on apparent hypocrisy.

The two sentences that have been repeated by several bloggers and news outlets around the internet were said by Tiffany Steckler, an EA spokesperson, during an interview on Gamespot Australia on September 23.  According to the article, Steckler said that “It’s funny that a place like Australia, which has come up with some pretty violent material in the past like Mad Max, can effectively ban video games for the same reason.  EA believes that adults should have the right to make their own choices when it comes to the content they consume.”

Steckler’s words were in sharp contrast to Valve’s rather muted response to the news.  Doug Lombardi, Valve’s vice president of marketing, spoke to Shacknews way back on September 18.  “We were surprised to hear of this news yesterday,” he said.  “Obviously, everybody at Valve is pretty bummed.  It would be a shame if folks in Australia, or anywhere else, are unable to purchase Left 4 Dead 2 because of a ratings issue.”

“Pretty bummed,” Mr. Lombardi?  If someone told me that they were censoring my work after accepting what I’d handed them before while letting a game like MadWorld through, the phrase I would be using would sound more like “immensely disappointed,” or “insulted,” or “pissed off.”  It has been noted that Valve has filed for an appeal, so at least it’s not taking this lying down.

(Warning: Profane language, references to deviant sexual behaviour, over-the-top violence)

To be fair, part of the problem may be the fact that Australia still considers video games a kiddie pastime and has no “adult” rating—the highest their rating goes is MA15+, which means everything over it (like MadWorld) has to have its representatives convince people like the OFLC that it’s suitable for a fifteen-year-old or be banned.  This is according to EveryonePlays, a site that is currently pushing for the very simple solution of creating an R18+ rating.  I can’t tell you if that would technically make games falling under that rating “pornography,” but I’m sure Australia’s video game market wouldn’t mind if they got to enjoy the mature fare everyone else gets to play without having it yanked out of their hands.

For those interested (who should be everyone who actually bothered reading this post) Kotaku.com published a fine article detailing the reasons why Left 4 Dead 2 got passed over, as well as mentioning that lenience was shown by some of the board members voting on the issue.  As EveryonePlays points out, though, just because some politicians were willing to bend the rules for the sake of sanity doesn’t mean the system isn’t still broken… or is it?  Please provide feedback on exactly what you think of this issue.