MovieReal
Hollywood turned real: play MovieReal!
This is Game-at-Request for Quinn L. of Los Angeles, CA.
There are three angles from which I should like to discuss today’s project:
- This Game Is Not for Me - it was meant to appeal to: (1) a married man older than myself (2) his son (3) Quinn in LA that requested it.
- Content for Kids Must Have Meaning - I believe there is a tremendous amount of social responsibility to build meaning and value into anything that kids are intended are see, play, or otherwise consume.
- Overt Use of Copyrighted Material - I believe that MovieReal constitutes fair use, with regard to both law and (more importantly) artistic principle.
1. This Game Is Not for Me
What about a videogame is important to people that aren’t me?
- Music - Something to establish and carry the mood
- Graphics - Pretty, recognizable things to look at
- Win Condition - A completable goal to make progress toward
- Story - Fiction establishing purpose
- Lives - Chances to make mistakes
My interest in Game-a-Day projects is almost always exclusively in the system mechanics, but since this project wasn’t for me, I spent an extra hour or two to account for the above elements. This type of exercise is an important part of why I see free Game-at-Request projects as a healthy part of my creative growth.
“I need a cool gift for my brother-in-law (we do a secret sibling drawing in my fam). He is pretty into video games,” Quinn wrote. “He has a wife, a son, and a daughter. I think his son is going to be really into it, almost more for him.” After I followed up with her, Quinn shared some photos, and mentioned a few miscellaneous interests: BMW, star wars, transformers, spiderman, dinosaurs, cars, sunglasses/hats…
My way of tying these elements together is what turned out as today’s game, MovieReal.
2. Content for Kids Must Have Meaning
Kids are not a very discriminating audience. Some lazy, dangerous, and generally unprincipled developers - whether behind cartoons, toys, videogames, books, or otherwise - see this is an easy chance to cash in on creating meaningless garbage. As my string of choice adjectives does a poor job of hiding, I find that type of thinking detestable.
The messages in The NeverEnding Story about the importance of imagination, hope, bravery, and reading shaped the direction of my life. I’m glad I watched Sesame Street (it helped build basic social and school skills), Mr. Rogers (it helped build my cultural understanding), and Square One (it helped build my conceptual math abilities and appreciation). I don’t think I got much from watching Care Bears or The Flintstones, except maybe some passing amusement and a little disorganized fodder for my imagination.
With the five hours that I set aside to put together MovieReal, I didn’t have any expectations of creating my own equivalent to what The NeverEnding Story did for my life. But I knew, by the request, that a young child was going to see or maybe even play this game, and that for me adds pressure to pay attention to significance in the game’s message.
Most of my experience with delivering messages has to do with obtuse metaphors for adult life. Since I have less experience with messages explicitly for kids, my plan for developing a message included two parts: (1.) be weary of rewarding destructive behavior, such as violence or greed (2.) use character identity to reinforce positive influence, in this case, family/parents. I think kids are even less likely to read into deep metaphor than adults are - and most adults don’t anyway - but character identity is very easily surfaced. Aliens, Predators, Dinosaurs, Decepticons, Monsters, Tanks, and Dark Jedis are “bad”. By putting mother, father, brother and sister on the side opposite the enemies, I hoped to reinforce that they are all inherently “good”. Furthermore, the family is quite literally “in this together”; success for the family is a shared outcome.
Difficulty with a Purpose
I made this game difficult. I don’t rub in loss - the message is “Try Again?” instead of something final like “Family Defeated” - but I also did not make winning easy. I think that the tendency to make things trivially easy disrupts the underlying inherent messages that “practice improves performance”, “persistence in the face of failure yields eventual success”, and “challenges exist to be overcome.” A trivially easy game communicates instead, “participation is enough to succeed” and “expect to win on your first try”. These are dangerous messages that I believe are polluting our schools and workplaces. At a meta-level, the very existence of trivially easy games/films/books facilitates the attitude that, “if at first I don’t succeed, I should just turn to something easier,” another dangerous message with negative repercussions on school and the workplace.
3. Overt Use of Copyrighted Material
All source materials are instantly recognizable cultural artifacts. As has become the norm on the internet, the disparity in style strongly reinforces that the copyrighted elements are not to be regarded as my own original works (it looks like a collage, because it is). The infamous Punch-Out city background is the least recognizable element here, and even then I suspect most internet-savvy videogame players will immediately recognize the allusion.
All images are used in a transformative manner rather than a derivative fashion. The message is, “These static images collectively represent Hollywood fiction”, rather than “like Aliens, Star Wars, and Transformers? Then play this game!”
The amount of work duplicated is a tiny fraction of the original works. I’ve heard it referenced as the “10% rule” (use less than 10% of something and copyright holders won’t care), the “30 second rule” (30 seconds from a full length film or TV show are universally fair game), or the “300 word rule” (300 words or less copied from a book is generally regarded as fair use). In Kelly v. Arriba Soft Corporation, it was determined that a thumbnail of a full photograph was acceptable as fair use. I’m only using a single, static, scaled-down frame of a character cut out from its environment, which amounts to an infinitesimally small piece of the feature length films they are from.
Lastly, my game’s use of these properties in no way dilutes or substitutes the original work’s value. Someone that wants to buy the Terminator 2 DVD isn’t going to skip on doing so after seeing that I have a robotic skeleton image in this game.
Am I Really Concerned with Copyright Law?
No. My concerns are primarily motivated by artistic and creative principles. As an artist, there are ways in which I would be unhappy to see my work abused or ripped off, and it’s important to me that I not do that to other artists. For example, if I were the character/IP developers behind the Aliens and Predator properties, I would have taken extreme offense to Blizzard’s StarCraft, whether or not the law has anything to say in this case about what amounts to an unlicensed Aliens vs. Predator knockoff game.
Past Experience with Copyright Material
Building a Sesame Street game, two Star Wars games, and helping to build the Nintendo booth during college gave me motive to investigate nuances of copyright law. It also desensitized me somewhat to walking the line of infringement for artistic purposes. Note that these are also special cases in that they existed in their full form (including special input hardware) for only 3-days during a free public exhibition.