Owning Games

Games are a fickle weird place, you know. There’s this well established, carved out region of information in copyright law that’s designed to be restrictive enough to curtail methodologies for trade secrets, but explicitly not restrictive enough for methodologies that you sell, or that people can naturally come up with on their own. This means we get to this super weird place with things like lawyers being left unable to basically do any work at all thanks to noncompete clauses, but being hired anyway to do no work because that noncompete clause threat is a useful tool and –

yes I’ve been watching Suits, but anyway.

Point is, games are hard to own. Proprietary systems you can own, and you can brand and trademark bits of them but it’s very hard to tell people that you exclusively own a system for laying tiles down on a board with letters on them. Straight up copying Scrabble is… legal. That’s why you can buy a bunch of scrabble variants that aren’t as nice, why Connect Four has a bunch of different names if you check the Reject Shop.

This is a little dismal as a creative – anyone in the world can take my work, do it better, and get lucky and succeed. The idea I might own my own material is a bit of a thing that somewhere along the line I internalised as a child, and it’s just not true when you work in games. You can copyright texts – rulebooks and game names and card information – but any system you see, well, shit, the way that system works? It’s fair game.

It’s funny, too, considering that there’s all these Youtubers dealing with one of the most choking fists of ownership on the other side of this paradigm, but anyway.