Remember indie game One Hour One Life? Back in November, it made headlines for its Steam launch; it’s an one-man-dev-team MMO where you start as a baby, the offspring of somebody else on the persistent server, chosen at random. You live for an hour, with each minute representing a year as you age. Your task is whatever you make it, though hopefully it’s to make the game world a better place for the next generation, which will include your own next character if you’re hooked.
Anyhow, apparently the developer, Jason Rohrer, has traditionally shrugged off what he characterized as “unofficial adaptations” of his game. “There was never any confusion about these adaptations, and I generally have no interest in controlling other people, so the more the merrier,” he wrote on his game forums this week, noting that he had placed his work in the public domain to allow other players to, well, play with it and build on it – just not to pretend they had originated it.
But apparently one port has been running afoul of these basic rules of civility, misleading players into believing that the whole game was built by this mobile company, since the only reference to the work it had “borrowed” was a single splash screen. While this mobile group did ultimately add a line on the Apple store admitting it was an iOS adaptation of the original game, it then apparently ported the game to the Chinese market with no attribution whatsoever and has thus far refused to comply with Rohrer’s demands for clear attribution. He says he’s not really as concerned about credit as he is that he’s getting player tickets and written reviews about games that he isn’t actually running, since the provenance has been lost along the way and at least some of these spinoffs are marketing themselves deceptively, so he’s now requiring adapted versions to explicitly state that they are unofficial adaptations that aren’t approved by him as the original author.
“I’m generally not concerned with credit in most cases. If someone is remixing, I don’t want to burden them with a credit requirement, or force them to include the text of the license, or whatever. I’m just concerned with people being misled, or with my legacy as a designer being muddied. And ‘appropriate credit’ might not even be sufficient in the case of the mobile adaptation. What, one line buried in the Credits screen? That’s not going to clear things up for 100,000 Chinese players.”
“Has this experience made me second-guess the public domain? Do I wish I had retained the copyright to the game? No,” he’s written, which is far kinder than we’d be, especially given that this Chinese publisher trademarked the Chinese name of the game, barring him from doing so himself. The same may not be said about some of the other games this particular adaptation seems to be ripping off.
https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1103356289583767552
An update yesterday afternoon brings the confusion to an end, as Rohrer says he’s given up on his dispute submissions on various mobile platforms: “At this point, I guess I give up.”
“I feel like a great deal of damage has already been done to my legacy and reputation as a designer, and an unfathomable amount of additional damage will be done in the future, if the current course with the mobile adaptation isn’t altered. I can imagine a situation in the future where OHOL becomes widely known, but the vast majority of people in the world mistakenly believe that the mobile version is the original version, and that DualDecade alone authored it, or that I am part of DualDecade, and that I approved the changes that they have made. […]Â The truth now, for whoever is willing to tell it, is that the mobile version has gone from ‘unofficial and not specifically approved’ to ‘specifically unapproved and directly against my wishes as the original creator,’ only because of the way that its presentation has misled people in the past, and will continue to mislead people in the future, in its current form.”
He drops one last personal note directly to the problem dev, too: “Hopefully, Christoffer, you will be willing to correct this, and prevent additional harm to my legacy, in a way that you can live with. I’ve given you four years of my life and creative output, allowed you to build a successful commercial product using that output, and asked for nothing in return. Nothing but the truth. That’s on you now. But as for me, I’m out.” Yikes.
https://twitter.com/jasonrohrer/status/1102972322678370305
No good deed goes unpunished.
