Originality and story plagiarism in games

[edmundito]

"Good artists copy; great artist steal." -- Pablo Picasso

[plasticman]

in my eyes, when you create something "new" all you've done is assembling bits of existing material together, only in a way that hasn't been done before. it's hard to come up with a new concept, but it's easy to apply an old one to any random subjet. chances are you're the first one to do that...
what i found interesting at first about independent games was the possibility of creating original, unusual works that no company would have dared to produce. taking inspiration in other medias is natural, and the adventure game approach can always give the subject a new dimension.

now back to working on my cmi fangame...

[Las Naranjas]

Grim Fandango was open about it's mixing of genres, so whilst the Casablanca, Maltese Falcon etc. etc. references were very explicit, it wasn't parody, since in a truly post modern way it was placing them in the Land Of The Dead context and exploring that.

And I think DG only quoted me because I used it in the context of adventure games.

It's context dudes!

[GarageGothic]

Ugh, postmodernism - been there, done that, wake up and smell the millennium, the 80's are over, and so is Quentin Tarantino's career judging from the Kill Bill-trailer! Sorry, you would react that way too if you'd spent ten years dissection postmodern theories and films. Seriously though, I think the postmodernism defense is getting old. Writers have always stolen from eachother, making tributes, tipping their hats, it's the way art works, we don't need Umberto Eco to explain that.

In regards to what Jesus said:

LONG LIVE FEMALE ADVENTURE GAME LOAD CHARACTERS!!!

(I presume he meant "lead characters", but I wouldn't want to correct the lord almighty). Maybe there weren't that many female adventure game characters in Gallileia around the early A.D.'s, (although I'm sure they had Rosella and Laura Bow). But these days it seems that female player characters are getting to be a cliché in adventure games.  April Ryan, Kate Walker, the girl in Legacy: Dark Shadows, the female journalist in Journey to the Center of the Earth plus the female characters in multi-character games such as Grace in GK2 and 3, and Nico in Broken Sword 2 and 3. It looks as if the female player character could be the new cliché in adventure gaming - not because of her gender, but because they all more or less look the same and are all either journalists or some other kind of investigator. The Uncertainty Machine didn't do much to change this.
Now, with the protagonist in Legacy: Dark Shadows, the title character of Goldmund's Donna, and Dinah Burroughs in my game, Shadowplay, maybe we're close to creating an even more specific cliché: The gay female player character.

[Captain Mostly]

I know las! I was messin'!




soz






As for female characters, I'm pretty sure they're still a minority (although a minority that's steadily filling out with identicle clone-people). But more importantly, there's SO MUCH space for expantion with the ladies-roles that people will surly end up creating fresh character almost by accident. I mean, it could be any group of people. In fact, it's not so much that I want to see minority lead-characters, rather that if people initially say: I'm gonna' make a game with a black-guy as the lead, they're then going to be thinking about how the characters blackness would effect the way he acts, or interacts, or is interacted with. And if people start thinking this, then they're ACTUALLY thinking about their character, rather than saying: "Hey! I'll put a crazy white trash type guy in a mad-cap situation!!!" then churning out yet-another two dimentional (in so many ways) mouth-piece for all their "wize cracks".

I don't know if I'm putting accross my point clearly. I don't want to offend people (because there's enough facets to making games that poor or even non-existant characterisation doesn't mean it'll be a rubbish game over-all) but if people are so intent on setting themselves challanges (like "I'm gonn'a make a game in ONE HOUR!!!" etc) why does no one set themself, or set other people, the challange of "I'm gonna make a game, WHERE I'VE REALLY THOUGHT ABOUT MY LEAD CHARACTER!!!" ?

All these sprite jams, and idea pooling, but I NEVER see anyone setting out to really think about how a character might react in verious situations. And isn't it almost always how the character would react that ought to steer the story? We are following that character aren't we?

I liked alien rape escape at first, becuase I thought "Hey! I've never plays a game about a bimbo porn-star before!"  and I expected the fact that you were a bimbo porn-star to have a tageble impact on how the game plays. I was a little dissapointed that imediatly she starts to act like every other game character ever (in that she climbs out of windows, crawls through air-vents, combines improbable object blah blah blah) without ever even mentioning how this is un-usual behavior for her!!

Why aren't we ever asked to think like a porn star instead of think like an adventure gamer?

[GarageGothic]

Sorry, I'm no good with irony. Especially coming from religious celebrities