What’s ‘Hot’ and What’s Not?

July 17, 2006 on 6:11 pm | In The Casual Games Business |

One of the perennial issues in the casual games industry is what constitutes game idea theft – there’s been a bit of discussion recently on IGDA’s Casual Games mailing list. For every hit game there are any number of rip-offs produced in a short space of time. I have no evidence for this, but I would guess that Bejewelled is one of the most copied games of all time, there are a lot of hot versions out there.

Some developers (and I’m not one of them) argue that the sheer volume of ‘imitations’ of Bejewelled indicates that the game concept is almost in the public domain. Popcap, the original creators, probably wouldn’t agree, but it does raise the issue of what constitutes a rip-off and what is a new game - inspired by an original, but with enough new game play to be considered an evolution of the form.

Of course, to some extent, pretty much all games are an evolution of another, older form. Bejewelled, as is argued by Jesper Juul on his blog The Ludologist, took its inspiration from Nintendo’s Panel de Pon. In fact, it could certainly be argued that the entire industry is based on evolution rather than revolution - its pretty unrealistic to expect every game to be completely new and original - rarely is any art or entertainment form truly a first.

At 3RD sense, we’ve evolved our own Bejewelled-inspired game, Sea Jewels. We’ve taken the basic Bejewelled idea and added some new game-play features which we believe makes Sea Jewels different enough to be new . We haven’t attempted to hide our game’s influence - in fact, we’ve very deliberately nodded towards its Bejewelled heritage in the name - but we think we have made enough changes to the game to make sure the player gets a quite different game-play experience from the original Bejewelled.

But that’s our opinion. Take a look at Sea Jewels. Do you think we have put enough ‘new’ in the game? Where should a game developer draw the line? When can you sleep at night, comfortable in the knowledge that you have put something into the industry rather than taken something out?

We know that copyright laws aren’t sufficient to deal with this problem, and when developers go down the patent route, it just stifles ongoing development and creativity. As an industry that’s growing up, shouldn’t we be pulling together our own set of guidelines for developers new and old to help them understand what is and isn’t acceptable? At least then we’d all have something to work from.

Tell us what you think is and isn’t acceptable and what you think should be included in the guidelines. Then we can maybe work out if we did enough with Sea Jewels.

The Little Gamer