Posts tagged games

This blog post originally appeared on Technology Integration in Education, where I am a guest blogger. More interesting is Colleen King’s response – she’s the author of the widely stolen games.

I am absolutely thrilled when new math resources that include interactives appear online. Cataloging, annotating, tagging and making collections can add value to interactives. These jobs don’t necessarily have to be done by the same people who program math games or applets.

Right? Right?!

Here is an altogether positive example of a resource catalogue: MathForum’s Internet Math Library, the Software page. It provides tagged, searchable short reviews of sites with math interactives. One big minus of the library is that it does not deep-link individual games.

Deep-linking even many resources can be done appropriately. Take a look, for example, at MathsOnline blog. It links and categorizes several hundred math games created and hosted everywhere. Each game has a short (original?) review, a screenshot, tags, and the link to the site where it is hosted. Here is another example of such a site.

Some people object to deep-linking to their sites, especially if no content (no value) is added by the process. I confess it is annoying to find the same interactives, with the same descriptions, indexed by the same category and tag set, in gazillions of places. Instead of providing service to educators, this practice wastes time when people click link after link only to find the same content.

Then there is outright stripping of credentials. I don’t want to call this “theft” if it is done to something that is already freely available to anyone. It is not about property. It is, however, a deeply anti-social, anti-community behavior.

Consider an example that recently came up in a discussion of math games. “Percent shopping” is a game Colleen King created for her site Math Playground. It features a kid shopping at a store called “Troy’s Toys.”

There are automated content-aggregating sites, apparently dozens of them, that not only embed the game without any attribution to the author, but also offer its embed code to their visitors.  Some examples:
http://www.wordfreegames.com/game/percent-shopping.html
http://www.home-games.org/game/116/Shopping-at-Troy_s-Toys.html
http://www.freekidsmathgames.org/game/18/Shopping-at-Troy_s-toys.html

The sites sell ads. Using other people’s content. Without adding value to the content. This is bad.

The problem is also self-propagating, because new aggregating ad-selling sites, which are built automatically, simply take content from old aggregating ad-selling sites. Also honest but newbie site builders may take content from these “free and nameless” collections without realizing anything is wrong.

A consolation: math is now so hot that thugs break laws for its sake.

One may be a strong proponent of the Pirate Party on the grounds of making content available to people in need. But this situation is different: the content is already available.  The only other freedom some of these sites provide is making the content embeddable – but they strip the credentials in the process! Cory Doctorow recently wrote, in his Guardian column:

In my world, copyright’s purpose is to encourage the widest participation in culture that we can manage – that is, it should be a system that encourages the most diverse set of creators, creating the most diverse set of works, to reach the most diverse audiences as is practical.

Piracy, arguably, can encourage wider initial participation – but discourage large and expensive projects. In my mind, games that are already available for free, on a well-organized site without ads, don’t require any further liberation. Or do they?

Is easy embedding such a big deal? Here, I took a screenshot of Colleen’s game and linked it to her site. Is this significantly worse for promoting wide content creation than the ability to embed the game right here?

Colleen King’s response to the original post

It isn’t often that I’m mentioned in a blog post so I was very curious to read this. I wonder if people are aware of just how prevalent this problem is.

I agree with your description of this practice as “deeply anti-social, anti-community behavior.” And I agree that it’s not about property. And while this isn’t theft in the traditional sense, since I am still in possession of the original games, I think the consequences of such actions are more destructive than people may realize.

I’m going to describe a fictional but more real world example that depicts what is taking place and the potential harm it may cause.

Imagine that a group of people decide to organize a community theater. The idea is to create original, short films and show them free of charge to people who enjoy such productions. The group writes stories, builds sets, licenses music, rehearses, records the action, edits the film, and finally presents its work to the community.

Everything is wonderful. The theater group is doing what it loves to do and the community is enjoying the films.

Eventually, the theater group must face the economics of providing a free service. There’s rent and utilities, licensing fees, and editing software to consider. And demand has become so great for these films that the theater group is working practically full time without any compensation.

The group considers its options. It could begin charging the public to view its films. The group argues that doing so would prevent some members of the community from seeing the films for financial reasons. That didn’t seem like the right thing to do. Then someone suggests asking local businesses to sponsor the community theater. The group would place ads from local businesses in its brochures and show ads to the audience before viewing films. This seems like a win-win situation. The community theater covers its expenses and can even pay its members a small salary. Local businesses are gaining new clients and customers. And the community is enjoying wonderful films free of charge.

Flash forward.

Mr. X has been watching the success of the theater group from afar. He thinks this is something he’d like to do. However, Mr.X doesn’t know how to make films and doesn’t wish to spend any time learning. Besides, he rationalizes, the theater group already created a good product. And Mr.X is really only interested in the profit potential of the community theater. Providing a service is just a secondary benefit.

Mr. X finds some low cost space for his theater, comes up with a catchy name, and makes the theater attractive and comfortable. He then pays a visit to the original community theater group. Mr.X finds copies of all the films the group has ever produced and proceeds to take one of each. He wastes no time adding the films to his own theater’s list of events. The idea is working! Mr.X is earning money while providing a terrific service. Businesses are doing better than they ever have and the people in Mr. X’s community are thrilled to have such wonderful films to watch free of charge.

Meanwhile, Ms. K, one of the members of the community theater group decides to do some traveling. And in her travels, she stumbles upon Mr. X’s theater. Enjoying films as she does, Ms. K decides to go to an afternoon show and, much to her surprise, the film is one she made some years ago! Ms. K looks through the theater’s listings and finds nearly every one of her films on the list. But there is no mention of her work or anything at all about the community
theater group she founded all those years ago. Then Ms. K finds something even more disturbing in the brochure. Mr. X is giving away copies of the films! She tries to contact Mr.X but he is nowhere to be found. Feeling somewhat helpless, Ms. K returns to her theater group to discuss the matter.

They view a graph showing the number of people attending the theater over time and spot a disturbing trend. Traffic has been diminishing. People no longer think it’s necessary to visit the original community theater since the films can be viewed elsewhere. The group then looks at profit charts and observes a similar pattern. When traffic declined, local businesses no longer saw any benefit in sponsoring the community theater. The theater began earning less and was struggling to cover its expenses. It could no longer afford to produce new films thus depriving the community of its unique and innovative work.

The story of the community theater is a sad one but I wonder if it had to be so. Could the community theater story have a different ending?

How can organizations protect themselves from unauthorized distribution of their creative works, apart from invoking the law? Would the community theater prosper if it had decided on its own to distribute its work under a creative commons license? I can see how that might return control of creative works to the organization but I wonder if it would eliminate or even reduce the attribution problem. Is it beneficial to have copies of creative work available in hundreds of locations? Online, the concept of location is mostly inconsequential. There are exceptions but generally we have access to the original work and every location that stores a copy. What’s the benefit of multiple copies?

This is a very interesting problem with many subtleties to discern.
I’m really like to hear what others think.