Plagiarism: is Britain in the grip of a copying epidemic?

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Britain has long been hailed as a creative powerhouse. Not just in games, but in all media, politicians routinely line up to praise the unique British talent for punching above our weight.

Yet in the past week, two plagiarism rows have erupted. Coldplay have been accused of stealing the main melody for the title track of their latest album from a little known US band called Creaky Boards. (Coldplay deny the accusations.)

And in games, an old-school point and click adventure called Lost in Limbo stands accused of having pinched its static images and backgrounds wholesale from popular games such as Oblivion, Thief, Diablo 2, Painkiller, Unreal Tournament 2003 and Silent Hill.

Homage is nothing new in media, from bands covering golden oldies to knowing references littered throughout cinema.

But plagiarism is quite different. It involves passing off other’s work as your own, and most intellectual property owners take a very dim view of it.

Publisher Tri Synergy has pulled its distribution of the game, created by Majestic Studios.

If Majestic has just taken textures, images and artwork wholesale from successful titles, that was a very foolish thing to do, and they will shortly be paying the commercial price.

The issue has got me thinking about the nature of plagiarism. Majestic came unstuck because they appear to have taken imagery directly from games, down to the placement of rugs, furniture and wall hangings. And it is easy to make a direct comparison between the two titles.

But how does that work in terms of gameplay, puzzle design, interface improvements and so on. Arguably these elements are more important to the success of a game than the graphics. So when GTA III created the free-roaming city, or SimCity the original sandbox game, and imitators emerged in their scores, is that plagiarism or homage?

And in the casual games space, how do the squillions of match-three games, or variants on copyrighted word games like Boggle and Scrabble, avoid the accusations of plagiarism? (I know the Hasbro went after Scrabulous on Facebook, but there are still others out there).

Is it simply the case the copying artwork is easy to prove, although less important to the overall game experience; whereas proving that a game mechanic has been copied is essentially impossible. Is it even possible to claim ownership of a game mechanic?

What this issue raises up to me, in fact, is not the issue of plagiarism in core games but the complete lack of originiality in casual games. I wonder if that will ever change?

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