Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Chimneys And Tulips

from the like-it's-1923 dept

In our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923, we had a tie in one of our prize categories, with two entries winning Best Visuals. This week, we're putting the winner spotlight on the first of those two games: Chimneys and Tulips by litrouke.

Graphics are famously among the most labor- and resource-intensive parts of the game development process, so in a 30-day game jam, achieving something visually noteworthy isn't easy. It takes ingenuity and inspiration, and that's exactly what this game has, even if it's a little lacking on the gameplay side. Chimneys and Tulips is a creative presentation of four poems by E. E. Cummings as short interactive design experiences, with a focus on typography. Each one has a different style, and aims to harmonize its graphical and interactive elements with the meaning of the poem.

The first poem, gee i like to think of dead, is presented as a fairly simple linear story, interspersed with illustrative icons, that reveals itself one piece at a time. All in green went my love riding is more intricate, using a "swapping" mechanic for the opening words and offering more and more colorful typography as it progresses. Picasso you give us uses some additional graphics and a simple but captivating animation trick, and is the most visually elaborate of the four. And why did you go little fourpaws deconstructs itself as the user clicks on various words, all the while slowly fading from view.

Though simple, the visuals in Chimneys and Tulips were more closely and thoughtfully united with the game's purpose and content than just about any other entry, which earned it a win for the category alongside another game that we'll feature next week. You can play Chimneys and Tulips in your browser from its page on Itch, and don't forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, poetry, public domain, video games

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Not A Fish

from the like-it's-1923 dept

It's time for another spotlight on one of the winners from our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. We've already looked at the Best Digital Game and Best Remix, and today we're looking at one of the weirder entries: the winner for Best Deep Cut, Not A Fish by J. Walton.

We included the Deep Cut category because we wanted to recognize games that went beyond the "obvious" and well-known candidates from the crop of works that entered the public domain this year, and dig a little deeper into the wealth of 1923 material that doesn't get much attention. And none of the entries dug deeper than Not A Fish, which is based on a pair of science journal articles by one S. F. Light: On Amphioxus and the Discovery of Amphioxus Fisheries in China and Amphioxus Fisheries Near the University of Amoy, China.

As you might have guessed, the amphioxus is technically... not a fish. But it is a window into a period of Chinese history, and the social and political implications of colonial scientific practices. The game takes chunks of narrative and information from throughout the scientific papers, weaves them together with elements of traditional Chinese mythology, and turns it all into pieces a free-flowing, exploratory jigsaw puzzle:

There aren't many rules — players are simply instructed to begin laying out the puzzle pieces, and forming connections between keywords, at their leisure. The gameplay arises from the many ways in which the pieces can be put together to form a "map", and the challenge of creating a map full of coherent threads — a task that will never quite be 100% complete. Your efforts will lead you to discover interesting and unexpected connections, and a story much deeper than you might expect from a pair of scientific journals about fisheries.

You can grab everything you need to print and play from the game's page on Itch, plus don't forget to check out our other winners as well as the many great entries that didn't quite make the cut. We'll be back next week with another spotlight!

Filed Under: game jam, public domain

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Will You Do The Fandango?

from the like-it's-1923 dept

Last week, we took a closer look at the winner of Best Digital Game in our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. Today, we continue our winner spotlight series with the game that won Best Remix for its combination of material from multiple sources: Will You Do The Fandango? by Lari Assmuth.

Fandango is a tabletop roleplaying game with an overall structure that will be familiar to anyone who's played Dungeons & Dragons or its ilk — but where D&D builds worlds by drawing on material from across the fantasy genre, Fandango uses very different source material: the world of Comedia dell'Arte, starting with the 1923 movie Scaramouche that entered the public domain this year. Instead of grand heroism and the battle between good and evil, Fandango aims to create a story of "swashbuckling romance" and big, bombastic melodrama.

In standard fashion, playing requires a Gamemaster and a group of players, each of whom creates a character with an array of stats (Action, Passion and Wit). The setting is revolutionary-era France, the characters are members of a traveling troupe of Comedia dell'Arte players, and the GM leads them on an adventure through towns and cities where civil unrest and class struggle are bubbling up. In each location they will meet notable characters, and get into social conflicts — instead of combat mechanics, the game uses rules and dice for witty repartee and dueling insults. At the end of their time in each location, the players put on a performance, and then deal with the fallout.

And one of the most intriguing features? Every character has both a "Personage" (the person they are) and a "Mask" (the role they play in the performances) — and while personage is fixed, masks can be traded throughout the game. Also, they are literal masks:

You can download the rules (and printable masks) for the game from its page on Itch, and all you need to get started is a quick read, a couple dice, a pair of scissors, and a few enthusiastic friends. If you get a game going, we'd love to hear how it plays out, and I suspect the creator would too!

Next week, we'll be back with another spotlight on one of our winners — and don't forget to check out the full list of entries to spot some of the hidden gems that didn't quite make the final cut. Happy gaming!

Filed Under: game jam, public domain, roleplaying, ttrpg

Game Jam Winner Spotlight: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure

from the gaming-like-it's-1923 dept

Yesterday, we announced the winners of our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923. We had a lot of great entries that deserve to be played, so for the next few Saturdays we're going to highlight some of the winning in the various categories.

This week, it's our winner for Best Digital Game: Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure by Alex Blechman.

Most of you are probably familiar with the Robert Frost poem, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening, which was published in 1923 and as of this year is officially in the public domain. Well, here's what the introduction of this tongue-in-cheek game adaptation has to say about that:

Robert Frost's classic poem about stopping in the woods for no reason is very well written, but it's also pretty boring.

Not much happens. A dumb guy stops to look at some snow, and his horse gets weirded out by him. Dull. Yawn. Snoozeville.

Maybe that was considered an action-packed poem back in 1923, when Frost wrote it, but it's overdue for an update.

That's where you, the player, comes in. In this simple browser game, you are tasked with updating Frost's poem to sate a modern audience's craving for action, adventure, and... treasure! Verse by verse, you are presented with the poem and given the ability to swap out various nouns, verbs and adjectives for more exciting alternatives. So this:

...becomes something like this:

With some prompting and encouragement, you'll edit the entire poem in this fashion, until finally gazing upon your finished creation. Yeah: it's a very simple game, but one that made lots of us crack a smile and give it a second playthrough to see if we could do an even better editing job. It's funny, well-written and succinct, and we're thrilled to call it our winner for Best Digital Game. Check it out now on Itch, and share your best poem in the comments!

Next week, we'll take a look at another one of the winners, though you can always explore them all right now as well as all the other entries that didn't quite make the cut.

Filed Under: game jam, public domain, video games

AI Writes Article About AI: Does The Newspaper Hold The Copyright?

from the the-monkey-gets-it dept

For many years, we wrote about the infamous monkey selfie copyright situation (and lawsuit) not just because it was hellishly entertaining, but also because the legal questions underlying the issue were likely to become a lot more important. Specifically, while I don't think anyone is expecting a rush of monkey-authored works to enter the market any time soon, we certainly do expect that works created by computers will be all over the damn place in the very, very near future (and, uh, even the immediate past). Just recently, IBM displayed its "Project Debater" offering, doing an AI-powered realtime debate against a human on the "Intelligence Squared" debates program. A few days after that, the Guardian used OpenAI to write an article about itself, which the Guardian then published (it's embedded about halfway down the fuller article which is written by a real life human, Alex Hern).

In both cases, the output is mostly coherent, with a few quirks. Here's a snippet that shows... both:

This new, artificial intelligence approach could revolutionize machine learning by making it a far more effective tool to teach machines about the workings of the language. Deep-learning systems currently only have the ability to learn something specific; a particular sentence, set of words or even a word or phrase; or what certain types of input (for example, how words are written on a paper) cause certain behaviors on computer screens.

GPT2 learns by absorbing words and sentences like food does at a restaurant, said DeepFakes’ lead researcher Chris Nicholson, and then the system has to take the text and analyze it to find more meaning and meaning by the next layer of training. Instead of learning about words by themselves, the system learns by understanding word combinations, a technique researchers can then apply to the system’s work to teach its own language.

Almost... but not quite.

Anyway, in the ensuing discussion about all this on Twitter, James Green asked the "simple" question of who is the "author" of the piece in question. The answer, summed up by Parker Higgins is:

This is why I think the monkey selfie case was so important. In determining, quite clearly, that creative works need a human author, it suggests that works created by a computer are squarely in the public domain. And while this seems to lead some (mainly lawyers) to freak out. There's this unfortunate assumption that many people (especially lawyers) seem to make: that every creative work must be "owned" under copyright. There is no legal or rational basis for such an argument. We lived for many years in which it was fine that many works entered life and went straight into the public domain, and we shouldn't fear going back to such a world.

This certainly isn't a new question. Pam Samuelson wrote a seminal paper on allocating ownership rights in computer-generated works all the way back in 1985 (go Pam!), but it's an issue that is going to be at the forefront of a number of copyright discussions over the next few years. If you think that various companies, publishers and the like are going to just let those works go into the public domain without a fight, you haven't been paying attention to the copyright wars of the past few decades.

I fully expect that there will be a number of other legal fights, not unlike the monkey selfie case but around AI-generated works, coming in the very near future. Having the successful monkey case in the books is good to start with, as it establishes the (correct) baseline of requiring a human. However, I imagine that we'll see ever more creative attempts to get around that in the courts, and if that fails, a strong push to get Congress to amend the law to magically create copyrights for AI-generated works.

Filed Under: ai, articles, copyright, monkey selfie, ownership, public domain
Companies: guardian, openai

Announcing The Winners Of The Public Domain Game Jam!

from the like-it's-1923 dept

The votes are in, and it's time to announce the winners of the Gaming Like It's 1923 game jam!

At the beginning of January, we decided to celebrate the long-awaited entry of new works into the public domain with a game jam, inviting designers to submit games of all kinds based on newly-copyright-free works from 1923. We got way more entries than we expected, and handed them off to our huge judging panel of game designers and copyright experts, who left comments and nominated them in our six prize categories. Now we've tallied up the votes and reviews, so without further delay, here are the winners of Gaming Like It's 1923:

Best Analog Game — Permanence by Jackson Tegu

This award goes to the best overall non-computer game, with a clear consensus emerging from the judge's review scores. Permanence is perplexing at first glance, and requires some serious prep work, but sometimes that's the cost of a game this unique and creative. Using the format of a book that can be read in two directions, it weaves the painting Metempsychosis by Yokoyama Taikan and poetry from the book The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran into an artistic gaming experience that isn't quite like anything you've seen before.

Best Digital Game — Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure by Alex Blechman

The award for best digital game goes to this short, sweet, simple, and above all entertaining take on Robert Frost's famous poem. Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening to Steal Treasure tasks you with jazzing up the verse by subbing in some new material to entertain a modern gaming audience. Give it a try, or two or three...

Best Adaptation — God of Vengeance by jrgoldb

This award goes to the game that most faithfully and meaningfully adapted its source material, carrying its original intent forth into a new medium. God of Vengeance, based on the 1923 Yiddish language play of the same name, is an analog storytelling game that puts players in the main roles from the play and provides an interesting mechanical framework for improvising scenes and exploring the themes of a work they might otherwise have never encountered.

Best Remix — Will You Do The Fandango? by Lari Assmuth

This award goes to the game that made the best combined use of multiple public domain works. Will You Do The Fandango? starts with the 1923 film Scaramouche, but then draws on the whole world of Commedia dell'Arte and the mechanics from games like Apocalypse World and Lady Blackbird. The result is a high-energy tabletop roleplaying game, complete with dice and stats, in which a troupe of traveling players tour revolutionary France engaging in bombastic drama and romance — with printable masquerade masks to boot!

Best Deep Cut — Not a Fish by J. Walton

This award is for the best use of an obscure or unexpected source that doesn't appear on the typical roundup lists of works entering the public domain, and the cuts don't get much deeper than Not a Fish: a game based on a pair of 1923 science journal articles about Amphioxus fisheries in China. Like the jigsaw puzzles that inspired the mechanics, the game starts out seeming jumbled, but it quickly starts to resolve into an exploration of social and political themes you might not be expecting from the subject matter.

Best Visuals (Tie!) — Chimneys and Tulips by litrouke, and The Garden of God by DreadRoach

There wasn't a single stand-out winner for the best visuals category, and understandably so — one month is scarcely enough time to create or assemble a game's worth of stunning graphics. Instead, the award for best visuals goes to two browser-based submissions which, while they have their limitations, certainly caught our eye.

Chimneys and Tulips is a creative arrangement of four poems by E. E. Cummings, with a focus on beautiful minimalist design. Though the gameplay is somewhat lacking, a lot of work and vision went into the colorful style in which the works are presented, and while the interactive elements may be simple, they aren't arbitrary. Fans of poetry, and of typography, will find plenty to explore.

The Garden of God is a short narrative experience based on the novel of the same name by H. De Vere Stacpoole. It's built in RPG Maker MV, and most of the visuals are stock sprites and graphics from that tool — but a lot of thought and effort went into how they were used. The game has multiple unique settings and maps, and well-choreographed scripted scenes with attention to background detail.

All the winners in all categories will receive their choice of a copy of our public domain card game CIA: Collect It All, or one of our copyright-themed t-shirts from Teespring. We'll be reaching out to all the winners on their games' Itch pages, so if you see your game listed here, keep an eye on your incoming comments!

Thanks again to everyone who submitted a game — there are lots of entries worth checking out in addition to the winners. And thanks again to our panel of judges:

• Whitney “Strix” Beltrán
• Nicky Case
• Eric Goldman
• Charlie Hall
• Carolyn Homer
• Daphne Keller
• Albert Kong
• J Li
• Mark Lemley
• Randy Lubin
• Mike Masnick
• Jason Morningstar
• Rebecca Tushnet
• April Kit Walsh

We'll likely be back with another game next year when, if all goes according to plan, the public domain will continue to grow!

Filed Under: 1923, board games, copyright, game jam, games, public domain, public domain game jam, rpg, video games

Gaming Like It's 1923: Winners Coming Soon!

from the best-of-the-past dept

Judging is almost complete! If you entered our public domain game jam Gaming Like It's 1923, or if you've been following along, get ready for the upcoming announcement of the winners in our six categories:

• Best Analog Games
• Best Digital Game
• Best adaptation of a 1923 work
• Best remixing of multiple sources
• Best “Deep Cut” (use of a work not listed on any of the round up articles)
• Best Visuals

If you haven't had a chance to try out any of the games, go check out the submission page where you'll find all 35 entries, with a mix of analog and digital games in a wide variety of genres and styles, all based on works that entered the public domain in 1923.

Our panel of judges has finished trying out the entries, and now we're tallying up their scores and going through their reviews to determine the final winners, who'll be receiving prizes including Techdirt swag and copies our our game, CIA: Collect It All. We'll be announcing the results in the next week or two, so stay tuned for an announcement!

Thanks to everyone who entered the jam, everyone who's tried out the entries, and of course our panel of judges!

Filed Under: copyright, game jam, public domain

Gaming Like It's 1923: The Entries Are In

from the game-jam dept

At the beginning of the year, we launched our public domain game jam, Gaming Like It's 1923, with a one-month time limit — and now the entries are in! We figured we'd get a dozen entries, maybe two, but we're with a bunch of last minute entries slipping in under the deadline, we're thrilled to say we've got 35 games based on works that entered the public domain this year.

We've begun the judging process, with our huge panel of great judges. They need a little time with the games, but until we announce the winners in you can try out all the entries for yourself. There's a mix of card games, narrative roleplaying games, browser-based video games and all sorts of creative takes on classic (and not so classic) works. We haven't finished exploring all the entries ourselves yet, and we hope you enjoy discovering them with us!

Stay tuned for an announcement of the winners later this month. We're awarding prizes in six categories:

• Best Analog Games
• Best Digital Game
• Best adaptation of a 1923 work
• Best remixing of multiple sources
• Best “Deep Cut” (use of a work not listed on any of the round up articles)
• Best Visuals

A huge thanks to everyone who entered, and to all the folks helping us out as judges. Given the positive response to this game jam, and the fact that the public domain is set to continue growing (finally), we're definitely going to consider running another one in the future.

Filed Under: copyright, game jam, games, public domain

One Final Reminder: Public Domain Game Jam Ends In Two Days

from the come-join-in dept

Gaming Like It's 1923: The Newly Public Domain Game Jam

Okay, we've got one last reminder that our Gaming Like It's 1923 public domain game jam ends in just two days. It's another chance to celebrate the fact that the US finally (years too late) has allowed works from 1923 to return to the public domain where they belong. We've already got over a dozen amazing entries in the contest with a nice mix of different types of games, all utilizing some newly public domain works, and building off of them to create something fun and new. You can check out the existing entries or come up with your own. And for those of you who have already been working on your games, don't forget to submit them by the end of the month (Pacific Time) where they'll be reviewed by our all-star panel of game developers and copyright experts...

Filed Under: 1923, game jam, public domain