Legal Issues in the Games Industry

Legal Issues

Legal issues in the Games Industry are these a problem? Yes, they are a BIG problem!

38 studios (founded by Curt ‘bloody sock’ Schilling) were formed in 2006 in Massachusetts. It was given $75 million by the state of Rhode Island to move states and created 450 jobs for their new state. It has 2 projects; the RPG Kingdoms of Amalur and an MMO named Copernicus. After Amalurs disappointing release sales 38 studios defaulted (Couldn’t pay) their next loan repayment, so basically they were screwed. Within a month of this company had shut down and the 150-plus members who moved states where left on Rhode Island with no job.

Infinity ward are the developers behind the Call of Duty: Modern Warfare series. This includes MW3, the highest-grossing entertainment release in history. The studio heads were fired by activision (Their owners) because they were discovered to be holding meetings with other publishers. The whole fiasco of what happened with Infinity ward and EA was settled outside of court, almost-all of the Infinity Ward staff quit to form Respawn Entertainment. EA will be publishing their first game in 2013.

Most people have heard of SOPA and PIPA previously. This is legislation (law) designed to prevent piracy and ensure the validity and enforcement of copyrights. Even though not all off the members of the ESA were in favour of doing this, the whole thing with SOPA and PIPA closed down some massive sites which people used for backing up work, and other things. Just because people were using to to pirate and illegally download things off of the internet, but that was stupid because a lot of people lost some of their life’s work that they had on there.

Law360, New York (November 26, 2008) when you start playing games on your Nintendo Wii, your Xbox 360 or even your computer, you won’t realise the legal and business issues behind the amazing graphics and score. Digital gaming is one of the world’s fastest growing industries of today’s society up to 26% in 2011 even with the economic slowdown and it is no surprise that where there is money there are lawsuits. One of the trickiest areas in this is the intersection of intellectual property law and virtual worlds. An example of this is the $6 Million agreement between Blizzard Entertainment and MDY industries. Blizzard Entertainment are the popular game makers of World of Warcaft.

Regulatory Issues in the Games Industry

Regulatory Issues

What actually is a regulatory issue? Regulation is about codes of standard.

A regulation is a legal provision that creates limits or constrains a right, duty or responsibility. Regulation can take many forms, including self-regulation by an industry such as through trade association. But do we REALLY need regulations? In a legal way yes. But in my opinion we shouldn’t really have them in place, because it’s Illegal to buy an 18 game underage not play it, so either way they will be getting the same amount of money from parents or guardians buying kids their favourite games that are too  high of age regulation for them.

As video games become better, some become more violent and the medium was considered by the media as ‘dangerous’ to the point some were banned! In order to retain a sense of order and reason to the sale and advertising of video games regulatory standards were created.

‘Riga’ is made up of representatives from across the UK games industry; it has historically included members from SCEE, Revolution, Blitz Games and many more. Its current head is Jason Kingsley, OBE he is the founder of Rebellion Developments.

Many of the worlds top publishers are members in the ESA they focus on running E3, supporting the ESRB, fighting piracy and fighting censorship.

In the UK, until summer 2012 the BBFC (British board of film classification) were the sole legally-enforced ratings board for Video games. As of summer 2012 PEGI have replaced them in this role. Due to a minor legislative error made in 1984, until 2009 the sale of age-restricted games.

PEGI (pan-European game information) provide ratings according to the traditional age breakdowns of Europe, complete with small icons to represent different elements of content. In Japan, they have two rating bodies: computer entertainment rating organisation (CERO), who work with video games for home consoles and PC (except games of a traditionally ‘adult’ nature) and the ethics organisation of a computer software (EOCS) who rate there games CERO won’t.

This has led to a culture of modifying games for release- this is almost always-referable to scrapping the project entirely. In china, you can’t show corpses. WoW: WotLK was changed for that region, making the undead and abominations have skin and be full objects/creatures.

So in general who are regulatory bodies/issues for? Us? The Industry? Or your parents? That question is for you to answer! Goodbye!

Ethics and Morals in video-games

Known worldwide throughout video games there are lots of ethics and morals included into them.

Ethics: The principals, rules and conduct of a group or society.

Morals: the principals, rules and conduct of an individual.

Generally in games Red = the bad guys and Blue = the good guys.

The developers of a video game also like to put the player into a sear where they feel like there in the game themselves they do this by adding Player choices, a great example for this is in the game Bioshock, players can save or harvest the little sisters for a reward of ADAM.

Saving the girls cures them and gives the player 80 ADAM.

Harvesting kills the girl and gives you 160 ADAM

But there are different advantages and disadvantages to this, as if you keep saving the girls, you will gain rewards throughout the entire game, and when you save them the music and sound effects will be all happy and jolly, on the other hand if you harvest them you may get a bigger ADAM reward but when it comes to harvesting them the game goes all screechy and static effected which makes you feel bad and evil.

Video games are the perfect ‘Proving Ground’ to test emotional responses, but are they always used responsibly?

Games such as assassin’s creed or GTA encourage the player towards violence, but for set goals. They reinforce this idea of behaving responsibly via de-syncing (dying) if you kill too many civilians in the AC series, and in GTA, if you commit to many crimes the police and military will chase you down.

Based on the film death race 2000 exidys death race was the first game controversial for its violence. Mortal combats live action violence would prove hugely controversial as would manhunts later use of traditional video game sync kills. Manhunt was later implicated in the murder of a teenager, after the game was found in belongings of the victim. The attacker had never played it.

Also the row that modern warfare 2’s mission no Russian, the entire level the entire level is the same whether the player kills people or not. What is the point of this sequence? Why was it included?

In resident evil 5 purely a product of its homeland the Japanese lack the history of racism towards black people that Europe and the US have experienced. Does that justify it ethically, not necessarily because the trailer included Chris Redfield a big stereotypical white man walking through a town of black African zombies which don’t look like zombies they just look like vandals, this is where the government and other countries where not happy with the game and it’s ethical views in the trailer.