Guest Lecturer - Arthur Parsons

Our guest lecture this week was presented by Arthur Parsons who is a veteran at Traveller’s tales as he has worked there for the past 16 years. Arthur is the lead designer and game director at Traveller’s tales and he has work on many AAA games.

To explain what a game director is, they control the direction of a project, keeping in check and making sure everything to do with the project is proceeding correctly. A director must know the IP and the audience to fully help them understand the project. In Arthur’s case, he works on a lot of Lego games that have themes of different movies so Arthur must fully immerse himself in everything to do with that franchise so he can deliver the best game possible.

In this report I will be talking about intellectual property (IP for short) and what it means in the games industry. An article I read written by Ben Siders, really goes into detail about the subject. He goes on to explain that a video game is not a conventional product, a developer doesn’t sell manufactured goods or even physical media, the main thing a developer owns is entirely intellectual property and all they sell are licenses to use it. I found this a really interesting way to look it as it makes sense, because anyone can take your game, strip it down to the code and replicate in a way that uses new art and extra code and then they have a new IP. “Sure, the instruction manual, source code, and art files may be subject to copyright, but nothing stops another developer from ripping off your basic gameplay idea and publishing a clone with original art and programming”

This is seen all over the industry with clones of popular games popping up everywhere, things like this are micro management games such as Farmville and Clash of Clans, they work the same yet have differences that make them their own IP. As they say, the biggest form of flattery is imitation.

References:

Ben Siders . (2013). Game Developers: Intellectual Property Is All You’ve Got, So Make Sure You Get It. Available: http://techli.com/2013/05/game-developers-intellectual-property-is-all-youve-got-so-make-sure-you-get-it/#.. Last accessed 8th May 2015.