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[Scelly9]

Copyright does not protect the idea for a game, its name or title, or the method or methods for playing it. Nor does copyright protect any idea, system, method, device, or trademark material involved in developing, merchandising, or playing a game. Once a game has been made public, nothing in the copyright law prevents others from developing another game based on similar principles. Copyright protects only the particular manner of an author’s expression in literary, artistic, or musical form.

That seems to say that game mechanics can't be copyrighted.

[Starver]

• A First person shooter where you play a young British soldier in the First World War. No GUI, damage system similar to DF. Make as realistic as humanly possible. Ridiculously good graphics, every detail historically accurate. Campaign lasts the whole war, beginning to end. Establish early on that the enemy aren't monsters any more than the player is. Make the main character around 15 and market to the 13-15 age group. Laugh as millions of teenagers develop PTSD and their parents can't sue due to a disclaimer placed on the box where no one would notice.

There'll have to be a lot of Player Privileges (enemy AI prevented from being quite so personally deadly to the player).  Yes, people lasted from the beginning to the end, but the best, most immersive parts of the whole campaign are going to be pretty lethal.  And if you're not going over the top to be machine-gunned by the enemy, you're at risk from shelling, gassing, diseases and conditions or being shot for allowing yourself to get trench foot or anything else...

(Also, as an avid wargamer, I can tell of the WWI games we sometimes played.  A lot of accuracy was put into the system.  It ended up where both sides sat in trenches and fired at/onto each other largely ineffectually (depending on exact trench-layouts), then whoever broke first and decided to go over the top ran over no-man's-land and as far past the crashed planes/broken-down tanks as you could get before the wave got annihilated.  Then the other side might decide to take its chances against the remaining trench defenders...  and still got annihilated before they got across NML...  Good times...   But left us a little depressed    Still, we kept at it, refining the system to keep it sort of realistic[2] but now we occasionally got an actual incursion, that would still get repulsed...   )

If you can map (not railroad, not glass-tunnel, but generally work out a decent way of getting someone in the right[1] places at the right[1] times to get a taster...  They have to be somewhere where they had a Christmas Day football match or two.  Could be quite stealth-educational.  We're coming up to the various centenaries.  Not sure if everyone would appreciate the medium as a form of commemoration, but I could see it being a way to bring a little actual historical knowledge to 'da yout'.

(Glad you specified British Soldier.  Eastern Front would have been so much more awkward.  Due to the Russians' choice of the initial waves of troops, it turned things far nastier far quicker...  And then if you're a Russian fighter you've got a number of interesting choices to make even prior to the February Revolution, if you're not already one of the millions of POWs, for most of the war...)


[1] "Not so wrong", at least...

[2] Of course, we didn't try the totally asymmetric battles (either through equipment, training or tactical appreciation...) after all, what's the fun of being a given British unit successfully take a German strongpoint only to be told that they have to withdraw because what they're holding isn't part of the Plan (which has gone all to pot everywhere that the HQ Henries wanted to break through, in their combined madness and bad decision-making).  Or what passed as the Germanic equivalent (though rarely did they suffer quite the same level of bad Generalship).  So perhaps we self-selected the mutual blood-baths...


edit: Oh yeah, and definitely something crickety.  Not 20/20 IPL stuff, though.  Proper three-day tests.

[Sirus]

Yeah, US copyright law specifically forbids copywriting game mechanics.

You're an idiot. No they dont. Game Mechanics are an issue of patents. And almost no one in the table top gaming industry files patents for their games. And the very very few that have, dont enforce them except one. And the only one company thats tried to did it half heartly, and therefore it doesnt matter. But according to Designers and Dragons they have gotten some royalty based on it.

Right! Because only one game has used lives, or had a health bar, or had regenerating health, or had unlimited ammo, or had limited ammo, or was from the first-person perspective, or the third-person perspective, or has block-based puzzles...

[Vattic]

Yeah, US copyright law specifically forbids copywriting game mechanics.

The water has been muddied some with that recent Tetris case.

A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012 that the Tetris clone "Mino" from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating such elements as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks

Wikipedia

[Akura]

There needs to be WW1 games.  Or any sort of shooter that is not modern/near future/future.  The only game that is not post 1939 that I can think of is Assassins Creed.  And that's alternate history with sufficiently advanced technology, so it doesn't count.

I seem to recall spotting a FPS or TPS/strategy game civil war era-based game.  Forget the title though...

I remember buying a Civil War FPS on the PS2. It was so bad, I took it back to the store for a refund the next day.


...After playing through both (Union and Confederate) campaigns. It was basically (not the title, though) Call of Duty: Gettysburg.
...but now that I think of it, I don't believe any of the missions took place at Gettysburg...

[timferius]

Yeah, US copyright law specifically forbids copywriting game mechanics.

The water has been muddied some with that recent Tetris case.

A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012 that the Tetris clone "Mino" from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating such elements as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks

Wikipedia

At the same time, it's the difference of a direct clone vs. taking SOME game mechanics. Although, wasn't the conversation about doing a First person MtG game? And how as long as you avoided proper names you could use the genearl plane-walking theme? I'm not entirely sure why we're talking about copying game mechanics is all, we're not talking about copying the card game, are we?
Confused

[majikero]

Katamari has copyright on it's gameplay I think.

[Draco18s]

Katamari has copyright on it's gameplay I think.

Katamari is also so unlike anything that's ever come before, or since.

Unlike say...Monopoly ("move a piece around the board to collect victory points (money)" vs. say any other game where that's the goal: Dragonland (volcanoes and dragon treasure), Fast Food Franchise (franchisers and money); or we could say that Monopoly is about buying and selling real estate...just like For Sale)

[MrWiggles]

Yeah, US copyright law specifically forbids copywriting game mechanics.

The water has been muddied some with that recent Tetris case.

A US District Court judge ruled in June 2012 that the Tetris clone "Mino" from Xio Interactive infringed on the Tetris Company's copyrights by replicating such elements as the playfield dimensions and the shapes of the blocks

Wikipedia

At the same time, it's the difference of a direct clone vs. taking SOME game mechanics. Although, wasn't the conversation about doing a First person MtG game? And how as long as you avoided proper names you could use the genearl plane-walking theme? I'm not entirely sure why we're talking about copying game mechanics is all, we're not talking about copying the card game, are we?
Confused

The wikipedia article says that the copyright issue wasnt over the rules, e.g mechanics. But the other game elements. Field Size and Copying the blocks texture patterns.

Which is interesting, but not entirely new ground. For instance, I know I couldnt make a first person shooter, then use sprites from other games to populate it, or sound effects for the weapons copied from other games.

As an extreme example, you should be able to copy Halo 4 mechanics to a T, as long as you use entirely new art pieces ect ect ect.

That TF2 rip off in China. Thats totally valid, if sleezy and lazy. If you did that with Halo 4, you should be golden. And this is assuming you do replicate the code independently to gain the same effects of the mechanics.

[Alkhemia]

World of Tanks but with 40k vehicles.

[GoombaGeek]

This ended up sounding really autistic, but I'd like a game where you start with a bunch of trees and every kind of mineral. You can identify every mineral. You can craft anything with these. There is no goal.

[Alkhemia]

This ended up sounding really autistic, but I'd like a game where you start with a bunch of trees and every kind of mineral. You can identify every mineral. You can craft anything with these. There is no goal.

so like a good minecraft?

[GoombaGeek]

This ended up sounding really autistic, but I'd like a game where you start with a bunch of trees and every kind of mineral. You can identify every mineral. You can craft anything with these. There is no goal.

so like a good minecraft?

Yeah.

Like, you'd wander the rock-and-tree-strewn plains, looking for a lump of native copper. After tying it to a stick using some tree roots, you heat it over a fire and pound it into a knife blade with a rock.

You are able to move into any concievable tech tree and you can end up building things like nuclear weapons if you spend a long time playing through complicated multi-step processes where all the materials are at hand and can be made by you, from rocks and wood.

That's my ideal game.

[Sergius]

Do mods count? I wish there existed an Iron Man suit mod for GTA San Andreas. Then again, I wish there was an Iron Man suit mod for nearly every open/city sandbox game.

Iron Man suit mod for Red Faction: Guerrilla.

Full with flying and repulsor rays and wossnames, shooty thingies. And integrated PA system to play AC/DC songs, or something.

EDIT: OH, what do ya know, it exists (for GTA at least).

[aristabulus]

... And integrated PA system to play AC/DC songs, or something.  ...

It's Black Sabbath or nothing, maaaaaann. 

World of Tanks but with 40k vehicles.

I'm not sure 40k would translate well to that game style.  Dueling tanks seem like a rare occurrence in the fresh-ground-meat-all-the-time type battle fronts characterized in the fluff.  It _could_ work for Aeronautica Imperialis, which hasn't seen videogame representation yet, and air combat above the deck is quite divorced from events on the ground.

I'd be more interested to see DoW-style Epic scale battles.  Final Liberation was soooooo long ago.