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The Old Hack

NP Monday October 23, 2017

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52 minutes ago, partner555 said:
1 hour ago, Tom Sewell said:

I'd give those bazongas in the last panel 3 points.

I'd give them Double D+.

Apparently, Dan goes for the change which is least likely to be masked by change blindness ...

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K^2    2

Anybody else suddenly got an urge of turning this into an actual video game? Probably something fairly simple, in the style of early Mario Party games, with board + mini-games (pending future clarifications on rules.) I'm willing to sacrifice my time on code, but this seems like it'd hinge on art, and I'm useless at that. I can roll with 2D or 3D, and it'd be easy enough for me to get a match-making server going, or it can be purely single-player, depending on how much interest there is in turning it into something.

(Industry experience, two shipped titles, past work at Google in machine vision. I'm serious about getting the code working, but this is going to be a lot of work on the art side.)

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1 minute ago, K^2 said:

(Industry experience, two shipped titles, past work at Google in machine vision. I'm serious about getting the code working, but this is going to be a lot of work on the art side.)

It might also be lot of work on "getting the rules from Dan" side. Especially if you don't contact him personally.

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1 hour ago, partner555 said:

I'd give them Double D+.

Dem bad grades. And probably impractical. :demonicduck:

Had to flinch for that one.

6 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Anybody else suddenly got an urge of turning this into an actual video game?

Would have, but this is Goonmanji – anything could happen.

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K^2    2
19 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

It might also be lot of work on "getting the rules from Dan" side. Especially if you don't contact him personally.

Rules would have to be adapted to fit the mechanics, anyhow. Trying to use rules designed for a board game in a video game directly is a folly. I know some guys who worked on PC version of MTG. Trying to codify all of the special text on each card was a nightmare, because humans interpret rules very different from machines. Something that has an intuitive resolution in written rules to players is a critical bug waiting to happen when the conditions are just right on a machine. And yes, conflicts occasionally happen even in traditional MTG, but there you can at least argue about the rules, trying to come up with a resolution. When playing a game on PC, no such luxury.

So barring direct intervention from Dan, I would just take the general outline that we're sure to get over the upcoming weeks and take liberties with it to fit the mechanics of the game. I already feel like a lot of transformation mechanics would have to become mini-games, which will fundamentally alter how the game is scored. And that might call for other balance adjustments. I find that entirely acceptable for a fan effort.

Of course, I'm prepared to backtrack on any of the above as this arc progresses. We might get a lot of detail on how the game is played or very little. Some of it might be readily adaptable, and some would require changes. But I would argue that the main purpose of a fan game would be to try and make it fun, even if it has to diverge from in-story rules to do so.

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On 10/23/2017 at 2:49 AM, hkmaly said:

It might also be lot of work on "getting the rules from Dan" side. Especially if you don't contact him personally.

As much work as he seems to have put in, I imagine he'll post the full rules at some point.

Of course, the biggest hurdle would be how friggin' hard it is to transform players in our setting....

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K^2    2
1 hour ago, WR...S said:

Of course, the biggest hurdle would be how friggin' hard it is to transform players in our setting....

For a simple game with a skeleton team, honestly, I'd be content with a few drawn/rednered frames of transformation sequence story-book style. The drawback, of course, is that there'd have to be quite a few sequences for various possible pairs of starting and final states, greatly limiting the number of transformations.

A much better way is to deal with vectors, whether in 2D or 3D, and allow for procedural transformations. These will almost always require some additional artist work to handle weird edge cases, but you can greatly increase the number of possibilities and it'd support animations out of the box. I can think of several ways to approach the details, depending on what tools the artist(s) is/are comfortable with. And yes, I recognize that something like that would be a far greater time sink on both the code and art side.

But the great thing here is that it's entirely open ended. You don't have to jump into the deep end of it if the resources aren't there. In fact, it can and should be started with just the board and the gameplay mechanics.

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3 hours ago, WR...S said:

As much work as he seems to have put in, I imagine he'll post the full rules at some point.

Considering he posted the rules to Sumo recently (after having thought they were lost forever). I think he'll post the goonmanji 2 rules as well, from what I gathered, it seems like he's only going to touch on the basics this week, but expand on them as the game plays out both in comic and in commentary. So we'll just have to make sure to read everything. :)

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Just for the record, in the US you can't copyright the rules to a game, only the expression of those rules, so legally you would be in the clear if you took the rules, as shown in the comic, etc and translated them to either code or a dead tree product or PDF.

Ethically you would be a skunk if you did that with out The Dan's knowledge and permission.

 

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K^2    2

Non-monetized derivative, using only a small portion of the original material (rules, few characters), that attributes and does not diminish the original work. This is Fair Use under US law. And yes, if it was just the game, without characters, it wouldn't even need that.

Given that this is meant as a fan-work, not in any way trying to be passed for completely original work, and Dan's past reactions towards fan-generated content in general, I would be comfortable going ahead with this without seeking explicit permission. I wouldn't do this against Dan's will, if it were voiced or if there was any reason to believe it would be voiced, of course, simply out of respect for the world he created.

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48 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Non-monetized derivative, using only a small portion of the original material (rules, few characters), that attributes and does not diminish the original work. This is Fair Use under US law.

No, it's not.  Do you think you can make a game with My Little Pony characters?  Or any thing from Disney?

Just because you aren't trying to make money off of it doesn't make it fair use. You know what makes if fair use? A judge saying it is. There really isn't a bright line in the copyright laws saying "do this and it's Fair Use". That's why things like the various open source/open gaming licenses exists, to create a virtual bright line.

The rules aren't the problem, it's the use of his copyrighted characters.  Using some one intellectual property with out their explicit permission is a copyright violation.  At the bottom of the comic page you will find this.

Quote

All comics, artwork, characters copyright © 2002-2017 by Dan Shive.

The Dan went out of his way to put that statement in, please respect it.

 

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On 10/23/2017 at 9:20 AM, K^2 said:

Rules would have to be adapted to fit the mechanics, anyhow. Trying to use rules designed for a board game in a video game directly is a folly. I know some guys who worked on PC version of MTG. Trying to codify all of the special text on each card was a nightmare, because humans interpret rules very different from machines. Something that has an intuitive resolution in written rules to players is a critical bug waiting to happen when the conditions are just right on a machine. And yes, conflicts occasionally happen even in traditional MTG, but there you can at least argue about the rules, trying to come up with a resolution. When playing a game on PC, no such luxury.

I had friends who bought MTG for the PC on launch. The amount of buggs in that game on day one was hilarious. I kind of knew it would be that way as I'd tried my hand at something similar, though much simpler, years earlier. Trying to codify a flexible rules system to something a computer can handle isn't for the faint of heart. A computer takes instructions very literally, and that's a good thing for most situations, but feed it a stack of MTG cards and things will rapidly fall apart. While some cards can easily be classified it's the interesting cards with their complex rules and exceptions that screws things up. I *think* it was eventually playable, but it took a lot of patching, and broken combos and weird rule interpretations kept turning up for a long time.

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2 hours ago, Cpt. Obvious said:

I *think* it was eventually playable, but it took a lot of patching, and broken combos and weird rule interpretations kept turning up for a long time.

Well, yes, they keep coming up in the card game, too, from what I've seen in EGS and elsewhere.  It's just a lot faster to get a ruling on whether they should be banned or players should roll with them, when the judge is right there, than it is when changing the rules/interpretation reqires reprogramming and installing an update.  The computer isn't necessarily any more quirky in its interpretation than some game masters I've played with.  ;-)

"The decisions of the Carnelli Master are capricious, arbitrary, and final."

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Well, I finally got caught up with reading the NP comics I missed only to land in this debate.

So for what it's worth -

Goonmanji II should not be a video game.

It should be a spectator sport with mandatory audience participation.

Could you imagine the disclaimers on the tickets or Pay-Per-View receipts to meet the "Informed Consent" requirements?

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7 hours ago, CritterKeeper said:

It's just a lot faster to get a ruling on whether they should be banned or players should roll with them, when the judge is right there, than it is when changing the rules/interpretation reqires reprogramming and installing an update.  The computer isn't necessarily any more quirky in its interpretation than some game masters I've played with.  ;-)

The computer is at least consistent. You need to spend effort to make it doing two different things in same situation. Also, fair: in no occasion would computer be tempted to side with the explanation favoring player with shorter skirt or bigger boobs. And not only because computer wouldn't be able to measure length of skirt without taking it off and putting on reference background with regular pattern, and size of boobs without 3D scanner.

7 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

Could you imagine the disclaimers on the tickets or Pay-Per-View receipts to meet the "Informed Consent" requirements?

Would probably need to be bound as book.

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K^2    2
15 hours ago, mlooney said:

Just because you aren't trying to make money off of it doesn't make it fair use. You know what makes if fair use? A judge saying it is.

Your case law is out of date. According to Ninth Circuit, Fair Use is an expressed right, and an exception to exclusive rights granted by copyright. Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (2015) Modern copyright law actually requires copyright holder to have a reason to believe that Fair Use does not apply prior to asserting copyright. And the proposed work is non-commercial, transformative, and does not diminish source material. These are the criteria for Fair Use.

Moreover, an implied license exists for derived works, conditional on attribution (e.g. Dan on NSFW edits) Consequently, per Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen (1990) this does constitute a non-exclusive license. I might not be a contracts lawyer, but I work for one. These things rub off.

15 hours ago, mlooney said:

The Dan went out of his way to put that statement in, please respect it.

That's a standard footer. There's one at the bottom of this page. It is by no means going out of someone's way. Going out of someone's way is actually registering copyrighted material with Library of Congress, which by the way, is requirement for actually enforcing the copyright. Albeit, copyright can be registered after infringement has taken place, limiting author's ability to seek damages and attorney fees. No LoC registration under name Dan Shive exists, making that copyright footer a mere formality with no legal bearing. Again, copyright still exists, even unregistered, but that quoted footing is absolutely meaningless.

But that's an aside. The crux of the matter is that Dan has been supportive of derivative works. The copyright is in every way respected. And if this is to become a thing, I'm sure we'll hear his thoughts on it one way or another. As I've said before, a mere mention from him that he does not approve would be enough for me to drop out of any attempts to make a game like this. But I'm also not going to bug him about permission for something that has less chance of happening than not. Given all of the above, that'd be just rude.

You, however, have absolutely no legal standing in this matter. And I don't think an ethical one either, but if you'd like to debate ethics of it further, feel free to PM me. I'm done derailing this thread.

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19 minutes ago, K^2 said:

Your case law is out of date. According to Ninth Circuit, Fair Use is an expressed right, and an exception to exclusive rights granted by copyright. Lenz v. Universal Music Corp. (2015) Modern copyright law actually requires copyright holder to have a reason to believe that Fair Use does not apply prior to asserting copyright. And the proposed work is non-commercial, transformative, and does not diminish source material. These are the criteria for Fair Use.

Moreover, an implied license exists for derived works, conditional on attribution (e.g. Dan on NSFW edits) Consequently, per Effects Associates, Inc. v. Cohen (1990) this does constitute a non-exclusive license. I might not be a contracts lawyer, but I work for one. These things rub off.

That's a standard footer. There's one at the bottom of this page. It is by no means going out of someone's way. Going out of someone's way is actually registering copyrighted material with Library of Congress, which by the way, is requirement for actually enforcing the copyright. Albeit, copyright can be registered after infringement has taken place, limiting author's ability to seek damages and attorney fees. No LoC registration under name Dan Shive exists, making that copyright footer a mere formality with no legal bearing. Again, copyright still exists, even unregistered, but that quoted footing is absolutely meaningless.

But that's an aside. The crux of the matter is that Dan has been supportive of derivative works. The copyright is in every way respected. And if this is to become a thing, I'm sure we'll hear his thoughts on it one way or another. As I've said before, a mere mention from him that he does not approve would be enough for me to drop out of any attempts to make a game like this. But I'm also not going to bug him about permission for something that has less chance of happening than not. Given all of the above, that'd be just rude.

You, however, have absolutely no legal standing in this matter. And I don't think an ethical one either, but if you'd like to debate ethics of it further, feel free to PM me. I'm done derailing this thread.

The Moderator: While I understand that legal arguments can be finicky, there is no excuse for getting rude in discussion. mlooney's legal standing in this matter is exactly the same as yours -- he is a fan of the work and he supports Dan. If you feel you have a stronger position than his, kindly assert it politely. If you fail to do so, I will take action.

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K^2    2
1 hour ago, The Wozard said:

So... Where's the starting square on the board?

Should all players start on the same square? Board has two reflection symmetry. Along the river, and along line perpendicular to it. So any starting position will get reflected to 3 other equivalent points giving you 4 start locations, which matches number of players. If movement is allowed both clock-wise or counter-clock-wise, there are 3 starting arrangements that are 100% "fair". The 4 corners, the 2-point squares adjacent to river, or 2-point squares on sides with no access to river. Corners seem most natural. If movement is allowed in one direction only, I don't think there is an arrangement that mathematically guarantees to give no pair of players advantage over another pair due to rotational symmetry being broken by river, and reflection symmetry by chirality of player movement.

I have no idea if any of that's relevant, though. The gameplay might be chaotic enough for starting positions not to matter at all. Good question either way.

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My other thought is that with the game running to 8 points, and there being a probably-better-than-even chance that one of four players will score 8-9 points in just 3 turns, a game will be SHORT. So the impromptu hijinks related to the transformations must be more important than the game itself.

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3 hours ago, Don Edwards said:

My other thought is that with the game running to 8 points, and there being a probably-better-than-even chance that one of four players will score 8-9 points in just 3 turns, a game will be SHORT. So the impromptu hijinks related to the transformations must be more important than the game itself.

That depends on how many cards each player gets and how common the individual types are. If we assume that all types are equally common and that a player starts with seven cards, that will make it achievable provided that you draw a card each round. However, let us say that some effects will cause you to lose cards -- whether random cards or all cards of a given type -- and you are already in trouble. More, not all cards may be meant for use on oneself. Some of them might be intended for use on other players or are of the type that modifies gameplay without allowing transformations. Let's say 40% of all cards are of this type. Suddenly that beginning hand is much less likely to allow three fast winning moves and it will take longer still to draw the extra transformations you need.

You might still be right, of course. It's just that I am less sure, not knowing what complications Dan has tossed into the game yet.

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