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Plagiarism
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@mietze I absolutely plagiarize my OWN old descs for new characters also typed, created, and played by me. Because writing descs is the absolute WORST part of this hobby for me. I hateses it. And I doubt there is any power in the world with the ability to make me NOT recycle one of ONLY MY OWN dozens by now - even if they are probably cut and pasted into various differing versions here and there.
But I don’t hateses it enough to plagiarize anyone else’s but my own.
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@Jenn i really don’t care if people wholesale port another pc from another game if it was their own creation. There are a few folks that do that even between genres. As far as I’m concerned if someone creates something its theirs and if they want to recycle it who the fuck cares.
However I do think that almost everyone thinks its lame to rip a desc or bg pretty much word for word on an another active game without seeking permission or touching base with the other person.
In the grand scheme of things is it the end of the world no. I rarely look at pc descs or even read them on wikis. I find i get more of a picture of pcs in rp and usually people pose appearance stuff anyway.
But to me that behavior speaks of a certain lack of discretion and respect that makes me kind of leery. When I’ve seen people engage in it usually there’s other behaviors that emerge that are problematic as well.
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@mietze Agreed. Again. In its entirety. I guess that what I’m suggesting in this thread is that it’s in Game Gab, under the guise of plagiarism in general - how do folks feel about that on games? Are there moments when it is ever ok? Is it ALWAYS blanket bad? In Game Gab, as a broad topic… I think there are a few VERY niche and SUPER thin /maaaaaaaaybeeeeeee/s. But folks will likely be watching even the maybes with side-eye.
Whereas if this were in Rough and Rowdy, specifically about Roz and Tez and their own intellectual property specifically being ripped off from a game it sounds like maybe neither of them even play… There’s really zero room for nuance in that situation at all. But. That’s a different board and different specific than the offshoot that was moved to here.
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When I saw the thread title I was expecting something about copying code or wiki styles or something, but copying descriptions and actual creative text from people? Jesus.
The idea is that one expresses themselves through writing… if you can’t or won’t do that, then what’s the fucking point?
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Plagiarism is when you copy someone else’s writing as your own without permission, so using a desc that a friend wrote for you wouldn’t count.
I also think phrases or a particular (brief!) way of describing something usually wouldn’t count. These things tend to go in and out of style among friend groups or games and feels more like the adopted slang than ripping someone off.
Blatantly using entire descs, event descs or scene sets or backgrounds or anything else where you’ve just copied what someone else did and not citing where the writing came from? Is plagiarism, and I’d support banning anyone who did it.
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@Nilli said in Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is when you copy someone else’s writing as your own without permission
Oof, let’s not go down this rabbit hole again.
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@Pavel I’m not aware of a prior discussion here, I was just thinking of cases like ghostwriters or the above example of Tez writing descs for friends.
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@Nilli There was a rather strong discussion about plagiarism previously, along with several different(ish) definitions.
I also abhor ghostwriters - the practice of using them, not the writers themselves.
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@Pavel Ahh I missed that one. I’m not trying to say I have the one correct definition here, just that if I wrote a description and said you could use it and you then used it, I wouldn’t call that plagiarism.
I see enough examples of the more blatant variety anyway that’s honestly shocking. It seems like most of us are thirty-somethings who have been RPing for 47 years and should know better than to be straight up copy/pasting other people’s work.
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@Nilli Oh, for sure, but you know how this group gets. Semantics.
I hate writing descs, but I’d rather use ChatGPT to cobble something together rather than wholesale take a desc someone else wrote.
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@Tez said in Plagiarism:
What would you do?
I think the response to any crime should be primarily determined by the injured party, but my instinct without knowing what the affected person thinks? Ban. If that’s the level of instinctual disrespect you have for the other contributors on a game, then I do not have high hopes for the behaviors I don’t yet know about.
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@GF said in Plagiarism:
@Tez said in Plagiarism:
What would you do?
I think the response to any crime should be primarily determined by the injured party, but my instinct without knowing what the affected person thinks? Ban. If that’s the level of instinctual disrespect you have for the other contributors on a game, then I do not have high hopes for the behaviors I don’t yet know about.
Though I normally hate banning as a first-instance reaction, I entirely agree. If you’re going to lie about something as pointless as a desc, what else are you going to lie about?
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Yeah. My first impulse was ban as well, but sometimes it is difficult to measure if your response is PROPORTIONATE when you are blinded by the light of FRIEND JUSTICE. I was also just fucking flabbergasted by how bold they were to just copy the whole damn thing. Like – for real? For real for real?
We’ve seen people stealing game code, wiki code, policy files – mine have been stolen twice!, and other general out of character content multiple times across the hobby. The guilty parties always look, you know, guilty, but there is something about the blatant disrespect and lack of creativity in stealing someone’s whole description that just baffles me. It’s just so weird. It’s so weird, guys. I am dying to know why you would do that.
she/they
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@Tez said in Plagiarism:
sometimes it is difficult to measure if your response is PROPORTIONATE
There’s no firepower like overwhelming firepower.
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@mietze said in Plagiarism:
I mean fuck now you can use ai for a base and edit. There’s no excuse. I know I would have a hard time respecting a player who did this. Especially so stupidly on another game in the same genre. Its just gross.
You shouldn’t need a policy to know this is a lame ass thing to do.
We actually wrote up a specific AI policy (tldr: we refuse to use it for anything including images, players are not permitted to use any language machine model but may use it for images if they want) because of its burgeoning use in the MUSH world, but never would have thought we’d need to include a plagiarism policy.
If it were me, I’d just chalk this up to Artificial Non-Intelligence and not even using a language model, and probably ban them outright. Not only is it unethical, but as others said, it betrays a fundamental lack of creativity that makes me doubt whether they would be a contributing member of our storytelling community.
I was thinking about this more and more since last night, and went from it being irksome to feeling like it is a real violation of the heart and soul that I would pour into a character. And there’s just no excuse for it, really.
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Odd question about plagiarism. I know plagiarism of descs and even whole characters has happened before in the hobby, but has anyone ever attempted to plagiarize a plot or PRP before?
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@MisterBoring said in Plagiarism:
Odd question about plagiarism. I know plagiarism of descs and even whole characters has happened before in the hobby, but has anyone ever attempted to plagiarize a plot or PRP before?
I’m sure it’s happened, but I think also when you are talking about PLOTS and such, so much is really just boiled down, whether it’s Joseph Campbell or Aristotle, to “the same stories we keep retelling”, that you get into a situation where it’s not necessarily plagiarism per se, it’s just telling a story that has been told before, elsewhere.
I mean, how many tv shows and movies have told the same story as Groundhog Day? Even GROUNDHOG DAY wasn’t the first use of the Groundhog Day story.
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Oh sure, plenty of plots at a certain level are derivative or otherwise copied from others. I’m wondering if someone attempted to introduce the same NPCs, mcguffins and events, like, down to the letter as someone else’s plot.
Proud Member of the Pro-Mummy Alliance
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@MisterBoring said in Plagiarism:
Oh sure, plenty of plots at a certain level are derivative or otherwise copied from others. I’m wondering if someone attempted to introduce the same NPCs, mcguffins and events, like, down to the letter as someone else’s plot.
I have definitely seen STers recycle the exact same plot, shoehorned into another game’s theme, that they ran elsewhere. I’ll say that much.
And I HAVE seen people run their own versions of plots I’ve run, which I take as flattering. Although I’ll bet if push came to shove, someone could find some place before me (a movie, a show, a book, etc) that ran that plot before I did.
Although, I did once see someone use one of my PCs as an NPC in a plotline at another game once. That was kind of trippy. But they hadn’t wholesale copied the desc, so…
