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Plagiarism
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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…
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@MisterBoring When I was looking at the history of plagiarism in the hobby, I saw someone trying to copy and paste someone’s entire NPC court structure. I think someone lifted @Coin’s npcs actually. Not plot beats or anything, but NPC structures.
she/they
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I have had two major experiences with plagiarism/theft and both of them were completely and utterly infuriating.
In one case, when I was playing on a WoD mage game many moons ago, someone stole my entire wiki page, swapped out maybe three or four sentences on the whole page, and plunked in (some) new pictures. We’re talking the CSS, the color, the layout, the writing, everything – including some images that were icons for specific subsplats that this new person didn’t belong to but didn’t recognize and was too stupid to remove. The amazing thing was that when I confronted her about this and pointed out that her wiki page history showed that, when created, it still had my character’s own name in the content, first she a) denied that she had taken any of my work and then b) insisted this was fine because the site wiki had templates. Which it did. But my writing, my graphics, and my custom code are not. So theft, and then outright lying to my face.
I experienced something similar when someone I’d brought on to staff BSG: Orion after Dropkick left lifted our entire database to help one of the former staffers build BSG: Deimos. Now, as it was explained to me when I started on that game, the BSG games had a tradition of passing on a lot of work from one game runner to the next, so most of that was totally fine. But I was also under the impression that they did so after talking to the previous staff and did not do things like port in room descriptions, unique mechanics that hadn’t existed on other iterations, etc. – all of which BSG: Deimos did. And when I confronted one of their staffers about it, they once again claimed that they hadn’t taken anything, all of this was passed from game to game to game, and which I knew for a fact wasn’t true because I was the one who wrote some of those things, as well as several other new things that had been created by staffers that weren’t around, weren’t consulted about reuse, and blatantly had their work taken. That really upset me because I felt like not only had my work been taken, but that I had let them down by trusting the coder I’d brought on.
In both cases, the thing I found to be beyond the pale wasn’t even the theft. It was the blatantly lying to my face about it. If you’re going to be an unrepentant asshole about stealing other people’s work, at least own it. Own something that is actually yours, even if it’s just your shitty actions and attitudes.
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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.
Not another member of our community, but I did wholesale rip off the haunted mansion mission from VTM:Bloodlines for a plot once…
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@Tez said in Plagiarism:
@MisterBoring When I was looking at the history of plagiarism in the hobby, I saw someone trying to copy and paste someone’s entire NPC court structure. I think someone lifted @Coin’s npcs actually. Not plot beats or anything, but NPC structures.
It was some other CofD game that basically copied all my sphere pages, yeah. Literally my theme stuff too.
ETA: I just checked. It was basically the Vampire and werewolf page, the House Rules, the Influence page, the Pure/Forsaken treaty write-up, etc. Some dude left Eldritch (my game) and decided to plagiarize stuff for some other CofD game that was opening. I never figured out exactly who it was, unfortunately.
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I keep reaching for a cogent thought about this but everything I want to post boils down to: “I cannot believe how dumb this person was and how pointless this was.”
Nobody would’ve cared if they’d written a bad desc or placeholder desc or used an AI to generate their desc. What was even the point? I put Lucian’s RP hooks through an AI detector and they pinged as generated, so it’s not like the player wasn’t probably doing that to a degree/had something against that. Why…this? I guess ‘insecurity’ but…gosh, what a dumb thing to potentially get yourself booted from a game over.
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As a gamerunner, I would give someone plagiarizing someone exactly one chance to explain themselves (and change the text in question). If I didn’t like the explanation, or they refused to change it? Believe it or not, straight to ban. If they had an explanation that sounded reasonable and matched up with what the plagiarized person had experienced, I would consider the plagiarist to have used their one strike that they were going to get, and watch them closely the rest of their time on the game.
As a player, if a game plagiarized another game… I’m just not going to play there as soon as I find out. I am going to go with @Nilli 's description of plagiarization, because I’ve used ideas from other folks either with attributation or with permission and attributation, and I’ve given folks permission to use ideas/text of mine, and I find both of those just fine. If someone has written policy/concepts the way you want it, and they’re okay with you using it/tweaking it/etc… I don’t have a problem with that.
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Ripping off entire games or theme files is a different animal than the plagiarism that started this thread. I remember when that Arx-ripoff had all of their theme files. And if I recall correctly, it was revealed that Neitherlands took their theme files directly from a game that didn’t get off the ground. I mean, I’ve been staff on games where disgruntled players popped up with a new mu thematically very similar to ours. At the time, it felt a lot like what we’re talking about, now.
re: the ripped desc. I know we have a lot of educators in our hobby, and I’m inclined to look at things through that lens, and offer a little more grace. Coming out of the pandemic (read: still being in the pandemic) and with this AI bullshit, there’s what feels like a lot more of this going around. Granted, this wasn’t my creative work, so I can’t say how to feel about it. But it seems to me like a stupid, lazy, low-stakes, self-sabotage type of mistake done without malice.
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I’ve had a whole concept and creation ripped off. The only thing they changed was the name. Imagine my surprise when I created a new character only to run into myself, a character still active on another mush…
It was so similar that it could only have been a staffer from the other mush…
I asked why she had my bit. She said she just really liked it…
Really soured Cajun N. for me.
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I don’t think there’s true malice involved with any of that, just expediency. Unfortunately someone focused on expediency for their own enjoyment disregarding others often isn’t super fun. Not that you aren’t going to run into that on mushes no matter what. But I have limited time and energy. I also love to brainstorm ic and ooc, ect. I have a collaborative/respectful playstyle. When someone is ripping off work uncredited when they could have even just done AI or like I dunno maybe at least go to a defunct or different genre but are instead going to the same genre and a game that some are looking to (inappropriately imo) as a replacement of the game that they’re ripping someone else’s work from…it just seems like they’re making it known they’ll happily rip your ideas and pass them off as their own oocly and not want anyone to think their pc icly is the type to do that (which if kept totally ic imo would be valid).
It wouldn’t be the end of the world but like…I’m tired, man. I want to have fun with mostly people who are at least somewhat ooc considerate and aware. (I’m sorry if anyone feels like that excludes them but like I’ve tried a lot and been burned a lot and I also coach humans through that at work and in volunteering so I’m just…tired.)
So seeing something like this isn’t the end of the world and I don’t think there’s evil involved and its not worth too much investment but it does kinda make me feel kinda sigh.
And I do think that is a valid thing to feel. The difference is that at work and as an educator of children, I allow myself to feel thar sigh, take a moment, and then get to the labor of helping them work through the behavior, help the group work through it, ect. And it is labor and its hard work. Once upon a time I thought that I should/needed to do it on mushes too but I don’t want to anymore. So if someone is that un self aware, I just prefer to stay out of their way. It is never contained to just one action/incident.
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Someone who thinks stealing an entire character desc is ok is someone who needs a lot of education. And they should get that. Just probably not on a MU, where all the educating and cleaning up after this person and walking them through things is
- a lot of emotional labor
- eating time that could be used to do stuff for people who are not problems
- possibly allowing other people to be transgressed against
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I’m heavily influenced by Bill Amend in how I make MUSH characters.
He was once asked which of the characters in Foxtrot was him. His answer was, all of them. He put something of himself into the entire family.
I put something of myself into characters I make. It’s the easiest way I have to make them human.
Stealing a character is no trivial thing.
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@Rathenhope I would if you would just give me an option
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So I had a character concept uh…semi-swiped at one point?
Once upon a time I was part of a pretty robust RP community on an MMO, and I’m sure it will come as an utter shock to people who have RP’d with me, but I tend to be fond of snarky/socially maladjusted assholes with a heart of…um…well, a heart. Somewhere in there. My main was one such character, a dark elf ranger with werewolf problems, and she was indeed quite snarky and quite socially maladjusted. In the case of this character it was for a whole host of reasons (on top of, you know, just kind’ve being an asshole), but one of the bigger ones was some significant PTSD and general trauma. She did not make many friends, but she was part of a very active RP guild and did plenty of stuff there.
So there was this other player in the guild who had many different sorts of characters, but they all had, if boiled down to their most basic elements, the exact same backstory; a damsel in distress being pursued or otherwise under threat from an evil controlling male character, who would need to be rescued (typically by a love interest). She just really liked this trope, which is cool and fine.
However, the player liked to occasionally make “joking” comments about how my character’s problems would all be solved if she just got laid. These happened once or twice IC, and at least a few times more OOC.
Eventually my character left that guild for IC reasons, but still interacted with them quite often. Shortly afterward, this player made a new character that was, uh…a snarky maladjusted asshole wood elf ranger with werewolf problems and general trauma issues (with, of course, the backstory of an evil controlling male character she needed to be rescued from). This character hooked up immediately with some warrior dude and, wouldn’t you know it, all of her issues went poof immediately and she got pregnant with a bunch of babies or something.
At the time my reaction was essentially “What the fuck” and “okay, bit creepy”. In hindsight it’s a lot more uncomfortable since I’ve worked out that I’m ace and I was poking around a little(a lot) in that direction with the character, but also, seriously, wtf.
Anyway, that’s my story, lol.
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@kalakh I hate that ‘getting laid’ was suggested as a fix for PTSD. Hate it.
Also this player is the worst.
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@Smile said in Plagiarism:
@kalakh I hate that ‘getting laid’ was suggested as a fix for PTSD. Hate it.
Also this player is the worst.
I’ve seen it a few times (and as a general solution to character issues), and while I get it’s (usually) a joke, this was definitely the first time someone…uh…acted it out for me.
Like, it’s creepy and uncomfortable, but it’s also just so fucking weird.
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I don't know what I'm doing. Poke at Seven Nations sevennations.aresmush.com port 2021
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