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Bob's Game

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Re: Bob's Game

#81
Bob, if you're reading this, I hope you're doing alright. I respect your dedication and the amount of work that you did, even though I don't quite understand the reasons for your fight against Nintendo.

Re: Bob's Game

#82
post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

my work is my life is my art, are you sure you are not at least partly your work, I find it an odd idea that you can detach work from 'life' as if it exists in a separate continuum.

I don't really mean that you should completely remove your work from your identity, only that you shouldn't tie your identity to one particular project. I think Bob would be in a much healthier psychological spot if he had made ten games by now, or even created art that wasn't games, instead of becoming obsessed with just one particular project.

That's possibly a fair assessment, it might also be true that with better support to manage mental health issues one might continue in their pursuit of what to others seems like an obsession, I am not certain there is anything inherently unhealthy about committing to a single project. We should ask Justo Gallego Martínez :)

Re: Bob's Game

#83
I'll admit everytime I read "horror"/exceptional stories like these with no good ending (the other being the ballad of yanderedev), it makes me feel very self conscious and stressed out I might fall into that trapdoor.

The only way to counteract it from my experience is to work on multiple projects (and wrtie down and grade ideas based on how ambitious and time consuming said idea us).

Re: Bob's Game

#84
Nintendo rejected his idea because it was 2004 and there was no market for niche artsy indie games. There was no app store, and indie games at the time simply weren't commercially acceptable. In 2004, gaming was still this relatively new industry. Products were either geared towards children, or violent games towards adults.

I don't think he could admit to himself that Nintendo had no business attempting to sell his egomaniacal art project to a mainstream audience.

At the time he was better off selling it on Steam. If he so badly wanted to get a Nintendo license he should've repurposed the engine into something less abstract.

I think the game is an impressive accomplishment for one person. But compared to what else was coming out at the time on the DS, by multi person development teams, it really doesn't look that good. It almost reminds me of a Newgrounds flash game.

Re: Bob's Game

#85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked at it a few weeks back and it's really strange. It has really weird restrictions that don't make any sense regarding the license - I'm not even sure if they even are legal. The author claims he is sharing the source but that nobody else can fork it, unless they fork it on GitHub?! I don't know if the wording is legalease enough to be enforced, but of course a license like this is legal. Just because you can…

The first two clauses of the license are the BSD-2-Clause license, nothing weird or unusual there. The third clause is... interesting. I suspect it's probably legal, but it may well have unintended consequences because it appears to be requiring you to use a trademark. The fourth clause may fall afoul of First Sale Doctrine. It's something that I wouldn't trust without talking to an IP lawyer to work out what it actu…

The fourth clause may fall afoul of First Sale Doctrine. It's something that I wouldn't trust without talking to an IP lawyer to work out what it actually means and how much is actually viable to be done in an open source license.

I don't think the first sale doctrine comes in to play here at all. If we make it physical media for arguments sake. First sale doctrine would say that if a user bought a cartridge of the game they could resell that cartridge. That is not the same thing as redistribution which would be the equivalent of copying the game to new cartridges and selling those.

Also, this is definitely not an Open Source license. However, it is similar to the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial license.

The fifth clause is nullified by the terms of GitHub, I think, as GitHub's ToS seems to require you to allow anyone to fork your repository without encumbrance, which the fifth clause tries to narrow.

I'm pretty sure the terms of a website can't overrule the license of the software. I think at best it could get the project kicked off of github, and make it hard to prosecute someone who didn't realize. His biggest problem is use of the word fork when he really meant derivative work. Which comes down to my point that the goal of the license is legal, but maybe not the wording.

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