If you would have asked me about the control a creator should have over their creative projects when I was younger, I probably would have said that the creator should have full control and no one should be allowed to “abuse” their work for their own gain. My stance on this has somewhat changed. I think my initial stance mostly came from the worry that people would take my work – not that my work is really all that popular to be taken – and twist it, making it seem like what they made out of it was the same as what I made. That opinion has changed as time went on and with the ongoing issue forwarded by the stop killing games movement it felt like now was the perfect time to talk about it.
Stop killing games – and I’ll link to the website since they do a much better job explaining it than I will – is basically an initiative that will allow people to continue to have access to the games they bought with their own money. With people losing access to games when servers or support shut down, the longevity of games is often in jeopardy. To combat this, people should be allowed to emulate “dead” games. Obviously none of this should be done for a profit, and the original creator should not be responsible for any continued support for the now abandoned project, but they also shouldn’t be allowed to go after the people who do keep the games alive.
The drama surrounding this issue is mostly due to a creator by the name of Piratesoftware not fully understanding how this movement works, and refusing to admit that, causing people to be misinformed about the movement and the amount of signatures required to get the motion looked at in the EU is far too low. He’s not the only reason for this of course, but he has been on the forefront. But with all this drama, it got me thinking about how I feel about “my art” and how it will be used and I believe I already talked about this somewhat in an older post, but I have a pretty recently acquired view on this.
As much as I would like to one day make money with my stories, I am primarily writing these stories as an outlet for what is going on in my head. I want to tackle issues surrounding mental health, but most importantly I want to tell fun stories about a fantasy world that has cool worldbuilding. I came to the conclusion that I am writing one version of this story for me. That version will be saved somewhere forever. It’ll be shared with people, sure, but once it leaves my hands it is no longer fully mine. If it does ever get published then any edits done later on will just turn it from my art into a product. There is nothing wrong with that, but I believe that that process changes the core of what I’ve made. So once it goes out into the world, I think it’s fine that other people interpret it differently, do with it what they want and have their own thoughts about it. Obviously I don’t want people to monetize what I’ve made, that’s a different story, but if I stop writing the story, I am also perfectly fine with someone else picking it up and continuing it. If people enjoy a piece of art they shouldn’t be denied access to it due to support vanishing. This is true for books, but also for music and games. Let me know if you disagree though, perhaps you have a different view on this and good reasons for that.
With this, we’re starting off July and the writing break has done wonders for me. I’m excited to start again – even though I did a little bit of writing throughout June, I didn’t quite fully – and the schedule of two posts per week is going to be back for the foreseeable future. Thank you for your patience and I hope to see you all here again on Friday for a chapter of The Hesitant Hero.
Opal Kaharis 