Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryanjmo | Hacker News Reader

There are tons of comments saying that copying these games is wrong and imoral, but no one is explaining why it is so wrong and imoral.

Please explain to me why, because I literally don't get why it is so wrong and imoral.

Disclaimer: I don't work for Zynga, but I do copy the shit out of stuff.

View on HN

Really? Okay, well is it okay to paraphrase someone else's thesis paper and submit it as your own? You've changed every word but did none of the research. That's kind of how Zynga operates. When you plagiarized the thesis you typed every word into your text editor, obtained the original work, transcribed it as your own, printed it and handed it in but really, you didn't do the work. Zynga codes the games and changes the graphics ever so slightly then publishes the games but they don't do the real work. They're like every other scum developer that blatantly leeches off the success of another, barely making an effort to make it their own.

But doing what you described with the paper, certainly would be considered cheating by a university. But, what is morally wrong about that? What makes the university rules, the correct rules to act by? Certainly, if you choose to go to a University you are agreeing to follow their rules, but outside of breaking your agreement with the university, what is wrong about that?

Why can't we use other people work to create our own. If someone took my thesis and turned it in and got an A, I would be psyched for them and happy they used my work. It doesn't hurt me at all.

Why can't we use other people work to create our own. If someone took my thesis and turned it in and got an A, I would be psyched for them and happy they used my work. It doesn't hurt me at all.

The problem is that Zynga isn't operating in a vacuum. Sales lost to Zynga do hurt someone else.

In the University paper example, how would you feel if the number of A grades available were limited, and because someone copied a previous year's A-paper, someone who deserved an A now received a B? What if that person was you?

There's a spectrum between inspiration and impersonation, and Zynga is clearly on the impersonation side. IMO, it's extremely disingenuous of Pincus to try to pass of his game as somehow derivative of Sim Tower or Yoot Tower. I'm surprised he wrote a memo at all, considering that Zynga employees aren't stupid - they know what brings in the money, and it isn't coming up with fun, novel, interesting games that are built upon the shoulders of giants.

So would it be ok to copy a site/game that doesn't have much traction if you have a better distribution channel and can get the copy traction?

In this case the original creator isn't hurt at all and actually may benefit. Would you consider this ok?

If it is ok, where do you draw the line?

So far from people's answers to my question "what is so morally wrong with this?" I do not think the reaction that it is so wrong is as cut and dry issue as we want it to be. But, if I am missing something obvious, I would actually really appreciate the insight!

So would it be ok to copy a site/game that doesn't have much traction if you have a better distribution channel and can get the copy traction?

In this case the original creator isn't hurt at all and actually may benefit. Would you consider this ok?

Generall, IMO, if you're literally cloning someone else's game (or other content), it would be very difficult to justify. I think the only time I could see this working is if you're bringing the cloned game to another platform that is not being served by the original creator, with the original creator's blessing.

Most people wish that effort=reward, and it is aggravating to see Zynga do well in spite of their apparent lack of effort, at least in the game design department. What makes it worse is that at this stage of Zynga's existence, they have the resources to create original IP. One could conclude that their game design decisions are driven purely by a backwards-looking perspective, instead of a forward-looking one.

"Why can't we use other people work to create our own. If someone took my thesis and turned it in and got an A, I would be psyched for them and happy they used my work. It doesn't hurt me at all."

Not sure if this is devils advocate, but i'll answer.

If someone copies one paper, theres a legitimate argument that maybe it doesn't matter. But if copying in university was rife, people would just copy each others work and not learn anything, going through school for the monetary benefit only. Now lets say the subject is History, perhaps you don't care either way (short-sighted opinion, but the benefits are difficult to quantify). But now lets say this is medicine. All doctors cheat on their exams and research papers, so no-one knows anything, and even those who do bother to learn find it difficult to advance medical knowledge much further than the architects of all the original work.

So now does this attitude hurt you? Probably.

Games are far less important in life than professions like medicine. But Zynga must be one of the richest games companies around right now, and I'm not sure they actually know how to design their own games. Certainly i've never seen an original piece of work from them, everything is a rip off of smaller developers works, heavily marketed to eclipse the original creators. Who knows what this is doing to the facebook games market in the long term? (of course, the world might be a better place without so much facebook, but thats another story)

It's not okay to plagiarise someone else's thesis paper, because the entire point of a thesis paper is to demonstrate your own ability to think/research/etc. If you plagiarise a paper you can fully expect your university/college/school to reject the paper, and you suffer the consequences.

I don't think the same set of moral constraints apply in Zynga's case. They aren't trying to prove themselves to some 3rd party. The whole point of Zynga is to make money for the people who own and work at Zynga. And apparently duplicating other people's games is working pretty well as a way of meeting that objective. There's definitely nothing noble about what they're doing. And I don't know how much effort they are putting in, but certainly seem to be doing what they are doing (which is distributing games, not producing innovative games) better than everyone else.

That's one purpose of a thesis. The more significant purpose -- at least at a graduate level -- is to contribute to the sum of human knowledge. When academics are rewarded based on how many papers they've published in which journals, that's an attempt to quantify the value they've added to the system. Allowing plagiarism prevents assigning proper credit for original work, as well as lowering the total output of the system. Likewise, I think a lot of the outrage comes from the perception that the small developer is providing most of the value, but Zynga is getting most of the profit; not only is this unfair, but it discourages small companies from trying innovative new ideas, and the industry is poorer as a result.

Of course, it's entirely possible that the concept and design of these games is totally interchangeable, and the real value is in the marketing and analytics that Zynga does so well, which shoots that analogy right in the foot.

To play devil's advocate a bit, re-implementing a game is not as easy as paraphrase-typing a thesis. Zynga copied the gameplay from other game, but wrote the underlying code, did the art and tied it to their backend. That's a non-trivial amount of work.

It's like saying Seattle Computer ripped off Digital Research because Q-DOS was very similar to CP/M. In some ways, they did - they were really similar - but one is a reimplementation of a superset of the other.

Having said that, I'm mostly uncomfortable with these "second mover" (or "first copycat") companies. It's not that hard to come up with original ideas and the process you use to come up with those will give you both an insight on what makes an idea good and a number of ideas you may be able to use later. It's definitely worth the try.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com