Task 4 - Contracts, Legal and Ethical Obligations

Legal

Within the gaming industry, many legal issues arise, some of these are:

Copyright

Copyrighting is a secure way of making sure that your creation is under protection from outside sources however if you fail to copyright your work correctly, you run the risk of getting your creations stolen from you and used by another individual or company, thus wasting your time and money since they can then claim it to be theirs before you have a say in the matter.

Trademark

A Trademark is a recognisable sign for your company. If something is 'trademarked', it will usually be more popular, for example if a t-shirt was trademarked with the Nike logo, it would have an increased price and increased sales as it is a known company. An issues with trademarking is if an individual or company uses that trademark without the company's authority, this can lead customers on, thinking that it is a known brand when it is not.

Patent 

A patent is when you claim an idea, or an invention of some kind. These are used to make sure that you have the rights reserved for that idea, so that if someone else has a very similar idea you can perform actions to prevent them in creating your ideas.

Registered Designs

A Registered Design is when you claim a design you have created, much like a patent, to prevent people from copying your design. To register a design you have to go onto the UK government website and describe your design or provide information regarding your design and it will be protected from outside sources.

Ethical

Within the gaming industry, many ethical issues arise, some of these are:

Violence

Violence is very present within many popular video games, and is a real issue if small children see such violence as they could be influenced by it. This is why age ratings in place for many games, however an adult game can still fall into the hands of a young person. An example of a violent game is GTA 5, which allows you to shoot random people, run them over and other such violent activities.

Rating

The Age rating of a video game is determined by what content is in the game. For example if there is any sexual content within the game, then it will be rated an 18 by law. If there is a lot of violence it will most likely also be rated 18 depending on the gore factor/ how much blood is visible if any.

Education

Education can be taken over by games, which is one of the current issues. Games can affect a person's education in a bad way by decreasing their scores on tests as they put too much time into their video games instead of revising, this leads onto the addiction of video games.

Stereotyping

Stereotypes in video games often include police being arrogant men, like in GTA 5, that want to kill you if you do so much as look at them funny. GTA 5 is a great example in showing what stereotypes are present within video games as it has lots of different types of areas within its game world. For example in the country-side zones of GTA 5 people are scruffy rednecks whereas city-folk often wear smart clothes like suits.

Addiction

Addiction is a big problem within the video game industry as some video games can entice people to keep playing for hours, neglecting things in the real world. If you get addicted to video games you might suffer from it as it can cause some negative medical effects on your body.

Also you may get so addicted that you also want to have game development as your full-time job, aswell as playing games at home. heh

Contractual

Within the gaming industry, many contractual issues arise, some of these are:

Employment

Employment issues may arise if you cannot find the right people to join your team if you are in charge of a development group. On the other hand, if you are trying to get employed, you may struggle to find a job that is in need of your specialisations.

Development

The Development of a game may bring problems such as financial problems if you go over your budget or if you fail in someway that causes backlash onto your budget. You may also need to go over your allotted time when you are developing a video game, this will cost you extra money.

License

A license will be given to your employees so that they can have access to your restricted information and data. These licenses could be abused and something could get leaked by one of your employees.

NDA

A Non-disclosure agreement has some issues since a person can easily break it and leak your game, or leak the concept which can then be stolen by some other company. Your entire team has access to a lot of information about the game which can then be leaked anonymously, making it difficult to find the culprit.

Collaboration

Collaboration with other companies or other individuals could cause disputes as you wont have the same views on every aspect of the game developing process. This could cause some serious problems such as one company trying to sabotage the other company.