Game-in-Game IP
Ah, my instincts are getting trained: as soon as I read about Tringo, the game originally created inside an online multiplayer game that has since been sold (by the user who came up with it) for commercial distribution in the “real” world, I thought to myself: Hmm, what are the intellectual rights behind that?
Googling around, I found out that the game explicitly allows users to retain intellectual property rights to their creations.
Fascinating things, these game economies…
What do you gain from allowing users to keep their virtual property?
We get the content. We allow people to create a world which will be thousands of times more compelling than we could create ourselves. To date there are 10 million things built by users in Second Life. In other games, it’s all about getting all of the finite amount of content. Once that’s done, players move on. We’re continually updating with user-created objects so we don’t have to put patches or sequels out.
