Copyleft: the magazine

Borrowing aspects of Hungry Hungry Hippos, Creative Commons’ promotional materials and McKenzie Wark’s A Hacker Manifesto, the Free Culture Game by La Molleindustria has succeeded in doing what few have tried: simplifying the complexities of the debate over intellectual “property” into a flash video game. Your job is simple, just use the blue copyleft symbol to feed an information hungry populous fresh ideas from the Commons before the evil “Vectorialists” pull those ideas into the Market and rot the brains of your little people with copyrighted, commoditized ideas (turning them into grey automatons, it seems). Overall, the game play is relatively simple and keeps you on your toes, particularly for a game that’s so obviously an attempt to push ideology.

The Free Culture Game: only you can save the world from mind-numbing copyrighted content.

While we here at Copyleft: the magazine are all for attempting to change people’s perceptions of intellectual “property”, it is clear that the Free Culture Game has its downsides. It clearly promotes the theory of the Commons, that the free flow of ideas will create more innovation while commodification of information stifles creativity. However, the game definitely simplifies the idea of copyright, stigmatizing a concept which is, essentially, the basis upon which Creative Commons licenses are based. Without copyright law, there is no way to enforce Creative Commons licensing (or GPL, GNU or any other of the myriad free licensing regimes out there right now). So, while we applaud the effort as another fine attempt at cultural hacking (and a well crafted time waster), we wish there was a better attempt to push people toward more solid information, instead of putting something out there that, if the RIAA had done it, we would have immediately labeled propaganda.

(via Boing Boing)

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