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Plagiarism
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I’m going to preface this by making blatant: I AM AN OUTLIER.
I’m absolutely upset on Roz’s behalf, and anyone else who has had their writing and work stolen. I would have been enraged on my own behalf a few months ago, too.
In my SPECIFIC scenario… If, at some point in the future… There was someone who knew me who loved how I’d once phrased things and started using it themselves… I’d be super damned touched. But. Only in that specific frame of homage…
But yeah. Just like. Blatant rip-offs? That’s shady af, and worse… Often both mean-intentioned AND rude.
We're all mad here.
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If it’s a single phrase, I feel like that doesn’t ping to me as copying in the same way. Presumably you/they wouldn’t be adopting the other person’s writing wholesale and would still have their own quirks and turns of phrase that they’d use. The same way we adopt the language used around us other writers we read and interact with regularly leave us with pieces of their work - I find that distinct from copying and plagiarism, particularly because it’s likely to be maybe a sentence in a whole body of work. And half the time people will be happy to sing the praises of whoever they got it from, in my experience.
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Especially if this was my introduction to a player? I can’t imagine doing anything but be like “hey, thanks but no thanks” to them.
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@spiriferida Yes. All of that. ABSOLUTELY. And hence my immediate preface of there is one singular outlier in which I could be ok with someone doing this. But ONLY in that specific way, and your mileage may NOT vary, because it is gross af in literally any and every other context.
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I have TWO descs that @Tez wrote for me forever ago that I have used almost exclusively for so many years now, and I feel guilty every time, brain like ‘?? is this against the rules of everything ??’
ETA: Neither of those descs are currently in use because I don’t fuck with roster descs unless they offend me.
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I know people get cranky about pc reuse sometimes or look down even on people who recycle their name/desc/concept over many games but ripping work that isn’t even yours to begin with I would think this would meet with near universal disdain.
I mean fuck now you can use ai for a base and edit. There’s no excuse. I know I would have a hard time respecting a player who did this. Especially so stupidly on another game in the same genre. Its just gross.
I’m sure there was some thinking that maybe nobody looks much or cares much about descs anymore. I think that’s true for many people. But that’s just brazen.
You shouldn’t need a policy to know this is a lame ass thing to do.
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This is so fucking wild, like I feel it’s a lot more effort to go looking for some desc to steal rather than just taking five minutes to write your own paragraph.
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@helvetica YOU ARE ALLOWED TO DO WHATEVER YOU WANT WITH THEM.
I actually got told about the Concordia guy while Roz was still out of contact on the plane. I INSTANTLY recognized the desc. (That is, I instantly recognized it as something that either she wrote, or I wrote, mostly because of the nose line. I had to dig into history to determine the answer, which, it turns out, was we both wrote parts.)
But then I had to SIT THERE to FIND OUT if she had GRANTED SOMEONE PERMISSION because, as I said while waiting:
Regifting might be tacky, but at least it isn’t plagiarism.
ETA because I’m no double-poster:
@Jenn said in Plagiarism:
In my SPECIFIC scenario… If, at some point in the future… There was someone who knew me who loved how I’d once phrased things and started using it themselves… I’d be super damned touched. But. Only in that specific frame of homage…
I steal things from my friends all the time. We trade words, ways of phrasing. They just slip into the way we write, because we write together so much. It’s the same way we fall into the same patterns of speaking as the people around us. Magpieing little pieces of genius from each other is a love language. Of course you’d be touched!
This is totally different tho.
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@mietze said in Plagiarism:
I know people get cranky about pc reuse sometimes or look down even on people who recycle their name/desc/concept over many games but ripping work that isn’t even yours to begin with I would think this would meet with near universal disdain.
Gonna recycle my characters even harder now that I know someone might be annoyed by it lmao
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Have been plagiarized! In this same specific way actually. Once someone wholesale stole my description for a character on a different game, bragged about how much time they spent on it, and then another person copied them and brought it back to the game I play. I ran into them and was like o.O and that was the story they gave me, anyway.
As flattering as it is cringe! -
@mietze I absolutely plagiarize my OWN old descs for new characters also typed, created, and played by me. Because writing descs is the absolute WORST part of this hobby for me. I hateses it. And I doubt there is any power in the world with the ability to make me NOT recycle one of ONLY MY OWN dozens by now - even if they are probably cut and pasted into various differing versions here and there.
But I don’t hateses it enough to plagiarize anyone else’s but my own.
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@Jenn i really don’t care if people wholesale port another pc from another game if it was their own creation. There are a few folks that do that even between genres. As far as I’m concerned if someone creates something its theirs and if they want to recycle it who the fuck cares.
However I do think that almost everyone thinks its lame to rip a desc or bg pretty much word for word on an another active game without seeking permission or touching base with the other person.
In the grand scheme of things is it the end of the world no. I rarely look at pc descs or even read them on wikis. I find i get more of a picture of pcs in rp and usually people pose appearance stuff anyway.
But to me that behavior speaks of a certain lack of discretion and respect that makes me kind of leery. When I’ve seen people engage in it usually there’s other behaviors that emerge that are problematic as well.
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@mietze Agreed. Again. In its entirety. I guess that what I’m suggesting in this thread is that it’s in Game Gab, under the guise of plagiarism in general - how do folks feel about that on games? Are there moments when it is ever ok? Is it ALWAYS blanket bad? In Game Gab, as a broad topic… I think there are a few VERY niche and SUPER thin /maaaaaaaaybeeeeeee/s. But folks will likely be watching even the maybes with side-eye.
Whereas if this were in Rough and Rowdy, specifically about Roz and Tez and their own intellectual property specifically being ripped off from a game it sounds like maybe neither of them even play… There’s really zero room for nuance in that situation at all. But. That’s a different board and different specific than the offshoot that was moved to here.
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When I saw the thread title I was expecting something about copying code or wiki styles or something, but copying descriptions and actual creative text from people? Jesus.
The idea is that one expresses themselves through writing… if you can’t or won’t do that, then what’s the fucking point?
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Plagiarism is when you copy someone else’s writing as your own without permission, so using a desc that a friend wrote for you wouldn’t count.
I also think phrases or a particular (brief!) way of describing something usually wouldn’t count. These things tend to go in and out of style among friend groups or games and feels more like the adopted slang than ripping someone off.
Blatantly using entire descs, event descs or scene sets or backgrounds or anything else where you’ve just copied what someone else did and not citing where the writing came from? Is plagiarism, and I’d support banning anyone who did it.
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@Nilli said in Plagiarism:
Plagiarism is when you copy someone else’s writing as your own without permission
Oof, let’s not go down this rabbit hole again.
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@Pavel I’m not aware of a prior discussion here, I was just thinking of cases like ghostwriters or the above example of Tez writing descs for friends.
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@Nilli There was a rather strong discussion about plagiarism previously, along with several different(ish) definitions.
I also abhor ghostwriters - the practice of using them, not the writers themselves.
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@Pavel Ahh I missed that one. I’m not trying to say I have the one correct definition here, just that if I wrote a description and said you could use it and you then used it, I wouldn’t call that plagiarism.
I see enough examples of the more blatant variety anyway that’s honestly shocking. It seems like most of us are thirty-somethings who have been RPing for 47 years and should know better than to be straight up copy/pasting other people’s work.
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@Nilli Oh, for sure, but you know how this group gets. Semantics.
I hate writing descs, but I’d rather use ChatGPT to cobble something together rather than wholesale take a desc someone else wrote.
