Introduction

It is common knowledge among game developers that our industry is in something of a “creative crisis.” Every week there is a new journalistic exposé about how game business models squeeze out new ideas, or another blogged rant about how the increased scale of next-generation games is going to kill game design experimentation.

A Game Developers’ Bill of Rights is part of this ongoing discussion, a provocation that draws attention to a set of important issues and challenges facing our industry. It highlights some of the problems that developers face as they try to create games and grow our industry, both creatively and commercially.

A Game Developers' Bill of Rights was directly inspired by A Bill of Rights for Comics Creators, a document that was meant to address some of the inequities that comics creators face as they work with comics publishers to get their creations out into the world. In reading it, I was struck by the common ground that game developers and comics creators share. Many articles in my Bill of Rights are inspired directly or indirectly from the Comics Creators Bill of Rights.

A Game Developers' Bill of Rights is not meant to be a strictly practical document. I did not write it as a guide for contract negotiation, nor as a set of legal standards for developer/publisher agreements. But I do believe that the positions represented by the articles in the Bill of Rights are absolutely the correct and proper ethical positions to take. And generally, game developers simply do not have these rights in the arrangements they make with publishers. It is possible that in the current climate of the game industry, with the current power relations between developers and publishers, game developers will simply never be able to exercise these rights fully. (More about that at the end of this document.) But first, onto the bill itself.