Original Games has reached out to the indie gaming art community to make an original game by YOU.  All game sprites and ideas portrayed are in your hands.

Tap-Tap-Duck’s research and development was experimental.  My goal was to create a complete mobile game in one weekend, it would also have to have the ability to be reskinned very quickly because I wanted to turn it into a contest.  My hope is that the contest will help promote Original Games as well as generate some really interesting content for the game.  As I’m writing this the content is currently underway so I will have to add some thoughts post-contest.

I was successful in developing the game within a short time frame.  I did this by purchasing a game template from the website Codester.com.  This is a concept I was unfamiliar with before this experiment, up until this time all of my code has been handwritten either by myself or a team member during a game jam.  In this case time was now a luxury and I thought it would be interesting to reverse engineer another person’s code and reskin a game.

The concept of reskinning or recreating similar games began at the dawn of the gaming industry.  The first game ever Spacewar! was created at MIT on the PDP-1, a massive computer using a radar display as its monitor.  You can try the demo for this game on “Masswerk.at”[1], I have posted the link below.  The first arcade game called Computer Space was released in 1971 and had very similar game play and design.  This idea of borrowing or remixing ideals and art from other games is everywhere and it is a progression of creativity.  A really interesting TED talk by Kirby Ferguson titled Creativity is a Remix goes into this topic in great detail.  He first describes that the basis of all remixes are three elements: Copy, Transform and Combine.  Then he states

“I think these elements are the basics of all creativity….” Ferguson [2]

Ferguson goes into an extensive talk uncovering many instances where pieces of art, mostly music are direct copies of previous work.

I am not saying that ripping off someone else’s work is acceptable  because there has to be a code of ethics involved to find that line between plagiarism and inspiration.  Relating this back to my Game Tap-Tap-Duck, the fact that it is a copy of a game that already exists does not mean that it is not an original piece of work.  The idea was to find the game’s originality from its audience, acting as an interactive type of meme that has the potential to go viral.  I also turned the game development into a contest to generate community made art assets.

My hope is that a contest entry would have a wonderful context and increase engagement .   In the paper Understanding the meme term for a general and architectural point of view, Alina Holovatiuk states:

“In the context of viral information carried by a meme, a comparison with lines of a song that cannot be thrown out of one’s head is the best.” [3]

“This game is cool.  Why?  It’s got different art styles going on in there!  And also, the background changes depending on what character you want to bounce around.  I personally find this game a bit of a challenge but I’m sure it’s a lot easier than juggling a real duck hehe!”

“After a nice long streak, it would be nice to be able to revive it somehow.  I’d totally watch an ad for that.  ;)”

“Know what would be cool?  If some kind of bubble or something floats by in the background and if you’re able to hit that, you get a safety shield and have one save from hitting the ground!  Let’s make that tougher – the duck doesn’t hit it but you have to tap it! But it’s only there for a limited amount of time ha”

Citations:

[1] Spacewar! – video games 60s style. 2020. Spacewar! – Video Games 60S Style. [online] Available at: [Accessed 14 December 2020].

[2] TED. (2012, August 10). Creativity is a remix | Kirby Ferguson. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zd-dqUuvLk4

[3] Holovatiuk, A. (2020). UNDERSTANDING THE MEME TERM FROM A GENERAL AND ARCHITECTURAL POINT OF VIEW. Space & FORM, 2020(44), 71–78. https://doi.org/10.21005/pif.2020.44.b-04