Tuesday 24 May 2011

I am not a psychic plagiarist, or how I ripped off a game without being aware of it's existence.

One thing that I noticed is that fiction can have strongly similar elements to other aspects of art. I have never noticed that Blade Runner had been inspired by a film called Alphaville, I thought that it was a truly original film. The same thing happened when I found an old project I had written.

The basic gist of my old project was that a group of assorted friends were given the ability to powers from Norse gods. It was aimless and it had some unfocused content, so I never finished it. Instead I worked on refining my writing skill.

A few years later, I encountered Shin Megami Tensei and its spin-off Persona. I loved how the games in the series kept up a balance of realism with video game mechanics for an engaging gameplay experience.

Then I encountered some notes taken from my old project. The setting of modern realism and preternatural oddities whammed at me like a locomotion train.

Sure, I could have rewritten the entire project to be very different from the Persona games, but I have decided to leave it be. I intended the project to be written in it's own way, and I learned something. Just because fiction is similar to another piece of work, it does not mean I should rewrite the intended message. Otherwise it would be something like a picture build in the sand, changing as the winds moved.

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