[game_edu] Readings, Libraries & Copyright

[Andrew Armstrong]

The educators I talked to at DiGRA all just have game libraries they 
loan games out of, and/or have consoles and PC's to play them on in 
labs. I presume either it's legal, or the restrictions that people might 
think of (EULA, etc.) are unenforceable or too overarching to apply to 
lending. As far as I recall, interestingly places like Blockbuster (and 
other game lending services) don't pay anything special for their copies 
in the UK, but that might have changed at some point.

Just as with books, if they are not in this library (or are loaned out, 
or whatever), then the students need to buy them I'd guess (or might 
want to buy them anyway). Problem is backcatalogues of games are hard to 
find (especially platform specific ones not re-released on an emulator), 
so something worth doing is investigating where the games can be brought 
from (if anyone can tell me where to find Planescape Torment, 
DRM-unencumbered, that's something I'm looking for ;) the second hand 
version all go for high amounts on Amazon it seems).

Andrew

Malcolm Ryan wrote:

> As a lecturer in game design, I want to set a 'reading list' of games 

> for my students to play. In other disciplines the University has 

> standard copyright arrangements which allow them to make sets of 

> readings available to students at little or no cost, but there doesn't 

> seem to be any appropriate arrangement for software.

>

> Have you encountered this problem? How have you addressed it?

>

> I know that a lot of good cutting-edge independent work is available 

> cheaply or for free online, but I don't want to be forced to exclude 

> AAA titles from examination. Ideally I would like to set up a library 

> of games but I am worried about the copyright and licensing issues. 

> Does anyone know more about this?

>

> Malcolm

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