Addressing Game Theory's Biggest Problem

very rarely am i afraid to hit publish on a video sure there are theories that I know are gonna end up being controversial but at the end of the day they're all just meant for fun there are a few out there that are about actual real topics that matter the stuff about how loot boxes and mobile games hijack your brain but overall 95% of the time my theories are never meant to be taken seriously just to get you to think about your favorite games and movies critically or through some different perspective at the end of the day does it really matter if Mario's a sociopath or if link is dead or that I nail who purple guy's true identity is finally after like 15 attempts my philosophy has always been that it doesn't that it's more about listening to the evidence and hearing a good story enabling you to play the original Super Mario Brothers with the knowledge that canonically speaking all those blocks that you're rewarded for hitting were indeed members of the Mushroom Kingdom and maybe you shouldn't go around breaking them all really know if you truly are the hero of the game I know some people get really mad about that philosophy and so I'd like to remind you that this is a show that once calculated the length of Luigi's hoo-hah don't get me wrong I take my work and my research in all of these episodes really seriously but at the end of the day it's all meant for entertainment for fun with the little dose of Education on the side that's why I honestly started making these sorts of couch videos these are the ones that are just a little bit more personal and a little bit more important quite frankly and today I'm legitimately nervous to publish this video because today it's talking about stuff in the real world real stuff that really matters and that I take really seriously now today you may have noticed that your sub box were hit with the old one-two punch of uploads one game theory and one this matpat talk time I guess you can call it and that's because before you watch that episode of game theory you really should watch this video that episode is all about the Scott Cawthon fan art scandal about he releases a teaser for his new finale our game but with one major issue two of the characters featured in that teaser weren't his original work they were actually recolored modified and models that were so close to the original designs of the characters that the team working on this new game couldn't tell the difference it was definitely a huge oopsie moment and Scott did the right thing by pulling the Kizer off the internet but where that episode looks at all the weird legal wrinkles around that whole situation I wanted to upload something else that looked at the human side of things because if there's one complaint that I always see in online threads about why this channel makes them so mad and why they hate me so much it's that I steal fan art and I've never really publicly addressed that so today is all about fan art how we do things here when we're working on theories the steps we go to to try and avoid any unintentional issues and how you as a fan artist can actually be better empowered to protect your own work because honestly there aren't many resources out there and I legitimately want to help first off let me just say that I totally relate to Scott situation as an example last episode we had a three-second segment where I mentioned snaps sixes Salvage minigames and the editor delivered me a first draft that looked a little something like this basically the entirety of five sixes Salvage minigames did you notice it let me play it again basically the entirety of five sixes Salvage minigames two of the three images that we just showed don't actually appear in Finans 6 their fan made from a modded version of the game where you can play through different animatronic scenarios now after looking for the mod I can only trace it back to here Bend the hybrids YouTube channel so I have to assume that he's the one who is actively making these mods and then just featuring them on the channel for views but even then that one image of golden Freddy at the salvage table has been reposted without credit on 6 or so other websites anyway I left the notes in the draft calling out the mistake in the final scene went a little something like this basically the entirety of in a fix is salvaged mini-games three scenes directly from the game much better know that example was an easy one to spot because it came from a very prominent gameplay moment things start to get a little bit trickier though when you're taking individual character models here's another one that came up in the same episode draft you have Freddy foxy and Bonnie notice the problem here it's not the official model of Bonnie the face and nose are just a little bit too round in seeing the draft I wasn't a hundred percent sure of it myself but I called it out in the notes and changed it just to be safe and now that I've gone back and done a bit more research I can indeed say that this is a fan model credit to kit who the man on reddit but if your image searching for Nath one Bonnie it is the first result that shows up in Google Images something that again has been reposted and re credited dozens of times and remember some of these fan models are so good that Scott Cawthon himself isn't catching up just like I'm working with the team of editors who aren't as familiar with nafiz I am Scott is working with the team who isn't as familiar with the franchise that he himself created but he still had to approve that image before it wound up on his website that one image meanwhile in just the two examples from game theory we covered four seconds of what ended up being an 18 minute long video where we used hundreds of video assets for just that one episode now does it excuse any mistakes that slip through the cracks no no it doesn't I'm not pretending that it does but hopefully this helps you to at least get a better understanding that I'm not sitting here as some mustache twirling villain trying to intentionally steal other people's creations for his own benefit and unlike Scott - we're not just doing it with one franchise that we happen to create we're doing it with every game that we cover each with their own robust fan communities often times with different artwork that gets featured in different territories around the world here's another one that came up recently from the Kirby episode this Kirby Star Allies box art on Twitter I received this tweet quote this is just a new low I mean not only did you neglect to use the official art you used a fans mock-up without even creating them I can't believe it how does something like this even happen well first off a new low friend have you seen the persona video or the four owner one let me explain to you how it could happen you google image search Kirby star allies box art and you find it right there search result number three there's no watermark there's nothing indicating the original author the thing even has an ESRB rating and an amiibo tag in the corners all the translated stuff in the screen grabs on the back it's there it looks legit even if you click into this link on reddit the post itself doesn't say that this is something that the poster had made but rather titled it box art version two we just assumed it was an alternate version of the game's box art especially considering that this is a series with vastly different boxes internationally sometimes I mean take this example Kirby's air ride for the Gamecube they always make Kirby seems so angry in the u.s. anyway if an editor actually gave me a draft of a video that featured the box art on the right I would probably call it out as fan art since the coloring of Kirby feels a bit too neon it feels just a bit off from his usual brand or at least his usual brand here in the states I would assume it was probably fan art and we would cut it just to be safe anyway the long and short of this whole example is that this fan art was box art that was maybe created by reddit user cliche name who as far as I can tell based on his profile just happens to make really convincing fake box art for Nintendo switch games again this isn't me trying to condone any mistakes it's just trying to show how easy it is for some of this stuff to unintentionally slip through the cracks you know the culture around fan art has changed a lot over the years this channel is going on eight years old and like the middle aged dad of YouTube right now younger than granny marbles and great-uncle Smosh but old enough to remember the days when you rated videos from one to five stars and they game out awards for getting the most views in a week yeah those were real things back in the day now in those early days of game theory if I used fan art I would actually get messages from the artists saying that it was so cool that I had used their art in a video nothing else just hey thanks glad you liked it it was sort of like how people treat meme templates nowadays if you're using a meme you have no idea who the originator of that template was but there was an originator a first user whether they came from the meme economy subreddit or tumblr or the darker recesses of the internet that produced the truly dankest of dank memes fan art kind of felt like that it's also worth mentioning that back during the first two to three years of game theory years of game theory mind you I wasn't monetizing any of my videos so I wasn't making money off of anyone else's fan art because I literally wasn't making any money for myself the channel had almost a million subscribers before I turned monetization on funny enough because I was afraid of getting copyright strikes from gaming companies and YouTube would delete my channel you know come to think of it maybe that's why it was less of a big deal back then to use fan art the idea of building a personal brand around your art or your YouTube channel just wasn't a thing to a lot of us back then you didn't think about making money off of this stuff especially when you were dealing with someone else's game characters we were all just the little guys scared of the big guys and the big guys were the game makers and then four years ago something big happened something that fundamentally changed the relationship between youtuber and fan artists or at least the way I perceived that relationship and that big thing was named Smike for those of you who are in around to see it Smike was a channel that skyrocketed to over a million subscribers during the initial five nights at Freddy's craze he had a non-stop barrage of top 10 videos dedicated to all things for Nath and when I say all things fine ass I mean all things snaf clean when you're doing top 10 facts about the cupcake you know that you've crossed into some unholy ground cue thee it's time to stop meme and now QT it's time to stop me and that inspired my it's time to stop me great so much so that the running joke of this mic channel was that Smike was smil king for Nath but that wasn't the issue plenty of youtubers milk a franchise to death the issue was that he filled his videos with fan art uncredited fan art and for the first time a creator was actually held accountable seen as building this hugely successful channel using stuff that he had stolen from dozens upon dozens of other creators so much so that he had to make a public apology and pulled down all of those old videos but you gotta say as a bummer cuz I really wanted to revisit what cupcake number three fact was I need my facts mic snap is coming back into relevance I need to refresh myself but it was that moment that I realized that I needed to treat fan aren't more seriously based on that incident four years ago in May of 2015 I actually changed the entire policy about how images are used in game theory and would eventually be used on film theory I still have the emails in fact it's just not something I've ever talked about publicly so I think a lot of people think that this was an issue that I never addressed or took seriously but that couldn't be further from the truth and this is really the place where I want to set that record straight for every game theory episode every single person who's ever edited a video for myself for anyone who ever touches one of these things they have to follow strict guidelines on what images we can and can't use we only use images that are marked in google image search results as labeled for commercial reuse or reuse with modification an image with either of those two labels is one that you're allowed to download print and throw up in your house if you want to but also allows you to use it in your business hence the commercial part of commercial reuse that way theoretically speaking every image we use should be in the clear in general if you're a YouTube creator this is where I'd recommend you get all your images when you're looking for images for your videos now all that said it's not a perfect system clearly we still run into instances where we're using other people's fan art unintentionally but you know me I'm an uber nerd who loves to keep track of all the data about everything and so I've been keeping track of the data around this and most of the time when these situations arise it's usually a combination of these two reasons first the image was mislabeled by Google images which is usually the result of - the image already being reposted by some other site who has the licensed for ryu setting automatically turned on for their accounts it even happens a lot on the fan wiki's when situations like this happen I feel horrible it's painful it's embarrassing I beat myself up over it the internet definitely beats me up over it and quite frankly some people never let me live down the few mistakes that we've made across the literal sea of tens of thousands of images that we've used across the eight years of this series when these things happen I do try to get the proper credit into the episode as soon as I can you can ask Popo keno or it's me Veronica or potato farm twenty-one all on Reddit after speaking with these people and learning about the difficulties that they had in trying to reach me about their crediting claims i've even updated the descriptions on the channels to encourage people to post on the game theorist subreddit which tends to be the easiest place for me to find these sorts of complaints like I said no solution is perfect but I've tried to solve the problem from a lot of different angles from the way we do things here internally when we're creating episodes to the way that people externally can contact us to fix these sorts of issues but there is a third angle but it's one that requires a little bit more work from you fan artists protect yourself using these three steps first check the policy of the site's where you're uploading your content or double-check your image use policies to ensure that the settings match how you want your art to be used it'll help protect your artwork from unfair sharing or at least it'll protect it a little bit better to sign your work and then three watermark that work so it can't be mistaken as official artwork or shared without your name being attached to it and lastly this isn't so much a step as it is a request give us the benefit of the doubt I hope I've convinced you today that these sorts of mistakes aren't happening maliciously I'm sorry that your work unfortunately got wrapped up in us continuing to try and learn how to best handle these nuanced situations but hopefully it'll help empower all of us to deal with similar situations in the future we'll finally have a better understanding of how to handle fan art it's interesting but the whole evolution of fan art online reflects some of the best and worst parts of online culture all wrapped up in one fan art is at its core a real imagining of your favorite character or game and it gives everyone a chance to show the world that their favorite story can be told through their own personal lens it used to be that each piece of content out there in the world was its own little package that when the end credits rolled the movie was over fan art changes all of that through fan art the movie goes on to be infinitely reinterpreted the TV show can go in whatever direction the artist imagines and that youtuber that you love so much can be placed into any art form any meme any edit mashup sparkly snapchat puppy filter you can dream up the content is no longer just the endpoint it's the beginning it takes on a new life whether you're drawing your favorite ship writing a fanfic or crafting a theory yeah game theory as a show is itself a form of fan art which is why I do take this stuff really seriously sometimes the original artist might not be comfortable with your interpretation like I can't say I totally agree with all the online ships that I see on Wattpad or the unbelievable number of children that I've apparently adopted over in those stories but the thing about the Internet is that it's all open to interpretation whether or not JK Rowling really did intend for so-and-so to be dating such and such in their earlier days it doesn't matter because once those stories are published and those movies are released the power passes from the creator to the fan artist and frankly the Internet theorists to interpret the stories however they want when we advise people on the consulting side who are building a new YouTube channel or trying to launch their brand online one of the things that we tell them over and over again is that their logo or their main character should be easy to draw so that fan artists can have an easier time recreating it and riffing on it most of the time they've never even thought of that sort of thing like it's never occurred to them but I think more and more you're gonna start to see people celebrities companies all looking to people who have the power to take their idea and run with it to reinterpret it to make it much more powerful than the original the people talking about it writing about it drawing painting animating and editing it here on the Internet so okay all that is to say that the power of fan art and the importance of respecting fan artists has come a long way on the Internet I've also come a long way but I'm on this learning curve just along with everyone else I'm only human sometimes I use something without realizing it's fan art and so do other people if you see this happen not just to me but on the Internet at large try not to assume that the person is a thief or malicious or trying to take advantage of the little guy the Internet is just an enormous place and there are billions upon billions of contributors everywhere Save cancel culture for something else something that really matters and with that I think I'm done here go get on out of here go watch that finale episode I upload it alongside this one I wanted to make sure I uploaded them together because I didn't want anyone to think that I was trying to make excuses for using fan art on the channel warm get away with something by using the fanatic oppy right scandal as some sort of a shield I did a ton of research over in that episode on who owns the fan art copyrights who owns the characters themselves where they have the rights to use them and on whether Scott was required to actually take down his trailer I really encourage you to watch all the way through that one because I talked about both sides of the issue and for a topic that seems super dry like who owns that copyright over fan art it's actually really fascinating and exposes a lot of weird issues about France and about how your pictures of the Eiffel Tower are probably illegal pretty fascinating stuff over there so anyway go check it out click the little box and remember that's not a theory it's a talk a couch talk thanks for watching that's just story time story story time with Matt Pat I don't know if you have an idea for how I should brand these things let me know I'm doing a lot of them nowadays I like them I don't know what to call them let me know in the comments if you're still listening to me and if you're still listening to me why haven't you watched that other episode go watch that one now do it now it's like a collab with myself

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 2,664,434

Keywords: fanart, problem, controversy, drama, storytime, matpat controversy, matpat problem, what happened to game theory, copyright, game theory fanart, game theory, game theorists, matpat, game theory fnaf, matpat fnaf, the problem with game theory, the problem with matpat, matthew patrick, stolen fanart

Id: 73441gAiMIc

Length: 19min 26sec (1166 seconds)

Published: Sun Mar 31 2019

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Exactly. I really hate how people jump to conclusions and criticize him before they even know anything about the video. I'm not saying that everyone who criticizes him is uninformed about the video, just some people.

[u/Nightrunner823mcpro]

I really enjoyed this video, and I'm sure if people would stop criticizing him based off a title than actually watching it then they'd enjoy it too. It addresses a major topic/problem in this community that I think A LOT more people should think about before acting. Matpat uses tons of examples for this which really drive the idea of what's legal and what's not and what should be done and what shouldn't. Tbh I learned a lot from this video, whether it's true or not, it gave me a better understanding of the world of fanart. Creators should atleast watch it before they make their next move, it may save them some.

[u/Watch-The-Skies]

I do have criticisms of Matpat, but honestly it's the fact that people immediately hatejerked from the title alone is fucking disgusting. Seriously, watch the videos guys. It also isn't hypocritical that these videos came out at the same time, Matpat addresses this at the fucking start of the video. The FNaF one is usual Game Theory video where he uses FNaF's example to discuss copyright. This one addresses Game Theory's own problems and gives background to how easy it is to accidentally use fan content. At no point in either videos does Matpat condemn Scott, in fact Matpat praises Scott for holding himself to higher standards than many devs.

[u/NHT1983]

Exactly, people keep slamming him for his latest video talking about something he's done in the past even though he directly addresses he's done it in the video and tells people to go watch this one and yet people make it sound like he didn't as if they hadn't even watched it. There are definitely things you can criticize about MatPat, I have my own, but this is not one of them IMO.

[u/WitheredBonnieStudio]

Look, I understand the reasoning and stuff around why a stolen asset might appear, but if it's called out, why keep the video up?

[u/BenIsAFuckingIdiot]

Ha I was in this video. :)

[u/AubergineScatman]

good on him for owning up to his fanart problem, I guess

I still don't appreciate some of the other "mistakes" (most are very intentional) he's made and never gave a second thought about

[u/shrekthe1st]

Frankly, what people say about matpat here is ridiculous. People will blindly hate on matpat like sheep without even watching the video where he addresses the criticism. So far, everyone I've talked to that have disagreed with me haven't even watched the video. It's hilarious.

[u/Ashtheuncanny01]

Dear god