Of Plagiarism and Imitation

Again this blog slips into disuse, much to my dismay. I’ll skip the theatrics and get right to one of the minor issues keeping me from posting here.

I tend to pride myself a lot on my personal style of doing certain things, writing being one of them, but I’m well aware that a lot of ideas I have are derived from things I’ve been exposed to, recently or otherwise. For this reason I never fuss over seeing others adopting a similar style since I don’t have any sort of intellectual copyright on such things as cynicism, sarcasm and the humorous undertones I attempt to give my writing with the use of them both.

On the other hand, when another person uses the same tools in a similar (yet perhaps more effective) fashion as me, but in a far more established and exposed position, this can create problems. Not for the other person, but for myself. While it causes me no harm for the both of us to be on the same path of style, in the long run people may think of me as infringing on the other person’s intellectual property simply on the basis that he exposed the style and made it popular under his own name.

For those who still haven’t quite deduced who I’m speaking of, I am of course referring to the one and only Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw. Over the span of the last 5 months, he has been made equally exalted and infamous with his superbly written and voiced video series known as Zero Punctuation. If you’re a gamer who has recently rented out a lovely rock to live under, or just a non gamer who couldn’t care less, these are reviews in which he selects popular game titles and takes them apart with a relatively objective point of view that should be the envy of other game journalists and is the scorn of a multitude of fans of the games he’s butchered; all the while set to a very rich yet spontaneous sense of humor and backed by cutesy cartoon figures that serve to cushion the blow for some and rub salt into the wounds of others.

Now I simply adore Yahtzee’s ballsy attitude and “I’m right and you’re not” tone of voice he keeps throughout the description of the games in question – but it always leaves me feeling a little inadequate at the end of every review. I realise it sounds a lot like whinging on my part to the lines of “it’s not fair!” And sure, it’s my own fault for not making the effort necessary to be in a similar situation as good ol’ mister Croshaw but I can’t help but feel that with his newfound internet celebrity status, all I’m capable of being at this point is “another Ben Croshaw wannabe,” and that bothers me.

With all that contextual bullshit out of the way, I’m brought to the whole point of this article; the punch line, if you will. It pains me to come across artists expressing such fantastic pieces of work claimed to be their own ideas and clearly so, yet are often responded with quick and lazy attributions to other, more famous peoples’ works. To be fair, it is our nature as humans, after all, to relate things to others we’ve already seen. As an aspiring artist and writer, though, I get annoyed at how all some people are capable of doing is comparing and contrasting, instead of putting effort into being more objective in criticising a work of art – a work of art that somebody put effort into creating.