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FTA:

> When I sought out on the endeavor to create a mobile tower defense game, I announced that the game would be open source, and it would be free.

What are you talking about?



He means the money raising on Kickstarter


No, but that's an understandable cultural misconception. The money is relevant, but not the main issue at hand.

In these communities, nobody cares about money, because your standing in the community isn't determined by how much money you have, but by how much you have contributed. This is kind of implicit in 4chan users, where it's considered tacky to even claim explicit ownership, because memes are understood to be products of an amorphous community. It's explicit on places like Reddit, where cultural standing is measured as a number.

Yes, the author would not be receiving money for this product, but having created the game as himself (as opposed to as, say, a semi-anonymous Newgrounds member) he draws more ire. Contrast the relevant videos: the original Kickstarter video features a single strong personality, a person mediating the experience of the memes in the game, while the response video is relatively anonymous, attempting to minimize the mediation between the viewer and his point. The fact that the response video also calls out other YouTube celebrities who do the same thing—i.e. offer mediation and commentary of other content through an explicit personality—should be incredibly telling.

Other comments that say things like, "I'd be honored to have my content featured in someone's game," are missing the point. It's a basic culture clash: the article's author expresses distinct authorship which can be traced to a concrete person (or persona), even if he gets no profit and open-sources the result, while the people who make up the response understand that authorship as contrary to the whole point of communal humor, i.e. memes. The other meme aggregation sites are also 'mediators' of a sort, preventing people from experiencing the direct product of the community.




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