I’m invisioning an MMORPG that I would enjoy and I’m going to share it with you now. You will also find it appealing and will call for game developers to create this world for us. One of you is a developer and will have a great desire to pay me loads of money for the idea and will not want any additional work from me, just the idea. Yeah, right. Copyright me. I’m not claiming it’s original, just claiming it sounds fun to me.
So here we go.
“Project: New Hope” – Our planet was destroyed by a freak ecological
disaster. The few of us that remained were forced to leave on
starships to search for a new planet suitable enough to call our home.
Years go by and we discovered only one planet that would fill our
needs perfectly. The only problem is that it is currently inhabited by
some sentient creatures. These creatures are of a lower intelligence
than us and they are not interested in sharing the planet. They choose
to fight rather than let us live. We have no choice, we must take the
planet by force if we want to survive.
We have the ability to launch small crafts from the main ships which
will allow us to land on the planet surface in small groups. Being
outnumbered, our missions will be precise in nature. Go in – complete
the mission objective – get out. Missions will range from capturing
specific creatures for study, steal natural resources, destroying
military objectives, stealing military plans, finding weaknesses, stop
their crude attacks on our ships, stealing weapons, destroying
important infrastructure, or simply reducing the population of these
creatures.
By completing these various objectives, we hope to be able to take
over a small continent so we can put a base or two on the surface of
the planet. From these bases we can then undergo more advanced
military strikes on the creatures.
Eventually our goal will be the complete eradication of the creatures,
save for a few we may use for our needs. We must take control of the
entire planet, it is our only hope for survival as a species. Our
future depends on it.
Perhaps someday we will have the planet all to ourselves. We need to
make it our home, this planet the creatures call Earth.
– Ethic
ok, so we players are the aliens invading Earth? If so, then this is damn cool. Our planet was destroyed by a “freak” ecological disaster, so we can assume that we inhabitants of this word did not destroy it ourselves out of abuse? If so, then cool. Especially if we aliens see and decide that the Earthlings do not deserve Earth since they are destroying it by their lifestyles and overpopulation. We will appreciate the rare and priceless planet called Earth, since the humans don’t.
I like it.
Until that last line, “We need to
make it our home, this planet the creatures call Earth”, I was feeling very uneasy and turned off by the premises, because I assumed it was us Earthlings invading another inhabited planet. We obviously do not deserve the Earth, so why should I help Earthlings invade another planet?
Copyright it!
Exactly. I wrote it with the intention of causing readers to let what comes natural in their thoughts. They assume “we” is the human race, but instead the whole time “we” are the creatures without a home.
Faced with the impending doom of our race, and with the only suitable planet we could find to live on already inhabited by a species not interested in sharing, we are left with a “fight to survive” situation.
I think you could do a lot of cool things with this backstory.
You can’t copyright an idea, you can only copyright the expression of an idea. The distinctive rhetoric in the last line is copyrightable (as is the rest of the post), the “aliens invade earth” premise is not. Supposing Blizzard decided tomorrow that they were tired of raking in millions of dollars they could say, verbatim, “Listen guys, we were reading around the internet and saw Kill Ten Rats say `I’ve got a cool idea` and, wow, its really cool so we’re going to steal it” and you’d be powerless to stop them.
Patrick McKenzie
The first paragraph was written with my tongue firmly planted in my cheek.