The blurred lines between Ingame Guide Content Creation and Plagiarism

Content Creation can be a difficult process because developing something original is becoming increasingly hard these days. There are still some original works and they have been taken from inspirations of current works today. And there is content that is basically remakes, reboots, reimagined and sometimes even regurgitated tropes from yesteryear to make it palatable for people today.

The main area I want to discuss today is making guides for games as a content creator.

My main niche is in writing or producing videos with guides in games where written/video guides tend to miss. My main video that did really well was finding the Lake of Fire rune because both the Warlock Discord and Wowhead guide was not specific on where the rubble was.

You may notice that the WoWHead guide isn't very clear on where the rubble is and there is no picture of it. This is why I uploaded and quickly produced the video mainly because the guide was not clear on what the rubble looked like.

Are you coming up with the Guide? Or are you copying from someone else?

The biggest issue that came to mind when I was writing a guide is that am I actually coming up with these ideas or am I copying it from someone else? Am I actually in the game and experiencing it for myself? There are content creators out there who hang around discords to pick up guides as people discover things.

WoWHead is one of those data/guide aggregator and a lot of their guides are taken from various sources. WoWHead asks for permission from the guide creators before publishing them. I've encouraged some guide creators to make sure that they credit them appropriately (which they have!).

I have found myself multiple times after combining website information together and not actually going in to test it. I just sit there and say "This isn't a guide, I am just parroting information from various sites. How do I know that this is true if I'm not testing it?".

I think this is the key indicator that you're not creating a guide. You are copying the guide. You actually do not understand what you guiding people on, you are just parroting from the websites. This is either not useful or at worst, plagiarism from someone who actually did their due diligence on this.

This is an indication of a blurred line that you can cross without even realising it. You can piece together data from multiple places but you're actually just parroting what you've read instead of creating something new.

Do people really plagiarise guides?

Disappointingly, there are content creators who wait around for other people to do the work, copy their guides and put it up as their own guide. They give no credit to the actual person who made it. They claim that it is their guide despite a lot of their information is from one source in particular.

You may think it is easy to catch someone copying someone's guide but it is incredibly difficult to do so. There is always a possibility that somebody came up with the same idea or same solution to the problem at the same time.

One video that explains this incredibly well is this video by TomSka. I recommend listening to this video while you're driving to work or working out.

In the WoW Community, a guide creator named Moudi has accused MrGM of copying his content guides. It was such a huge deal that Asmongold reacted to it and suggested it was more of a coincidence.

It is incredibly difficult in these areas to prove that somebody is copying someone else's guide. There isn't really any smoking gun proof from Moudi. Most of the evidence he has presented is circumstantial. Everyone will have their personal belief and their biases (myself included).

People have suggested that coincidentally creating the same content could be an indicator. However, when new content comes out in WoW, you will be both looking for the same things. This doesn't mean people are copying each other because they could come up with the same conclusions from different methods.

A lot of people have suggested on publishing false information or picking out certain indicators. I believe the false information trap is usually the best at weeding out a plagiarist. Picking out indicators on similar information is a weaker argument as most people would discover this as they would go along.

Plagiarism is incredibly difficult to prove and with so many data points at our fingertips, it gets even harder. There is going to be a lot of guides which reach the same conclusions in similar methods where plagiarism could be suspected. Whether someone is copying other people's content or someone has geniunely reached the same conclusion in a similar way has become a lot blurrier.