Indie Developer Accused Of Plagiarism Says It Was An 'Intentional' Reference

A Reddit user’s Sunday post comparing lines in the 2019 indie game YIIK: A Postmodern RPG to passages from novelist Haruki Murakami has led to charges that the game plagiarised the award-winning writer.

The post from Reddit user malphasia places screenshots with dialogue from a YIIK character named Proto Woman above parts of the first chapter of Murakami’s 2004 novel After Dark—and the two were identical.

“She narrows her eyes and looks at the young man standing there,” read both Murakami’s novel and the game. “He is so tall, she seems to be looking far overhead. Their eyes meet. The young man smiles.”

The YIIK dialogue compared to the passage from After Dark. (Screenshot: malphasia, Reddit)

Directed by the brothers Brian and Andrew Allanson and released for PC, Mac, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation 4 in January, YIIK casts players as Alex, a man who assembles a group of friends for a surreal adventure after they learn of a woman’s supernatural disappearance.

Alex is designed to embody the hipster stereotype—snobby, disaffected, and extremely into the work of writers like Murakami and Chuck Palahniuk.

Ackk’s developers told Kotaku via email that the Murakami lines are in there on purpose. “YIIK does intentionally contain allusions to After Dark by Haruki Murakami!” they wrote. “That book was an influence on the game and we wanted to pay tribute to it.”

Murakami isn’t credited in the screenshotted dialogue and his name is absent in both the in-game credits and those published on the YIIK site.

The Ackk team says that their game is full of “more subtle homages to other authors like Chuck Palahniuk, Thomas Pynchon, David Mitchell,” but also offered the following explanation about why Murakami’s words from After Dark would appear without attribution:



Also, it was our intention for Alex to be utterly bewildered by the things that he’s seeing and hearing all around him. Certainly the YIIK player might realise these are words from After Dark, but we thought it would be difficult for Alex to consciously realise in that moment that he was listening to a direct excerpt of the novel.”﻿

There’s a consistency to the rationale Ackk gives, but without the developers present to explain their unattributed quoting of Murakami, players won’t know what the source is. Until this weekend, they were in the dark.


    Rip-off hacks

      Honestly, when it's a few lines like this I feel like the game creators were actually honest about it. Seems pretty believable to me. It's not like they lifted the whole plot or complete scenes.

        But it also wouldn't have been hard to place some form of credit in there.
        Many games reference many things but unless it's the most obvious reference then the developers tend to give some kind of mention somewhere or bring it up themselves for this reason.

          I do agree with that. It would have been appropriate for them to do so. Giving them benefit of the doubt for a moment, maybe it was an oversight, or meant to be a reveal at a later date.

      I'd say read the article, but you missed even the headline?

    This seems like one of those fuzzy "When does a reference become plagiarism/copyright infringement" kind of things. It's really not new for games to include dialogue that references literature or other media, most of the time it's in parody but other times we just call them Easter Eggs.

    The idea is, Alex has read After Dark, and his fondness for the novel is seeping into his reality Thats a post-development comment... is there any reference in came that this character "Alex" references that his fantasy and reality is mixed up and reaches that conclusion that the Proto-woman is quoting his favourite literature by name.

    If that realisation by the character is not in the story, then this is up their with lies about why Quiet is wearing a bikini :P

    I'm gonna sell copies of this game at the Sunday Market as an "homage".

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