Okay, so, first off, OP presented a false dichotomy.
I'm pretty sure we can all see that at this point, but I'm going to engage on the topic because the issue of attribution is a pretty valid concern going forward.
MarsAtlas said:
The_Kodu said:
Actually under creative commons law you are required to in some form. You can't just take something and claim it's you made it.
Which she never did claim. Additionally, none of her videos are monetized. Nothing wrong has occured. If it had, you can sure bet that people all over the internet would've actually taken this case against her to get a strike against her Youtube account.
It doesn't really matter that her videos are not being monetized. There are really two arguments that can be levied that put the action of not attributing to the sources of her gameplay that have nothing to do with compensation. The first is simply common courtesy. I can understand not wanting to have to spend the time to capture specific scenes after an initial preview, and LPs provide a good source of stock footage. However, it's common courtesy to attribute your sources. Think of the footage like the performance of a play. It's rude not to give the name of the performance or actors when you are using it as part of your video critique.
The other is an academic argument. Consider the concept of the video essay, which is a relatively novel thing. When you use a source of video footage in a video essay, you are effectively quoting from another work. Without referencing that work we do not know the context of the quotation. This failure to attribute, outside of being plagiarism, also makes it difficult to evaluate the video essay's academic rigor by making it difficult to check over the sources for internal context.
MarsAtlas said:
She didn't credit LPs, though she was under no obligation to do so.
This is arguable, but regardless of the legal theory, what she did is pretty much violating the principles of the creative commons.
MarsAtlas said:
Would've been nice, nonetheless. People who say that this is "stealing" obviously are unfamilar with copyright law, as you're skirting copyright law more by recording and monetizing game footage than taking somebody's LP footage and putting commentary over it.
The intent to monetize is actually not taken into consideration in terms of the actual violation of copyright. It is taken into account when considering fair use of copyrighted work. Remember, fair use doesn't mean you didn't violate copyright, it means that you are _allowed_ to violate copyright. There is no such thing as stealing when it comes to copyright, but in terms of equating this to say, piracy, what she did is equally against the law but easier to claim fair use for.
MarsAtlas said:
Another facet of it is that because she used somebody else's footage, they jump to the conclusion that she did not play the games in question at all, which is kinda horseshit for a few reasons. Its totally within reason for somebody to not film hundreds, possibly thousands, of hours of gameplay footage and then sift through all of that just for twenty-to-thirty second clips. If its a scripted event, one could've been easily averted all those hours by simply taking notes as to what part of the game the event takes place during, and finding an LP video that contains that point in the game. For non-scripted events, I think you really need some directed player input, which you can actually see in the latest of her videos with her choosing not to act in Assassin's Creed II, Red Dead Redemption, and Watch_Dogs.
This is a valid point. The argument that she uses other people's lets plays rather than her own some how cheapening the value of her video critique is not very well grounded. There are various reasons that it is easier to use existing LP footage, but in the end, she should be attributing her sources.
Supdupadog said:
Considering LP footage is taken and re-used all the time, if we're going to open this can of worms for Anita, we should open this cab of worms for everyone.
I agree, double standards are bullshit. We should hold people to crediting their sources regardless of who they are.
Supdupadog said:
Also Anita's point about using the prostitute to distract guards still stands because it's a valid option for completing a task. That some people don't use it doesn't change the fact the game developers decided to implement it in the first place.
Well, this depends on the degree of importance that you assign author intent. I mean, coming at this from the perspective of Roland Barthes the intent of the author is but a single portion of the text, and the fact that people can have an experience of the game that does not include this element is a legitimate point.
It doesn't undermine her criticism, but it does speak to the nature of the game as a medium of social critique. The implication that Hitman is sexist because it allows this move (in game parlance) is somewhat ludicrous because it also allows the decision not to take this move. It gives the player the option to spin a different narrative.
Consider the often pointed to 'killing strippers' scene. It is clearly the author's intent that killing strippers is an action that is penalized. It is still a valid move in the game, but it must be calculated for the rewards against the penalty. This is not an uncommon component in games.
In hockey, for instance, the choice to take a player out of the game can be made in exchange for a penalty. It is not against the rules of hockey to use the system of penalty in order to gain an in game advantage. In Quake III, a similar trade off is made with rocket jumping. You take damage, but you gain mobility. So it is not against the rules of hitman to kill the strippers, but it does induce a penalty.
The question is, what advantage does it give? The action is clearly penalized, but does it give anything to you in the game? It doesn't seem to have any tangible beneficial effects, and as far as i can tell, killing a stripper is treated no differently than killing any other bystander.
So, the question becomes, what does the choice to kill the stripper represent? What does the player gain from the interaction? It isn't so much a question of the game allowing the interaction at that point as the introspection the game can trigger. Like any art.
The player controls the narrative in this situation as much as any other party, so while it is possible for her to criticize the possibility of this narrative, it leaves it still rather open to the point that this is only valid of her own narrative. Her feminist criticism is... of the story she made.
Or, as has been suggested, of the youtuber she used the footage for. Which brings us full round to the issue of attribution again. While the interpretive nature of art prevents definitive statements, each person's interpretation brings something to the text of a piece. By not attributing the clips she sources, she leaves large gaps and holes in the text making it difficult to derive more critique and text from her work.