Oh man I thought I missed signups, but I’d like to join! I’ll be getting off work 5pm EST, so I’ll zip over to the form then if it’s not closed.
Edit: and I’m in!
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Still a few more hours to get signups in…
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Sign-ups have been closed. Thank you everyone who submitted songs or signed up for the jam! There are 53 game jam sign-ups, and 415 songs from about 368 unique artists. As with before, if you’re not sure whether your submission went through, check to see if the md5 hash of your email address is in the attached list.
Playlists will be sent out this week, probably before December 1.
If you have questions about your submission or the jam, contact us via DM, discord, tumblr, etc.
email_hashes.txt (2.0 KB)
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The playlists have been sent out! Check your email to see if there is a message from cchen.intfic with the subject “Your ShuffleComp 2023 Playlist”. You can submit games on the itch game jam page here.
If you believe that you signed up and did not receive an email, or if you have any other questions, please let us know.
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I’m curious whether there were any songs that I would have been interested in. Will you be publishing a list of all the songs that were submitted at some point? Maybe after all the games are submitted. With 415 songs (or more?), I imagine that there will be a lot of weird songs that I’ve never even heard of. That’s a hell of a lot of lyrics to look up.
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Yes! I’ve been even making a Youtube playlist for one convenient listening party!
(though some songs are not included because they are not on Youtube)
I’ve been trying to find all the “album” versions because they tend to be higher listening quality than the music videos…
I just need one/two more days!
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Er… I just want to remind anyone who got my or Tom’s songs that we were actively seeking very disturbing songs. So if you got the song about sex in a graveyard, or the child who is a serial killer, etc, we don’t want anyone to worry about our mental state.
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After listening to 7 songs that were mostly more-or-less gloomy ruminations about someone’s unfulfilled longing for attachment, I finally tracked down Tom’s pick, which came without a url included.
I was not disappointed.
Reviewers will surely be gushing over the resulting piece of IF, provisionally entitled VOMIT COFFIN.
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Oh, Tom will be thrilled. That whole album is AWESOME, but the section about the cyborg who wants to vomit and die is just tops.
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Wow, my list was great! Sad that I only knew one person who submitted a song, though (thanks, @manonamora !). Several of my songs are games waiting to happen.
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For the curious:
Here is the whole list of songs submitted, including a Youtube Playlist to listen to.
Note: Some songs could not be included because I didn’t find them on Youtube.
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Wow, thank you for this, @manonamora!!
Super excited to dig into my assigned songs this evening. I’m waiting for a quiet moment where I can chill out/INto the soundscapes!!
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Thank you!!
Note: the Radiohead song is “Jigsaw Falling Into Place”, not “Jigsaw Falling To Pieces”.
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edited 
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So I’ve been thinking: would we be allowed to put the songs in our games? Most are the copyrighted property of their artist(s), but it could fall under fair use or something. Whatever lets Youtubers put pop songs into their videos (I mean, if every video with a copyrighted song in it was removed, we’d lose a whole lot of them). I can’t see the Shufflecomp games being monetized, and they’re on the same level as random Youtube videos made for fun and not profit, so it should be fine… right? (Plus a trickier follow-up: what if we made new songs with samples from the songs we got, or remixed/otherwise edited them? Would that be allowed, even if the first case isn’t)
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I am not a lawyer, but paid some attention to copyright issues in grad school, and I’ll try to explain what’s at stake. Hopefully if there are any lawyers lurking, they’ll correct any mistakes I make. I’m also not affiliated with ShuffleComp and making any claim to answer any comp-related policy questions on their behalf. And I’m not talking about what I think the law should say; that’s a whole other post I’m not writing tonight. I’m just doing my best to explain what the law does say, as I understand it. It’s US-centric, because that’s where I live and that’s what I know about, but copyright law is similar in most countries around the world.
Probably not. Of course, whether there’s an official ShuffleComp policy on the matter is not up to me, not even a little bit, but if what you’re asking is “can I legally do this without permission from the artist who made the song?” the answer is no. You can ask them if you want to; they can say yes or no, whichever they want; or attach conditions to saying yes, like requiring payment, and that’s their prerogative.
It probably doesn’t. At least, it doesn’t automatically apply to the inclusion of songs into a game that was inspired by or engages with those songs. “Fair use” is usually pretty limited, and the traditional “big four” examples of fair use (commentary, criticism, news reporting, and scholarly reports) don’t obviously and unambiguously cover that case.
“Fair use” really means “there are social activities that are valuable, like news reporting and scholarly discussion of creative works, that can’t be done well unless we allow people to directly quote small amounts of the source material in service of doing these socially valuable things. So we allow those kinds of use, under these circumstances.” But “fair use” isn’t a magic wand you can wave or One Weird Trick Copyright Holders Hate that makes your use non-infringing; you have to actually be doing those things, not just claiming to do them, and if the copyright holder disagrees that that’s what you’re doing, then a court has to decide who’s right.
It’s also worth saying that a claim of fair use doesn’t avoid lawsuits; it’s what lawsuits decide on. Defending a claim of fair use if the copyright holder disagrees means going to court.
Lack of enforcement, basically. YouTube doesn’t hire employees to watch every video that gets uploaded; they couldn’t possibly afford to. So some stuff slips under the radar. Some artists and distributors don’t care if YouTubers use their music in the background, and some do; some may even like it, thinking it will get more people to hear their music in the long run. But that’s up to them: they don’t have to allow you to do so, they don’t have to be “fair” about who they let use their music, and they can change their minds at any time and demand that YouTube take down those videos.
It’s also worth noting that intentionally playing copyrighted music in an attempt to make video of an event subject to takedown is something that people who don’t want video of them circulating on YouTube sometimes do.
Whether use of copyrighted material is itself monetized or profitable doesn’t change whether it’s an infringement (though in the US, that can affect damages and/or turn the problem into a criminal rather than a civil matter). Handing your buddy a USB stick full of music he didn’t purchase is still an infringement, even if you’re not charging him.
That’s infringement too. If it’s someone else’s work, you need their permission to use it legally. There is no minimum number of words/seconds/samples/notes that you can use without permission
The US Copyright Office has a page of frequently asked questions about fair use that you might want to look at.
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We are not Copyright peeps either so 
(Thanks @patrick_mooney for the law-bit 
)
It would probably depend on the song itself and its particular copyright…and since all of that is a hassle and a half, we don’t require it. We just ask you to list the songs used (and potentially link the song’s YouTube page in the game/on the page).
(I don’t think the OG ShuffleComp required it either??)
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Wrt copyright/fair use, Wikipedia allows up to 20-second samples of songs that are also heavily reduced in quality. Example. Games might not have the same fair use defense though.
You could also embed a youtube video in the game’s html, and there are supposedly ways to make the video invisible and make it audio-only.
But yeah, we do not expect anyone to include the songs in the game and I would be surprised if any were directly included.
In my experience, if you post a video on youtube and the content detection algorithm flags it with a copyright claim, then yt will just add ads to it and give the revenue to the copyright holder.
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How are everyone’s games progressing? I’m a little less than halfway implemented, using Twine. So far only one minor roadblock code-wise, and I found a fix. I haven’t worked on this project for a few weeks, so that time away was helpful! I also managed to eschew most global variables, which was a relief, because my ongoing IFComp project is so state-dependent it’s wild.
(I chose to mostly talk technical, because sometimes I feel like when I talk about the narrative side of my process while I’m in it, it’ll slip away from me. But I’m interested in hearing about anything!)
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I have about a third written, but the holidays have been BUSY 
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