Levine, Does FRBR cover games?
Jenny Levine asks Does FRBR cover games?
Yes. A work is defined in the Final Report as “a distinct intellectual or artistic creation.” Lost Cities or Settlers of Catan or Clue or Dungeons and Dragons are all such things. (D&D gets FRBRily complicated very quickly — all those versions and rulebooks and modules and so on.) An expression is “the intellectual or artistic realization of a work in the form of alpha-numeric, musical, or choreographic notation, sound, image, object, movement, etc., or any combination of such forms.” For a game like Clue, that would be the conception of the rooms, the board, the rules, the people, the wrench and the rope, etc., but all as abstract notions, not yet made real. When realized in a manifestation (”the physical embodiment of the expression of a work”) we have the pieces, rules, board, and box all put together in a run at the manufacturer’s. Then we can go out and buy an item, in this case a box labelled Clue with a bunch of stuff in it, “a single examplar of a manifestation.”
FRBR applies to games because it applies to any product of intellectual or artistic creation. Clue and other board games are more complicated then this brief sketch, though, because in some sense each part of the game is its own work, so the manifestation (a box) includes manifestations of many different but related works. This is the problem of aggregates: how do you handle something that’s made up of lots of other things? Of course, not everyone would care about that level of detail for board games, but some people might, and it’s a good test of FRBR.
What about variations on the games, like the British version of Monopoly or Clue with characters from The Simpsons? I think those would be works too, derivative works.
How to handle bridge and backgammon I’m not so sure. Any ideas? Would bridge exist as a work with all sorts of different expressions over the decades, depending on whether it’s duplicate or contract, according to Hoyle, etc.? Maybe FRBR would treat games whose origins are lost the same way as it treats folk tales and songs whose origins are lost. Though I’m not sure what that is!