The Weird Wild Legal World of Mythic

So, as I mentioned yesterday (and others have mentioned as well) Mythic has a ridiculous pair of agreements you must accept every single time you log in. Syp pointed out that this enormous, crippling pain in the rearward areas is deliberate :

the less effort required to agree to something, the less is its juridical (sic) weight.

Which is a very interesting idea. So interesting, in fact, that someone should mention it to the American Legal System, where you only need to sign a contract once for it to be binding. In fact, the real, important contractual agreement probably occurs when you fork over your money, not when you play the game (first time or otherwise).

Of course, this isn't the first time that software company lawyers have developed "innovative" views of the law as it pertains to software. At my company it still requires an Act of God to be allowed to use any open source software, despite the fact that it has yet to bite anybody in the ass after a decade or two and billions of dollars of software written.

That isn't Mythic's only interesting contract. A while ago I started to write an article on Mythic's extremely interesting and extremely creative contract for their fansite kit.

On top of a number of clauses that limit your rights to talk about the game (you may not misrepresent the game, whatever that means) or prohibitions in terms of running ads on your site if you use the fansite material, there's also this one, my favorite :

When your WAR Fan Site interacts with players in/from the Game, you agree that You and all affiliates shall not:

(snip)
# Privately ask to meet players in person with the exception of clearly posted public gatherings.
(snip)

So if you run a fan site with the Mythic Fansite Kit, you may not ask to privately meet a player from the site. Brilliant.

At least it's good to know that Mythic takes the same creative, innovative approach to contracts as they do to game design.