Kirby Ferguson Ted Talk - Remix

     Considering how many people are alive today and how many more have been alive in the past, the odds of any one idea being completely original are  astronomically low.  As obsessed as society is with the notion of originality, it doesn't seem to reward it much.  No one has an idea and is then showered with grant money simply because no one has ever heard of it before.  Ideas are rewarded when they show some sort of practical potential, either by addressing some economic concern or sending a novel artistic message.
   
     That is the line for what separates a shameless rip-off of previous ideas with a useful remix. Someone who takes the ideas of others, copies them, and slaps their own name-tag on them are not contributing anything new.  They only seek to feed on the attention that the original ideas afforded their authors. I've seen this before in all sorts of foreign bootlegged merchandise for American media properties. Rather than buy an action figure of Luke Skywalker from Star Wars, grandma might accidentally buy Barry Star-Boy: Space Wizard Maximum Fun Time.

     The video game Overwatch just released a new character called Ashe, a spaghetti-western aesthetic female bandit.  People claim she's a rip-off of a similar character from the video game League of Legends. The irony is that that character is itself derived from a character in a game called Defense of the Ancients, which in turn is based on the game Warcraft 3. Because Blizzard made both Warcraft 3 and Overwatch, should we conclude that they plagiarized themselves? Does it matter if they did?

     Many great intellectual properties are simple spins on classical stories. Super Mario is a reiteration of the knight-saves-damsel-from-dragon story, except in this case the, "valiant knight" is a short, pudgy plumber with an Italian accent.  The creator of Link, the hero from The Legend of Zelda, said he based the character design on Peter Pan. Other than the green outfit complete with silly hat, Link and Peter have very little in common. Mario is very similar to its source material and Link is mostly different, but both are unique enough to be identifiable as distinct, separate entities. They are more than shameless copies like Barry Star-Boy.