Emiliano Sciarra, the inventor of games copied by the Chinese

Perhaps few know but Emiliano Sciarra, 52 years old from Civitavecchia, is the creator of the best-selling Italian game of all time, distributed in twenty-four countries and translated into fifteen languages. Yet he is not a millionaire, and if we were in his place we would suffer from nightmares answering Lord Jim’s Conradian question: “Who would ever think of dreaming of a Chinese?”. Why Bang!the card game created by Sciarra, with changed title and characters it was copied in China under the name of San Guo Sha, also becoming the best-selling Chinese board game: in Beijing, where some San Guo Sha bars have opened, it is the subject of a strategy course at the Polytechnic University while the online version has 250 million of subscribers. Possible for a reason: copyright law. Or rather its voids. There is no specific protection for board games.

Are game designers so underprotected?

The game is a creative act that you can’t even patent as such. And at Siae there is no games section. The rules can be deposited as a literary work, the board as a figurative work, but the game is a holistic whole that cannot be divided, it is not just its rules or graphics. The paradox is that it can be deposited if it is a TV format, like the game of parcels.

What about video games?

Copyright protects software. Video games are therefore much more protected and represent a gigantic industry, bigger than that of the cinema, while board games move a market of smaller proportions, even if it has grown by double digits in the last decade. Not enough, however, to push the publishers of the sector to join.

If someone decided to replicate Monopoly could they do it?

Obviously he cannot plagiarize the logo or use that board and those cards. However, it could re-propose the principles and concept of the game. The same goes for my Bang!, which I set in the Far West. If tomorrow someone calls him Bum! and transposes it into Space, he is perfectly free to do so.

As did the Chinese.

Calling it San Guo Sha and re-setting it in their epic of the Three Kingdoms, but they copied it in every way except minor changes. My publisher filed a lawsuit, but predictably we lost it. And since the Chinese have also launched an English version of the game, we have appealed for justice in the United States. But not even the American judge recognized the plagiarism.

Why?

Copyright does not protect the idea of ​​the game, but its expressions. Just put a warrior in my cowboy’s place and a ruler instead of the sheriff. He is a semantic hoax. The Chinese have admitted that they have gotten back to Bang! just because you can.

How much did San Guo Sha sell?

Very rough estimate: between 30 and 50 million copies.

What a frustration.

Even moral: if Bang! were it not a card game but a work of another type it would be considered an Italian excellence. Instead, due to our own prejudice, games are considered second-class culture rather than a creative act such as composing music. An aesthetic value is being recognized in video games, which are increasingly similar to films, while for board games it is complicated: they reconstruct a world, not a story, and in an abstract way. It is more difficult to communicate feelings and the authors themselves do not practice this intent.

Is it different elsewhere?

For example in Germany there is more cultural consideration. It derives, I am convinced, also from a climatic factor: in cold countries we spend more time with board games, both cards and boards. In Italy, unfortunately, the game is seen as something for children and an adult who plays is considered childish. Yet the games also convey important messages, even against the authors’ intentions: going back to Monopoly, it was born as a criticism of capitalism and instead became an exaltation of it, so much so that it was forbidden to import it in communist countries.

A few years ago you wrote the book “The symbolism of games”, from chess to the game of the goose, which you recall was not just a pastime for children.

No game was just that. The Game of the Goose which spread in the sixteenth century had an Egyptian forerunner and was inspired by the alchemical work, as certain names of the boxes still reveal: the well, the bridge. It is entrusted to pure luck, to the roll of the dice, but more than blind chance it reflects a conception of nature lost with time. Today the keys have been lost, the entertainment or intellectual aspect remains, as in chess, in which an extraordinary moral symbolism was also hidden. Just think of the king as a representation of willpower, which is essential to move any piece. Checkmate makes it impossible to activate any faculty, because without will everything ends.

How did the desire to create games come about?

An impulse as a child, until I discovered the computer and invented video games for fifteen years. Then, attending a group of table players in Civitavecchia, I was seduced by their creative freedom. Bang! this is how it was born: to create a fun but not trivial party game, imagined in the old West because it is a world that everyone understands. Even in China, so to speak.