Developer Of Free Web Game Messes With Sites Embedding His Game With Goatse Image

(Mis)Uses of Technology

from the ew-no dept

The tradition of game developers trolling those who pirate or otherwise use their games rather than immediately going the legal route has a long history. There are lots of ways to do this, most of which involve either breaking the game in certain ways, or inputting Easter eggs into games that cause those pirating it to reach out to developers on social media, essentially telling on themselves. On the one hand, a little humor in the approach as opposed to having lawyers fire off letters or lawsuits is certainly a better response. On the other hand, this trolling all takes up more development time and coding, leading to the obvious question: is any of this actually worth the effort?

Well, there’s trolling, and then there is trolling. Josh Simmons, developer of the free web game Sqword, decided to take some extreme measures when he discovered other sites were embedding his game in an iFrame window on their sites and surrounding the game with ads.

“This made me angrier than it should have—not because Sqword is a cash cow—we don’t run ads on the site and don’t make money from it, it’s just for fun—but because it was a passion project with friends, something pure and intentionally free to play WITHOUT ads,” Simmons writes. “It’s against my ethos as a developer, there are banners and popups everywhere. If I build an app, I believe it should either be free or it should be upfront about what the subscription or purchase price is (and then not upsell you). I couldn’t abide seeing my code monetized in this way.”

That frustration seems perfectly reasonable to me. He made a game that he wanted to be completely free to all, including free from advertisements, only to find his work being yanked into embeds on other sites monetizing his work. I can only imagine how frustrating that might be.

How he decided to combat those sites, however, may have been a bit much.

Instead of taking the “mature and responsible” route of simply blocking these external sites from using his code, Simmons says that he inserted a stealth attack in the Sqword code. Now, if the site detects it’s being loaded in an iFrame, it will display Goatse, the decades-old shock meme that has somehow evolved into an email service. The NSFW image served by Sqword also comes along with a self-incriminating message for visitors to the aggregator site: “I steal other people’s code because I’m a total hack.”

Here’s the problem: a surprise appearance of the “Goatse” image, which involves a graphic picture of a man’s stretched out posterior, does as much to punish visitors to the site as the site itself. If not more. And perhaps some of those visitors are children who stumbled across the game and had no idea about any of this backstory.

We might still want to say the onus is on these sites yanking in Simmons’ work to simply not do so, and perhaps that’s mostly true, but I’m also fairly sure Simmons isn’t looking to punish people who might otherwise be interested in playing the game he made available simply because they got duped into going to the wrong site. And while I’m loathe to make “but think of the children” arguments generally… I mean… it’s Goatse, for god’s sake.

Look, messing with these types of sites is still better than going legal. And the text was probably enough. Let’s not ambush people who likely didn’t even realize they were participating in something bad with gaping anuses.

Filed Under: goatse, josh simmons, piracy, sqword, trolling