Fair Dealing In Video Game Reviews

INTRODUCTION

Video games, as a form of entertainment, has existed for more than half a century now. Spacewar, created by MIT student Steven Russel in 1961, is considered the first ever video game.¹ Video games contain multiple art forms, such as music, scripts, plots, video, paintings, and characters, that involve human interaction while executing the game with a computer program on specific hardware. They are complex works of authorship and are not created as single, simple works, but an amalgamation of individual elements that can each individually be copyrighted (i.e., the characters in a given video game, its soundtrack, settings, audiovisual parts, etc.) if they achieve a certain level of originality and creativity.²