We’re at Otakuthon, Quebec’s biggest animation festival, and we’re here to talk video game law with a delegation from the Civil Law Section, including five students who recently graduated from the section.
Otakuthon is a volunteer organization that has been in existence for nearly 20 years. Our main activity is a conference. In fact, we have the largest Japanese culture convention in Canada. We have everything, if you think of anything related to geek culture, we have it, we have board games, we have video games, we have video game tournaments, you know, with prizes and so on, everything. We have the World Cosplay Summit, which is one of the biggest cosplay events in the world. On the second floor is the exhibition hall, which is a huge open-air space with lots of vendors.
My name is Bhromor Rahman and I’m part of Otakuthon myself. I started working on Otakuthon in 2023 and I had the idea of inviting Professor Thomas Burelli, who was my professor at the University of Ottawa at the time. It was a crazy idea that came out of nowhere, I proposed it to management, and it came to fruition, and he became one of the festival’s most sought-after guests.
Its content that’s super original, in fact it’s something that we didn’t really have on our side, and I thought it fitted in perfectly with our programming, in fact with our, in fact with our way of thinking.
We’re here to explain the legal issues surrounding video game law, so it’s a really fascinating conference, a fascinating convention with lots and lots of interaction with the public. We’ve organized several panels, and I took part in two of them. The first was a detailed panel on how video games talk about the law, so it was a bit of a popularization panel, explaining what you can learn about the law from video games, and then I took part in a second panel where we looked at a number of different legal issues, and I talked in particular about eSports in the Olympics.
My interest is in intellectual property which is how I ended up communicating with professor Burelli in these matters since it involves entertainment. For our second panel we started discussing how as jurists, we see law in different areas of our life that other people may not see it. And so, for example in discussing video games, I had an example in which we took Pokémon and looked at it as a sort of animal cruelty and also the involvement of a minor in this worldwide Quest, to save the world. Another example that we used that was my own personal example was the game Animal Crossing which is a really good example as to how we different aspects of civil rights in video games as well. In animal crossing for example there’s no competition law because Tom Nook essentially has a monopoly over everything whether it’s mortgages, commercial law, everything.
I took a few classes from Professor Burelli during law school. I found them very interesting, and we were able to work together as researchers, coresearchers. We wrote some articles on Olympic Games and video games but most importantly on today we’re presenting the article on dark patterns and video games.
So we’re going to be talking about dark pattern so different types of mechanics that you often see in video games to get people to spend more time playing, more time, not necessarily with their friends but just I guess in a way addicted to a certain point to the game, spending more money and all of that. So, we’re just trying to talk about the issue, show that it exists, show how States have addressed the problem, show how consumers can help with making the problem better, I guess.
We didn’t really know what to expect, but we’ve noticed that there’s a real interest, we’ve got full rooms, people are very curious, they have lots of stories and anecdotes and information to share and they’re discovering certain aspects of the law and it’s great because they come and talk to us. They talk during the presentations, they come and see us after the presentations and then some of them want to know more – do you give training courses, where can I find out a bit more, can I read something, and so on – so it arouses real curiosity on the part of the public.
