Parody & likeness policy

Part of the studio's [company policies](index.md).

DORMANT FOR NEW PITCHES since 2026-10-09 (owner decision). The trend radar no longer reads the news, and the Creative Director no longer pitches topical or parody games: of the nine games flagged topical, eight were retired, and the one survivor (AIRGAP) works as a sci-fi game in which the news was only flavour — mixing in world news and trying to parody it never produced a good hook. New games are original worlds (a palette form × a popular theme — see [docs/trends.md](../trends.md)). This policy still binds in full (1) the existing topical games, AIRGAP among them, on every lane that touches them, and (2) any parody or real-world hook the owner explicitly asks for in a ticket or a brief. The taste floor below binds every game the studio makes, topical or not: never entertainment from real, specific suffering or real victims, at any age — a war theme is a fictional war, an era is a look, never a real atrocity in it.

The rules every agent MUST follow when a game touches real-world news, trends, brands, or people. Binds the whole trend→game pipeline: the distiller (what subjects it may surface), the Creative Director (what it may pitch), the game-creator (what it may build and generate), and game-QA (the pre-ship gate that enforces this). When in doubt, the answer is don't — pick another idea.

Scope — parody is a creative CHOICE, not a mandate. The studio is not a parody-only shop (see [game-design-bar](game-design-bar.md)). A trend can become a straight themed game — a war in the news → a fictional war game — with no satire at all. The taste floor in this policy binds every topical game whatever the treatment: never make entertainment of real, specific suffering or real victims; fictionalize and abstract the real event. The satire-specific rules — "punch up never down", targeting a role/company/ conduct — bind a game only when its purpose is parody. A straight themed game just fictionalizes and moves on.

Not legal advice. This is an internal safety framework written by the studio for the studio. Our games ship on the public web portal with ads on, which makes everything here commercial use — the highest-scrutiny category. The public-figure allowance below rests on an owner decision taken after a legal consult; it is time-boxed and should be re-reviewed when the law or our monetization changes.

The public-figure caricature allowance

Owner decision, 2026-07-25. Effective immediately, the studio MAY build recognizable caricatures of real public figures. This replaces the previous blanket rule ("never a specific, identifiable individual"). It was taken by the owner, as a human, after a legal consult and a studio meeting, and it lives here, in the policy — not as a flag, config key, or prompt switch that any agent can flip. No automation may widen it.

Review date: 2026-10-23 (90 days). Past that date the allowance remains in force until the owner changes it, but the Creative Director must note in its run report that the allowance is past review. Never silently expand it.

Who is eligible

- Living public figures — politicians, executives, celebrities, influencers, public commentators — and only in their public role and public conduct. - Historic figures dead 102+ years. A rolling window: as of 2026 that is anyone who died in 1924 or earlier. The longest postmortem right-of-publicity statute in the US is 100 years (Indiana, Oklahoma; California is 70), so a rolling 102 clears the worst case permanently rather than eroding toward it.

Who is NOT eligible — no caricature, no spoof, no game built around them

- The recently dead. Anyone dead less than 102 years is off the roster entirely (owner decision, 2026-07-25: "no games about dead people"). There is no route to them — not a spoof name, not a stand-in. - Private individuals, always. Ordinary citizens, named employees, victims, witnesses, anyone not genuinely public. Minors, categorically. - Founders and central sacred figures of living religions — at any age, no matter how far past 102 years. This is a real-world-harm line, not a legal one, and it sits outside what the legal consult covered. Mythology of dead religions (Greek, Norse, Egyptian, Mesopotamian) is fully available.

What you MAY now do

- Recognizable caricature art. Exaggerated, stylized, hand-drawn, low-poly, flat-vector or pixel. Recognizability is the point and is permitted. - Satirical portmanteau or role names for living figures — "Eron Busk", "The Rocket Billionaire", "the Acquisitions Envoy". Recognizable, not their name. - Real names for historic figures (102+ years dead) — "Napoleon", "Cleopatra", "Abraham Lincoln" — in the title, dialogue, metadata, anywhere. - Mock public conduct: public statements, business decisions, public persona, the systems and companies they run.

Autonomy

Fully autonomous (owner decision, 2026-07-25). The Creative Director may pitch, the game-creator may build, and QA may pass a public-figure caricature game with no human in the loop — it ships on the nightly schedule like any other game. The provenance trail (step D below) is what makes it reviewable after the fact, so keeping that trail is not optional.

Where the serial numbers come off

(The distiller half of this section describes the radar's news side, retired 2026-10-09. The build-time half — invent the company, caricature the figure — still binds any topical game the studio works on.)

Owner decision, 2026-08-03. The studio's intake — what it is allowed to KNOW and say to itself about the world — is no longer censored. The transformation still happens, at the point it always also happened: before anything is built.

Until now the trend distiller abstracted at ingest. Brands were filed off before they were ever written down ("a beloved toy-brick empire"), real events were flattened ("armed conflict dominating the news"), and the studio's own record of the world was kept in euphemism. That made a leak structurally impossible and made the studio stupid: an employee asked what was trending could only answer in riddles, because a riddle was all it had ever been told.

What changed. scripts/trends-distill.mjs now records reality:

| field | what it holds | |---|---| | label | the buildable handle — still abstract, no real brand, product, team or living person's name. This is what a pitch is made from. | | description | one concrete sentence, real names. | | context | the actual story: who, what, which company, which event. |

Agents also read the raw headlines now (get_trending_headlines, over trend_items) — the literal feed titles, unedited. Asked what's going on in the world, an employee answers like someone who reads the news.

What did NOT change — none of it, at all. The taste floor. Every rigid ban below. The eligibility rules above. The transformation pipeline. QA's pre-ship checklist. A shipped game still invents its own company for every real brand, still gives every living figure a caricature and a spoof name, still carries no real logo. The safe gate still marks what may never be repeated in public, and a safe:false signal is still awareness-only.

The rule, in one line: naming something is permission to KNOW it, never permission to SHIP it.

The risk this accepts, stated plainly. Brand abstraction used to be impossible to skip, because the data reaching the Creative Director had no brand in it to leak. It is now a step that has to actually be performed — by the Creative Director when it pitches, by the game-creator when it builds and prompts for art, and by QA at the gate. That is a real transfer of load from structure to enforcement, taken deliberately: the alternative was a studio that could not discuss its own subject matter. If a real brand ever reaches a shipped game, this is the decision to re-examine first.

The one rule that matters most

Public conduct, not private identity. Target what a public figure does in public — their statements, their business decisions, their public persona, the institutions they run. The moment a game reaches into a private life — family, children, health, relationships, personal finances — it leaves everything this allowance covers, and no caricature style saves it.

This sits on top of the punch up, never down rule: a parody may mock the powerful, never the people harmed by them or any ordinary/vulnerable group. See the distiller gate in scripts/trends-distill.mjs and [docs/trends.md](../trends.md).

Four different laws apply — don't conflate them

"Transformative use" is one factor of copyright fair use, not a master key. Four separate regimes are in play, each with its own test:

- Copyright (fair-use parody). Protects works. Parody (mocking the work/person itself) is protected; satire (borrowing something to comment on society at large) is weaker. And Warhol v. Goldsmith (2023) narrowed transformative use for commercial, same-purpose uses — and our games are commercial and entertainment, same as most source material. So "it's transformative" is a thin shield. Lean on original expression + genuine commentary, not on borrowing. - Trademark. Names, logos, brand architecture. Risk is confusion/dilution. Never reproduce a real logo, product name, or protected naming convention. The allowance above does not touch this regime at all. - Right of publicity. Protects a person's identity/persona/indicia. This remains our largest exposure and the allowance deliberately accepts some of it: caricature of a public figure's public conduct is what we now permit, which is why the name of a living figure, their voice, and photo-matched art all stay banned — those are the signifiers the case law reaches hardest (White v. Samsung: a robot in a wig ≈ Vanna White → liable; Midler v. Ford / Waits v. Frito-Lay: soundalike voices, no name → liable). Stacking signifiers is a deliberate evocation; under this policy caricature + a spoof name is an accepted risk, caricature + real name + soundalike voice is not. - Defamation. False statements of fact about real people. Republishing a news outlet's allegation does not immunize you (republication rule). Make no factual claims about real individuals.

Rigid bans (no automated override)

Absolute in the pipeline, and unchanged by the allowance above. There is no override flag the automation may set — no human is in the loop at generation time, so an unlock switch is a footgun. Any genuine exception is an owner decision, made by a human, and logged; it never lives in a prompt or a config the agents can flip.

Never generate, ingest, embed, or synthesize:

- Real names of LIVING figures. Not in the title, slug, metadata, descriptions, achievements, on-screen text, dialogue, or code. Caricature yes, name no — this is the tightest remaining constraint on a living-figure game and the easiest one to trip. (Historic figures 102+ years dead are exempt: name them freely.) - Photo-traced or biometric likeness. Caricature is permitted; deepfake- grade is not. No art traced from, or geometrically matched to, a real photograph. No reproduction of biometric facial structure or distinct tattoos. This ban also protects historic figures: a photograph of a 1924-era person may itself still be in copyright (life+70 runs from the photographer's death), so tracing it is a copyright problem even when the subject is free. - Voice imitation. No synthesized speech that imitates a real, identifiable person's voice, cadence, or catchphrase — living or historic. Original fictional-character voiceover IS allowed and encouraged: elevenlabs generates narration/dialogue from a menu of generic archetype voices. Cast an archetype, never an impression. A soundalike with no name still infringes. - Media rips. No real photographic, video, or broadcast-audio files from news organizations, studios, or networks — no harvesting, cutting, or embedding. - Trademarks & brand architecture. No real logos, protected product names, or copied UI/UX trade dress (e.g. no TikTok/X/Meta logos or product names). A logo is the easiest hard evidence against us and omitting it costs nothing. - Trade-dress cloning. Game genres are free ("roguelike deckbuilder" is fine — form isn't ownable), but a specific game's distinctive art/UI/trade dress is not — don't clone it. - Recognizable copyrighted music/melodies. No real songs or hummable melodic quotes (song parody is a narrow, dangerous corner). Original audio only. - Defamatory premises. No narrative that accuses a real, identifiable person of unverified crime or private misconduct. Premises about real people stay on public record and are framed as obvious opinion/hyperbole. - Ineligible subjects. The recently dead (<102 years), private individuals, minors, and living religions' founding/central sacred figures — see above. - Real suffering, at any age. Never entertainment made from atrocity, genocide, slavery, mass death, or identifiable victims. Age clears likeness risk; it never clears the taste floor. A 200-year-dead slave trader is still not a funny caricature.

The transformation pipeline (apply before any asset generation)

When the pipeline injects a real event or figure, transform it first:

A. Naming. For a living public figure, never output their real name anywhere — use a functional/role name ("The Billionaire Rocket Guy", "Studio Executive #4") or a satirical portmanteau ("Eron Busk"). Under this policy the portmanteau is a legitimate tool rather than a last resort, because the caricature is doing the recognition work openly. For a historic figure (102+ years dead), use their real name — a spoof-named Caesar is just a confusing Caesar. Brands are never renamed-and-used: invent a fictional company outright.

B. Visual abstraction. Prompt gemini-image for caricature / flat-vector / low-poly / pixel-art styles. Push exaggeration — that is both the comedy and the legal posture. Assets must not trace or geometrically match any real reference photo, and must never contain a real logo or product shape.

C. Audio. Original sound effects/ambience, plus original fictional-character voiceover via elevenlabs. If a "voice" is needed, cast a generic archetype ("pompous tech-exec voice", "breathless news-anchor voice") from the tool's stock voices — never one chosen or tuned to sound like a specific real speaker. A soundalike of a real person, even with no name, is a right-of-publicity violation.

D. Provenance. Keep the trail from trend item → pitch → game (the scrum ticket body + the game's CLAUDE.md): who the subject is, why they are eligible, what public conduct is being commented on. Because these games now ship fully autonomously, this trail is the studio's only after-the-fact review record. Treat it as required output, not paperwork.

Pre-ship halt checklist (enforced by game-QA)

Before a parody/topical game passes QA, the answer to each must hold. Any violation is a hard FAIL, not a note — the game does not ship:

1. Does the title, metadata, on-screen text, achievements, or thumbnail contain a living real person's name, or any trademark/logo? → FAIL (Historic figures 102+ years dead may be named freely. Logos never.) 2. Does any art trace, geometrically match, or biometrically reproduce a real photograph or face? → FAIL (recognizable caricature is fine) 3. Is an eligible figure targeted for their private life — family, children, health, relationships, personal finances — rather than public conduct? → FAIL 4. Is the subject ineligible: a private individual, a minor, anyone dead less than 102 years, or a founding/central sacred figure of a living religion? → FAIL 5. Does it imitate a real person's voice, or embed ripped photo/video/broadcast media? → FAIL 6. Does it assert unverified facts about a real person, or punch down at the people harmed or any vulnerable group? → FAIL 7. Does it make entertainment out of real, specific suffering — atrocity, genocide, slavery, mass death, or identifiable victims — at any age? → FAIL 8. Is the provenance trail present (subject, eligibility basis, the public conduct being commented on)? → missing is a FAIL for a public-figure game, since nothing else reviews these before they go live.

A clean pass looks like: a recognizable caricature of a public figure's public conduct (or a freely-named historic figure), a spoof/role name if they're living, original exaggerated art, original archetype audio, no logos, and a premise that is obvious opinion rather than a factual claim.

Where this is enforced

| Point | File | What it enforces | |---|---|---| | Ingest | scripts/trends-distill.mjs | the taste floor, on theme signals (no news subjects since 2026-10-09) | | Pitch | Creative Director prompt | the taste floor on every pitch; this whole policy only on a parody the owner asked for | | Build | .claude/agents/game-creator.md | asset/likeness/naming constraints | | Gate | .claude/agents/game-qa.md | the halt checklist above — the teeth |