Amy Thomas, "Copyright, Contract, and Video Games: Terms of Play" (Hart Publishing, 2026)

Summary

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Podcast Summary:

New Books Network Interview with Amy Thomas
Book: Copyright, Contract, and Video Games: Terms of Play (Hart Publishing, 2026)
Host: Rudolf Inderst
Guest: Amy Thomas
Date: May 29, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode of the New Books in Game Studies channel, Rudolf Inderst interviews Amy Thomas, lecturer in Intellectual Property and Information Law at the University of Glasgow and the CREATe Centre. They discuss her new book, Copyright, Contract, and Video Games: Terms of Play. The conversation dives into how video game contracts (like EULAs and Terms of Service) function as mechanisms of power, shaping who owns, controls, and participates in video game culture, and how these legal frameworks affect both players and the industry at large.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Amy Thomas’s Background and Inspiration

• Timestamp: 02:45
  • Amy, a lifelong gamer and legal scholar, was drawn to the intersection of copyright, contract law, and video games through her dual interests.
  • She describes law and games as both involving “rules and systems,” seeing a natural line between the two in how control and creativity are managed.

2. Contracts as “Monologues of Power”

• Timestamps: 04:08 – 07:05
  • Video game contracts (EULAs, Terms of Service, etc.) are omnipresent and act as unilateral “terms of play,” governing how and when games can be used.
  • These contracts represent “state-sanctioned power” for rights-holders and are written to consolidate control and reinforce the proprietary ideology that games are "someone else’s property in its entirety."
  • Notable Quote:
    • “Terms of play are about telling the player that the game is someone else's property in its entirety. And that means that the person can tell the player exactly what to do and when, or else.” — Amy Thomas [06:41]

3. Players Left Out by Copyright Law

• Timestamps: 07:05 – 09:50
  • Copyright law privileges creators and distributors; players’ roles, rights, and obligations are defined privately by contracts.
  • The legal structure typically presumes players are the weaker party, giving rights-holders the power to dictate conditions.
  • Amy links this omission to campaigns like Stop Killing Games, which argue for increased player rights, especially in maintaining access to online games.

4. A Socio-Legal Methodology: Contracts as Critical Discourse

• Timestamps: 09:50 – 13:03
  • Amy applies critical discourse analysis to contracts, treating their language as significant in understanding power and ideology.
  • Most players never read these contracts, and even fewer understand them—their legal language functions like a “magic spell” designed to be impenetrable.
  • Notable Quote:
    • “The language of law is basically a magic spell. So you say the words in the right way, in abracadabra legal effect.” — Amy Thomas [11:38]
  • Contracts are everyday but hidden, naturalizing certain power dynamics and expectations.

5. Contradictions and Industry Priorities in Game Contracts

• Timestamps: 14:33 – 17:44
  • Game contracts consistently portray the player as powerless and restricted, unable to alter terms—they “shall, they must.”
  • Contracts obsessively prevent resale, even for owned physical games, revealing an industry-wide hostility to second-hand game markets.
  • Notable Example:
    • Reference to early cartridge warnings (“licensed not sold”), and Microsoft’s infamous attempt to restrict secondhand sales on Xbox One in 2014.
  • Notable Quote:
    • “They are written by the big scary lawyers with those big magical words that assume you're going to be naughty and if you are, there's going to be a scary consequence.” — Amy Thomas [15:08]

6. Game Studies and Legal Scholarship: Bridging the Gap

• Timestamps: 17:44 – 20:51
  • Game studies’ debates (e.g., ludology vs. narratology) directly impact legal interpretations of what a game is and what rights players might have.
  • If games are “rules and systems” (ludological), they are less like ownable property, which could afford more player freedoms.
  • Notable Quote:
    • “If you can convince a policymaker that a game is essentially a collection of rules and systems…and in turn that means that users have more freedoms to interact with it and do things with it.” — Amy Thomas [19:32]

7. How Contracts Define ‘Play’

• Timestamps: 20:51 – 23:02
  • The legal conception of play doesn’t fit neatly into “owner” or “user”—contracts can heavily regulate what kinds of play are permitted, including modding, streaming, and social interaction.
  • Notable Quote:
    • “It's difficult for me to see play through the lens of property really at all. It's someone interacting with rules and systems and then also maybe creating new things through that.” — Amy Thomas [21:48]

8. Beyond Contracts: Code and DRM

• Timestamps: 23:02 – 24:53
  • Technical measures like DRM (Digital Rights Management) are "hard" restrictions embedded in software, enforcing rules beyond what a contract can.
  • Suggestion for future research to investigate how the technical and legal restrictions compare in shaping what players can actually do.

9. Takeaways and Hopes for the Field

• Timestamps: 24:53 – 26:19
  • Amy’s central project is to “make invisible things visible”: to demystify the hidden powers at work in routine contracts.
  • She urges legal scholars and game studies researchers to question the legitimacy and lawfulness of unchecked contractual power in games.
  • Notable Quote:
    • “There is power and invisibility if no one's watching and the world has sort of accepted that these things exist, that they're natural and acceptable…knowledge is power if we're better equipped to challenge them.” — Amy Thomas [25:22]

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Memorable Moments & Quotes

• “Terms of play are about telling the player that the game is someone else's property in its entirety… But in the book, I question whether that's actually true and how much of the terms are actually just bluster or deliberately disguising parts of the law that might be actually more generous or liberal to the player.”
  — Amy Thomas [06:41]

• “The biggest lie on the internet is that I've read and agreed to the terms and conditions.”
  — Amy Thomas [10:46]

• “You say the words in the right way, in abracadabra legal effect.”
  — Amy Thomas [11:38]

• “Contracts that you don't read and you don't pay attention to, what do they actually say and what do they actually mean? Because I think in that way knowledge is power.”
  — Amy Thomas [25:22]

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Important Timestamps

• 02:45 Amy Thomas introduces her background and motivation
• 04:08 Explanation of “terms of play” and contracts as power
• 07:05 The gap in copyright law regarding players
• 09:50 Contracts as critical discourse and their language
• 14:33 Industry patterns in contracts, especially about resale
• 17:44 Game studies’ contribution to legal understanding
• 20:51 How contracts define and limit play
• 23:02 The role of technical restrictions like DRM
• 24:53 Takeaways: Making the invisible visible

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Conclusion & Book Details

• Title: Copyright, Contract, and Video Games: Terms of Play
• Author: Amy Thomas
• Publisher: Hart Bloomsbury
• Summary:
  Amy Thomas’s book explores the often invisible but powerful ways in which legal contracts and industry practices shape how we play, access, and think about video games—not just as entertainment, but as interactive works with real social, creative, and legal consequences.

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For further information, visit Hart Bloomsbury or contact Amy Thomas (University of Glasgow).

Transcript

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[Amy Thomas]

Welcome to the New Books Network.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Hi everyone and welcome back to New Books in Game Studies, a podcast channel on the New Books Network. On this channel we explore a new scholarship that unpacks what games mean, how they are designed, how they are played, and how they resonate far beyond the screen. I'm your host, Rudolf Inders, professor for Game Studies at the University of Applied Sciences, Neu Ulm, Germany. Before we get started, if you enjoy the show, please consider leaving us a five star review on Apple Podcasts or whichever platform you prefer. It really helps others discover us. And of course, feel free to share this episode with your community or gaming groups. And now, let's dive into today's conversation. I'm very delighted to welcome Amy Thomas who joins us to talk about her book copyright contract and video games terms of play. Amy, welcome to the show.

[Amy Thomas]

Thank you very much for having me, Rudolf. It's a pleasure to be on your super cool show.

[Rudolf Inderst]

She said it. Super cool show. Well, to begin, could you briefly introduce yourself and your research background? What drew you to the intersection of copyright law, contract law and video games?

[Amy Thomas]

Yes, so I am a lecturer in intellectual Property and Information Law. And I'm at the University of Glasgow and the Create Centre. So that's the centre for the regulation of the creative economy. So me and my colleagues all have this shared interest in the law and its effects on creativity. Chronologically, if I'm thinking of my research background, I was obviously interested in video games before law. I'm sure that's not surprising. So I'm a child of the 1990s, so I am Sega Mega Drive, I am Game boy, I am OG PlayStation. And I know that kind of, on the face of things, that doesn't seem super compatible with law. But actually there's definitely this kind of thread of interest between the two where there's rules and there's systems, right? So games are or have rules and systems. And from the copyright side, I guess I'm interested in rules about who owns intangible stuff and what intangible stuff can and can't be owned by law and when are people allowed to interfere or interact with that. And then I think as I've moved throughout my career, I've come to see the limitations of copyright and I've found that actually copyright is just sort of the legal backdrop to a lot of our interactions with creative works. But actually, what more sort of meaningfully facilitates this in an everyday sense as contract.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Now, one of the book's central arguments is that video game contracts act like monologues of power and shaping players to align with proprietary ideologies. Could you unpack what you mean by that and why contracts are such an important site of analysis?

[Amy Thomas]

Yes, gladly. So we encounter contracts every day when we play games. So this includes things like our end user licensing agreements or our EULAS terms and conditions, Terms of service, user generated content policies, community guidelines, the list goes on. So I call these collectively terms of play, because these are the collection of terms that govern legally how and when and where you're allowed to play a game. So I tie these terms to power in the book in a couple of senses. First, because this is the exercise of a legal power, right? If you have the copyright in the game, the law recognizes that you are the person who can decide the conditions under which it can be used. So that's a legal state sanctioned power to state your terms. The second bit is maybe more constitutive or kind of generative function in terms of the language of the contract itself. So by that I mean that you can take this legal power and run with it and construct other things that the law doesn't necessarily cover. So for example, default Copyright law doesn't define what cheating in a game is, but it gives you the power as the rights holder to decide. If not, cheating in a game is a condition on which you make the copy of your game available. This was actually tested, I should say, in a UK case where someone was taken to court for using mods in the Grand Theft Auto V. Multiplayer mode, using in game menus to sort of spawn weapons in cars and stuff. So we might all agree that cheating isn't desirable in a game for whatever reason, but the precise articulation of what constitutes cheating and what's fair or not, and what are the penalties for that, not something that's decided necessarily by the community. It's decided unilaterally by the rights holder. And that can be quite problematic. And then if we go a step further, those terms usually are about perpetuating a particular ideology or worldview. Usually that's centered around consolidating power and control with a rights holder who can govern a game space. In the book, I call this a proprietary ideology, as you say, because these terms of play are about telling the player that the game is someone else's property in its entirety. And that means that the person can tell the player exactly what to do and when, or else. But in the book, I question whether that's actually true and how much of the terms are actually just bluster or deliberately disguising parts of the law that might be actually more generous or liberal to the player.

[Rudolf Inderst]

You also argue that copyright law tends to focus on creators and distribution, while the player is often left outside the frame with private contracts defining the player's role and obligations instead. Why is this omission so significant?

[Amy Thomas]

So it speaks to a fundamental aspect of copyright, which, depending on how you look at it, is more or less legitimate as a kind of legal omission. For my part, I'm on the side of we should treat players fairly and probably accept that they have more rights than we give copyright credit for a lot of the time. In principle, copyright is the creator's right. It's by its nature focused on giving the person who created the thing, so in this case, a game developer or publisher, the legal rights to use the thing and make money from it. So we would expect, and we do find that copyright gives strong protections to those creators. It gives extensive rights over that object that's been created for a long time, and a game is a very protected piece of media. But on the other hand, copyright also has this public interest function that people who are not rights holders of that object also have a legitimate interest in interacting with it. So for example, for study or research. So this means there has to be some kind of balance between the interests, the rights holder and the player. But maybe because inevitably when you give someone a state sanctioned property right, you're introducing like a power differential between whoever has the property and who doesn't. Often the player's the weaker party in law because any rights to use certain things in certain circumstances become very heavily caveated. Essentially then you know, if default copyright law doesn't recognize the player as having any affirmative rights to use a game or access it, then it's entirely up to the rights holder what the terms of access are. And the player doesn't really have any shield to defend against that sort of sword of property, if you like. And as I say, scholars that are old school copyright would say this is the way the law should be. It's fundamentally about protecting the rights holder. But for myself and lots of other kind of contemporaries, we usually advocate for the position of the public, the user, in this case the player, as having more accessible use policies for creative work. And that's also one of the big kind of impetuses around the Stop Killing Games campaign just now, which is seeking to sort of prevent online games from being deliberately killed and made inaccessible. If players have more access rights to these works, then they might be in a better position to save them in theory.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Now your book uses video games as a case study to develop a broader socio legal methodology. Could you explain how reading contracts as a form of critical discourse changes the way we understand power in interactive media?

[Amy Thomas]

Yeah, it's definitely a wee bit unorthodox to treat contracts as critical discourse. I think for anyone that doesn't know, it's a method that looks at language. So hear the language of a contract and how that interacts with things like power and ideology. So essentially, what do things like word choice tell us about what the person choosing those words thinks or feels about the person receiving them? What's the story they're trying to tell? Do they speak really formally or informally? Do they use really technical terms or try to make things accessible? Even if something is written in all capital letters, that can be significant in conveying meaning. So as I say, typically you see this method more in oral conversational discourse, I guess, like what we're doing here or in a job interview. The person who sets the tone of the interview is the most powerful person in the room. Right? Interviewer is the person who decides whether they speak informally, not the interviewee. And the provocation behind Treating the terms of players critical discourse was for a couple of reasons. First, because if we do think about this in terms of power, it's a power that's almost deliberately disguised and very naturalised in our everyday lives as players. I think everyone will have heard that the biggest lie on the Internet is that I've read and agreed to the terms and conditions. We know that people don't read these things. They are designed to be clipped through. And certainly in the game interface they are just something that are just part of the game space, right? You just interact with them to progress and get to the fun bits. And the fact that these are everyday and that they are hidden but persistent is something that's suspicious enough for us to examine maybe more closely. Just because you don't read it doesn't mean that it's not powerful and it doesn't have a function. And then secondly, because even when people do read these things, they don't necessarily understand them. And overall there's really poor reading comprehension of what these terms actually mean. And that is deliberate, right? They're deliberately written to be impenetrable. One of my favourite studies that I cite in the book is done by some scholars in MIT who say that the language of law is basically a magic spell. So you say the words in the right way, in abracadabra legal effect. So they're deliberately written in this closed, conservative legal style by lawyers for lawyers most of the time, but where the player is the intended recipient, who's presumably not a lawyer in my case. I guess maybe that's not true. But again, this is an odd thing, right? It's obscurifying. You're using specific language to achieve a specific legal effect, but the recipient isn't actually expected to understand or engage with it. So with both of these issues, with the low readership and low readability, I thought this was a good site for testing issues around power naturalization. How do you make people systematically agree to something that's not in their best interests? And what is the motivation for doing that?

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[Rudolf Inderst]

striking feature of the book is its focus on the contradictions and idealizations embedded in game contracts, many of which seem to reinforce industry priorities rather than protect users or players in their case. What are some of the most revealing patterns you've found?

[Amy Thomas]

This is a really fun question because it forces me to try and distill what I think the kind of key characteristics of the player are assumed to be. Effectively and first and foremost there's this idea that the player is, and I kind of hinted at this before, the weaker party in the legal relationship. This may or may not be factually true in the eyes of the law, but the contract certainly conveys this. They take this very authoritative stance. They're very formally written. They are written by the big scary lawyers with those big magical words that assume you're going to be naughty and if you are, there's going to be a scary consequence. And the player by contrast, is the person that's being compelled to act. So the contract says they shall, they must, and the language that they use. But the player also doesn't necessarily have autonomy in this relationship. They can't change or interfere with the terms of play. You just have to accept them or walk away. Another one of the strongest conceptualizations of the player in the contract is as a non reseller, which on the face of it seems really random, but it's really consistent throughout every contract till it tap. So rights holders definitely don't want us selling our games. And at first I thought as a lawyer maybe this is just overbroad drafting that essentially they were trying to communicate like when you buy our game you don't own the IP to the game. Which like of course we understand. Or if it's a cloud based game, they're basically saying you own a subscription but not the game. Again, we understand, but actually the words of the contract, when they're spelled out, says, you don't own this, even if we sold it to you, even if you're holding it in your hand, and you're definitely not allowed to resell it to anyone. And this kind of hostility towards resale is something that's been ongoing, I think, since the early days in the games industry. You can see those old game cartridges that have the licensed not sold logo right there on the front with Sonic, you know, or you maybe remember back in 2014 when Microsoft initially designed a version of the Xbox One that had loads of plans to technically prevent people from lending or reselling games. So clearly there's this industry priority to effectively prevent resale, reroute all sales of a game through the rights holder. I don't really have a satisfactory answer as to where this hostility is coming from. I think maybe historically, because games are straight to home release and didn't have other means of making money past the point of sale, like, I guess, a film that has a cinema release. But I'm not sure that that holds true anymore because there's so many diverse business models. There's microtransactions, subscription services, merchandise, things like. But still this ethos against resale really persists, and that is odd.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Before we continue, a quick note to our listeners. If you're involved in running an academic program in game design, game development, or media studies or game studies, this podcast may be an ideal place to share your vision. Our listeners include scholars, educators, students and professionals across the field. Consider placing a short promotional segment to connect with this thoughtful international audience passionate about games and research. And now back to the show. Aiming youg Book speaks not only to video game studies, but also to intellectual property law and social legal research more broadly. What do you think game studies can contribute to these neighboring fields, especially when it comes to user rights and participation?

[Amy Thomas]

So I think especially on improving our legal understanding of who the player is and what a game is. Game studies would be super fundamental to this. One old argument that we as copyright scholars just love is the ludology narratology argument because it has legal consequences. So again, for the uninitiated, the Ludology narratology argument is essentially about understanding video games as either more like interactive mediums, with this focus on mechanics and games as distinct mediums that should be sort of studied and understood on their own terms versus if they're more narratological, then they're essentially an evolution of sort of storytelling media and more analogous to other forms of things like films. And books. I hope I understand that Rudolph's face seems encouraging just now. In copyright, if you fall more on the ludological sort of spectrum, if you can convince a policymaker that a game is essentially a collection of rules and systems and processes and interaction, then it becomes less like property, it's less ownable. And in turn that means that users have more freedoms to interact with it and do things with it. So it would mean that a games rights holder would have fewer rights to say don't use a game in this way, don't stream a game in this way, don't cheat because there's less legitimate claims to power through property. But if you maybe fall more on that kind of narratological spectrum, then films and books are things that we understand as traditional property and user rights argument become a bit more stilted because we have established ways of looking at these as sort of creative objects. There's more power there from game studies scholars in particular. I think it would be really helpful to have conversations about how to categorize games legally because it's still not something we have a satisfactory answer for an IP and copyright. And as I try to highlight in my book, if there's any wiggle room or legal grey area here, it will normally always be co opted to get rid of any space for player freedoms in favour of a more heavy handed approach to regulating games as property. But then we as lawyers would have the problem of saying, you know, and also you can't use a contract to work around this sort of limitation in the first place. But that's our problem.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Well, the protocol now listeners, I've never been stone coldly face red before. This happens right now. Must train my poker face obviously. Now the subtitle of your book Terms of Play is especially evocative. How do you understand play in relation to legal terms and how do you or how do contracts shape what kind of play becomes possible? And I think this is very much related to a discussion we just had before.

[Amy Thomas]

Right, definitely. It's a great question and I do have a very brief section in my book where I try to understand how contracts define this. So if you're given a legal right to play a game, what does that actually mean in practice? In copyright we really only have two options. You're either a rights holder or you're a user. And I personally don't think play neatly falls into either of these things because it's difficult for me to see play through the lens of property really at all. It's someone interacting with rules and systems and then also maybe creating new things through that that might be unexpected things, they might be creative or performative. In the book, I do have a chapter about user generated content which specifically provokes us that if players can make things with games, then how does that sort of intersect with this binary of production and consumption? And where do rights and copyright live within that? And again, I think this is something that game studies would be helpful for to better understand this nature of creativity when interacting with the game. But in terms of how contracts shape play and how they define play, as I mentioned earlier, this can be really extensive because the legal grant of power is extensive. So terms can be used to shape things like how players are allowed to interact with each other, what's considered harmful behavior and what's not, or what's offensive and what's not. It could be used to say whether you're allowed to mod or tink with a game. It could be used to say, you know, you're not allowed to show footage of this game on YouTube to show people how buggy it is. All of these things are how play is sort of defined through the contract in terms of what's legally allowed.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Now, are there other ways in which players are constructed? There are. Then through contract, Yes.

[Amy Thomas]

I didn't look into this, into the book, because there just wasn't the scope. It was born out of a PhD thesis. And as we all know, those can't go on forever, thankfully. But one thing that was super relevant that I didn't look at was digital rights management, or in copyright terms, technical protection measures. So essentially those are the rules that are embedded in code that control and restrict how players interact with a game. So those might be kind of digital blocks that prevent people from tampering with the code and changing things in the game. Or always online drms which require Internet connection to play with, even if they aren't necessarily kind of online or multiplayer. It can even be embedded into, you know, the little share button. Now that you get on controllers on a console and you get the kind of. This scene is blocked from recording if you're playing metal gear solid 5 especially comes to mind. That's a kind of DRM as well. DRMs are all protected by copyright law, so it's an infringement to tamper with these things or try to break them. So it's a super significant way of constructing play and the player, because it's not soft like a contract is where I can't measure whether someone actually obeys or doesn't obey because they don't read it right. DRMs are a harder measure because they actually enforce the behavior at a technical level. So I'm not good enough with tech to have done that research. I am, for my sins, a lawyer. But someone should do that research to see how the player is shaped through drm, and it would be really cool to know whether that matches the restrictions in the contract. So are rights holders as good as their word? Do they actually enforce the things that they say in contract through code?

[Rudolf Inderst]

This actually builds a perfect bridge to my very last questions, because the question now is for scholars, students, researchers, practitioners listening, what do you hope they will take away from copyright, contract and video games? What new tools, maybe, or questions do you hope the book provides for thinking about power in interactive industries?

[Amy Thomas]

So I think for me the whole point of the book was about making invisible things visible because there is power and invisibility if no one's watching and the world is sort of accepted that these things exist, that they're natural and acceptable contracts that you don't read and you don't pay attention to, what do they actually say and what do they actually mean? Because I think in that way knowledge is power if we're better equipped to challenge them and ask whether their power is legitimate and if it's lawful. And especially in games where I think, as I mentioned before, we do have this legal gray area about how to understand them and categorize them. And that does make for certain vulnerabilities around access and participation and user rights. And definitely we've let here in the UK and many other countries like the US as well, freedom of contract has really went unchecked and perhaps it is time to reevaluate that and figure out where the limits are. So there's lots of questions for future research.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Perfect. Amy, thank you so much for joining me today and for sharing this important and timely book. Maybe you just want to remind our readers what's the title again and where can they get it?

[Amy Thomas]

Yes, of course. And thank you very much for your kind invitation. I've really enjoyed this talk. So yeah, my book is Copyright, Contract and Video Games. The subtitle is Terms of Play and you can find it on Heart Bloomsbury.

[Rudolf Inderst]

Thanks again, dear listeners. I hope you enjoyed this episode as well. If you're an author or editor working in game studies and would like to discuss your latest work, feel free to reach [e-mail] you can also find me on LinkedIn and Bluesky under amestudies. Please leave X. And one last reminder, if you want to support the show, head over to gamestudiesmerch.de and check out our game Studies hoodie. Until next time, keep playing. And, of course, keep thinking thank you

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