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A Primer on Rights in Video Game Avatars

By Andrea Perez
April 01, 2020

Video games have come a long way from the days of arcades, joysticks and blowing into cartridges to fix the game. It's an industry now worth more than $120 billion a year and greatly surpasses the movie and music industries among the most popular forms of public entertainment worldwide.

Today's video games are complex, interactive works of cinematographic art that, although guided by major studios, the players themselves get to direct. Jeff Goldblum, Mark Hamill, Kristen Bell, Martin Sheen, Norman Reedus and Kit Harrington are only some of the actors on a growing list of celebrities who have starring roles in video games, sometimes even playing characters who look like themselves.

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