He can call himself "official" the same way he calls himself "the father". Just because it says it doesn't make it so. Definitely side-eyeing. At this point, maybe it was passion, but now it just reeks of arrogance and greed to me.
He wants influence on ANY movie using the term LitRPG. He feels that if he has the trademark to LitRPG, he should have some say in all aspects of it, including any movies. That's regardless of if they're even related to his writing since he'll "own" the genre effectively if the trademark goes through the way he wants. It's for "the genre's good" of course though. So he says.
Yeah, that's the part that bothers me. If one of my books were being made into a movie (I know: hah!) I certainly wouldn't want some rando to have input on it.
Let's be honest, Hollywood would do whatever they wanted to anyways. Hell, they ruined Red Player One. They'd likely eliminate all the blatant gaming elements from any big LitRPG movie in order to appeal to the masses anyways. The Land would probably end up looking like Middle Earth by the time they were done with it. But I agree--this trademarking business is a bad deal.
It's by that guy who writes "The Land" series? Lol, yea always wondered why he claimed he was "The father of American LitRPG" I saw genre first emerge over two decades ago, and my first work was speculative fiction based off of a virtual world. That was seriously my senior project in High School back in 2004. It wasn't called LitRPG back then, and wasn't in the same form it is in now. Most of that type of work was often called speculatvie fiction, or sci-ficiton/fantasy. Well he will file a lawsuit against someone too big for his ego someday, and get counter sued just like many of the other patent trolls. It is a bad situation though for small organizations like this that can be seriously hampered by a cease and desist order.
