Is the Train board game creator due credit in Gabrielle Zevin’s novel?

One of the games they develop together, “Solution,” is now caught up in a real-life debate about artistry and credit.

On Thursday, game designer Brenda Romero wrote in a Twitter thread that Zevin had drawn on the ideas and structure of her board game Train without acknowledging its inspiration.

“A theme in the book is how women struggle to get credit for their work,” Romero wrote.

In the novel, Sadie designs “Solution” as an MIT student in the 1990s. It’s a “Tetris”-like video game taking place “in a nondescript black-and-white factory that made unspecified widgets.” The player earns points for each widget but is constantly interrupted by a text bubble, which offers information about the factory in exchange for points. Through this feature, players eventually learn that the factory belongs to the Third Reich and that they can choose to slow, or stop, making parts. High scorers who dismiss the bubble eventually see a message calling them a Nazi. “The idea of ‘Solution’ was that if you won the game on points, you lost it morally,” Zevin writes in the novel.

‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ ends on the perfect note

“Solution” bears a strong resemblance to Train, a game Romero created in 2009. Train is an analog, multiplayer experience: part tabletop board game, part art object. (Romero owns the only copy and hand-painted the components; only a handful of people have played or will ever play it.) The object of the game is for players to fill a boxcar with tokens and get it to the other side of a board. Train, too, contains a grim reveal: Players eventually read cards informing them that the tokens represent Jews, and that the boxcars were headed toward concentration camps.

When Romero started sharing Train with colleagues, she was nervous. Though she never intended to mass-produce or make money from the game, it was not yet commonplace for games to deliberately evoke experiences beyond fun, such as grief, disgust or — in the case of Train — complicity.

Train has since become a staple of game design textbooks and curriculums. When, in 2010, the movie critic Roger Ebert doubled down on his claim that “video games can never be art,” gamers in the comments section pointed to Train as a counterargument.

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” was a commercial and critical hit when it was published last July. Romero, though generally aware of the novel’s subject matter, had not read the book until February, when a tweet by the writer and game designer Jane McGonigal mentioned her in connection with it.

Romero searched for the word “Solution” in the text, which landed her in the early section in which Sadie explains what she’s made: “The game’s about being complicit.”

Then Romero searched for her surname and got a couple of results. They were for her husband, John Romero. He appears as something of a historical figure a handful of pages earlier — described as one of the “American boy wonders who’d programmed and designed ‘Commander Keen’ and ‘Doom.’”

“Why not just credit me? I don’t know the reason for that. I’m even in the same chapter as my husband,” Romero said in a phone interview on Thursday. “It was important enough to make into one of the key things in the story, but not important enough to warrant credit.” (“Solution” appears only occasionally in the novel, though it does drive the plot forward at key points, helping give shape to Sadie and Sam’s relationship.)

Fiction often borrows freely from real life, from the very public (see “Daisy Jones & the Six,” widely recognized as having been inspired by Fleetwood Mac) to the private (the viral short story “Cat Person”), with varying degrees of disclosure. It’s not generally expected to footnote its references or adopt the citational rigor of nonfiction.

How one novelist drew on the work of Laurie Colwin in his own fiction

“Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow” does include a “Notes and Acknowledgments” section, in which Zevin notes instances in which she referenced real games, even when it was implausible that the characters would have accessed them. She cites the books that she used to research game culture in the ’90s and early aughts and names half a dozen games that inspired a chapter called “Pioneers,” as well as their designers. Neither Romero nor Train appears in these pages.

Zevin has publicly named Train as a source of inspiration elsewhere. In an interview in Wired last year, she nodded to Romero’s game while also highlighting the qualities that made “Solution” distinct.

“It is a take on Train, certainly, but it also to me is about my experience gaming and how bored I get with cutscenes,” cinematic moments in which games are not interactive, she said. “Solution” depicted dynamics that Zevin felt were specific to digital gameplay. “The tech throughout the book was the driving force.”

“I have no doubt that Train is the best game I’ll probably make,” Romero said. “It is the one thing I will have to show for dedicating my life to games. And somebody decided that was just fair game.”

Zevin could not be reached for comment. Todd Doughty, Knopf Doubleday’s senior vice president for publicity and communications, issued this statement: “‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ is a work of fiction and when crafting a novel, every author draws from the world around them. As Gabrielle Zevin publicly stated in last year’s ‘Wired’ interview, Brenda Romero’s undistributed board game, ‘Train,’ which Zevin has never played but was aware of, served as one point of inspiration among many for the novel, including books, plays, video games, visual art and locales.

“The entire world, characters and themes of ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ are solely Zevin’s fictional creation and the only games listed in the author’s acknowledgments are video games. Again, ‘Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow’ is a novel and not an academic or nonfiction text containing indexes, notes, or works cited. Knopf stands behind Gabrielle Zevin and her work.”

Zevin, in the novel’s acknowledgments, says that her list may not be complete: “For the most part, I have credited the designers,” she writes, “but as readers of this book will know, it is difficult to say who is responsible for any game or game element unless you were there.”