Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/q/29945
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I've recently looked at the chat that talks about the question of referencing actual military weapons in your writing. Since I'm writing a science-fiction novel, that's not too big of a problem for me; however, this causes me to raise a question: how does this apply to weapons from video games? For instance, Pixonic's game War Robots has some weapon names that I would like to use in the novel, as some of the things in the book have weapons with the same function.

Is it safe to include the names of these weapons (like Zenit or Molot) to correspond to the guns, or do I have to come up with another, original name and reference it to have a similar function to the actual in-game weapon? As of now, I'm assuming I can use the name because I'm clearly stating in my novel that the designers in the story gave it the name because they were lazy and decided to use the name featured in the actual game that uses it. In that case, I will tell where the original name came from.

Original score: 6