Meeple Emoji v2
Would you like a meeple emoji? Me, too. Here’s how that happens.
From April 4 - July 31, 2022, the Unicode consortium accepts submissions for new proposals. They notify you in October if your submission was accepted.
In 2021, I submitted near the end of the period but never got back anything in October. This was a good thing, however, because rejected proposals are not eligible for re-review for two years.
This year, I’m starting earlier. I’m using the same proposal but updating it with relevant facts and references. Many things have changed in a year, and some are for the better.
Read the proposal (Google Doc)
What are our chances?
There’s a lot that could go right. A meeple emoji is unique. It’s essentially public domain. It distinguishes modern tabletop games from older ones (e.g. Chess). We’d all use it like crazy. And for whatever reason, nobody has been foolish enough to propose it.
But there’s a lot that can go wrong. The number of accepted proposals is small. Unicode only opened back up in April 2021 after the pandemic shut them down in 2020, so there’s a backlog of proposals.
Search!
The biggest thing that will hurt our chances is we don’t search “enough” for the word meeple. The good news is we increased our views last year by 42% to 4,680,000 searches in Google.
Unfortunately, the median for accepted proposals is 750M. How can you help the cause? Search for the word meeple before July 31. Use the hashtag #SearchForMeeple in your posts to encourage others as well!
What’s next?
If we’re successful, we’ll be accepted for Unicode 16.0, the planned release of the Unicode Standard for 2023. That means you’d see a meeple emoji on your phone by early 2024.
Between August - October, I’ll be checking the list of emoji requests to see if meeple appears at some point.
Until then, well…you know what to do!
UPDATE (8/1/22): I got word back but only to find out my "emoji proposal for ‘meeple’ was unable to be processed for the following reason(s): Proposals must contain proper usage rights."
Except, I did include usage rights! I linked to a version of the shape that is licensed through Creative Commons for use without attribution for non-commercial purposes.
I can’t find a reference for the shape or glyph being copyrighted, but I did find that in 2019 Hans im Glück trademarked the word “meeple” in the European Union (they own the rights to Carcassonne). I could at least change the next proposal in 2023 to “player piece,” but is it worth dealing with the usage rights for the shape? Anything I draw would be derivative if there is a copyright out there, and Unicode frowns upon using commercial intellectual property for emojis.
Published on April 9, 2022
