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First of all, congrats on focusing on life outside of computers. Good on you.

Next, to answer your question. How about liquidwar?

I'm not asking this in a trolling way - where exactly is the innovation here? Are there any F/OSS games (bar Tux Racer...) that aren't merely copies of some proprietary equivalent?

While Free Software isn't exactly innovative, even TuxRacer was inspired by the N64 game 1080, lets not forget that Minecraft didn't exactly spring out of thin air either, it's heavily based on ideas from Infiniminer. True innovation is rather rare and while there do exist some original games, like Liquid War, there aren't many of them.

The reason for that are two fold: First of the "Ideas are cheap" mantra really isn't true, original ideas are rare, original ideas that are actually implementable are really rare and then even having that idea, doesn't give you the ability to communicate it properly. Which brings the second main issue: communication. It's much easier to say "Lets do a Civ clone" and find contributors, then to get contributors on something completely original, especially when it is nowhere near completion, nobody has a clear idea of what it should be like and there isn't something tangible to point at. Establishing a shared vision is hard if all you have is IRC and mailing lists.

xmoto is nice, but there's so much more :)
some i have played and did like enough :

http://ufoai.sourceforge.net/
http://www.openttd.org/
http://www.wesnoth.org/
http://wz2100.net/
http://www.scorched3d.co.uk/
http://www.bzflag.org/
http://chromium-bsu.sourceforge.net/
http://freeciv.wikia.com/
http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/v5
https://sourceforge.net/projects/koules/ (original page seems to be down)
http://neverball.org/

you can try LiquidWars while you wait.

Are you BORED with just following the SWARM? Do you lay AWAKE at night and WONDER how marketers CONTROL the SWARMS? Do you THINK they have a SPECIAL TALENT? THINK again! You TOO can hone your SUPER SWARM CONTROL skills to PERFECTION by playing LIQUIDWAR for up to THREE hours every night! That's what the BEST marketers do SEVEN days a week! THAT'S RIGHT! You can do it TOO! But DON'T SEND ANY MONEY! We won't bill you! That's right! We won't bill you! Follow this website to LIQUIDWAR RIGHT NOW or just apt-get liquidwar from a trained Debian operators' nearest server! And JOIN the SWARM of LIQUIDWAR players! You WON'T REGRET it!

Are you BORED with just following the SWARM? Do you lay AWAKE at night and WONDER how marketers CONTROL the SWARMS? Do you THINK they have a SPECIAL TALENT? THINK again! You TOO can hone your SUPER SWARM CONTROL skills to PERFECTION by playing LIQUIDWAR for up to THREE hours every night! That's what the BEST marketers do SEVEN days a week! THAT'S RIGHT! You can do it TOO! But DON'T SEND ANY MONEY! We won't bill you! That's right! We won't bill you! Follow this website to LIQUIDWAR RIGHT NOW or just apt-get liquidwar from a trained Debian operators' nearest server! And JOIN the SWARM of LIQUIDWAR players! You WON'T REGRET it!

Are you BORED with just following the SWARM? Do you lay AWAKE at night and WONDER how marketers CONTROL the SWARMS? Do you THINK they have a SPECIAL TALENT? THINK again! You TOO can hone your SUPER SWARM CONTROL skills to PERFECTION by playing LIQUIDWAR for up to THREE hours every night! That's what the BEST marketers do SEVEN days a week! THAT'S RIGHT! You can do it TOO! But DON'T SEND ANY MONEY! We won't bill you! That's right! We won't bill you! Follow this website to LIQUIDWAR RIGHT NOW or just apt-get liquidwar from a trained Debian operators' nearest server! And JOIN the SWARM of LIQUIDWAR players! You WON'T REGRET it!

Liquid War would be a nice test game on one of these.

Liquid War is another very entertaining and yet very simple multiplayer game.

ET is not Free/Open source. However there are tons of fun Open Source multiplayer games that you can use.

Care to point the last truly _original_ game (that does not suck)?

liquid war And its free software too.

...but would you buy it?

Everyone says they want creative and original games, then line up in droves to buy the next FPS and MMORPG.

How will things like Katamari Damancy really sell?
Personally , I really enjoy something that's really really different, I had great fun with "Construction Destruction", Airfix Dogfighter and of course, the amazing Liquid War, but I think I'm the exception, and games of that style will never be really big.

I'd be happy to know I'm wrong, actually...

Liquid War - The simplest and most addictive wargame ever made -- And free as in beer and speech!

It doesn't need a big machine, so give it a try already!

Note: it is more fun against people; The IA is very dumb

Did a search on the titles and it seems nobody has yet pointed to Liquid War (at least not properly naming it in the title of their post). Winner of Most Unique/Original Game in the HappyPuppy 2002 awards. Simple, yet fun. Controls couldn't be any simpler and multiplayer action is reasonably well paced, not "frantic" (usually), yet not slow, either (again, usually).

Worth a try.

Liquid War its fun and it is a ...its not exactly eye candy though...Screen shost...

Liquid War its fun and it is a ...its not exactly eye candy though...Screen shost...

"...the consensus among gamers and developers is that open source games still lag behind proprietary games in originality, sophistication, and artwork"

Hmm. Liquid War comes to mind. I certainly like Heroes (even if it still vaguely resembles Tron.)

John Gilmore published an essay a while back that also tied together concerns about nanotech and DRM. Gilmore of course is a long-time champion of online freedom and free software. In his essay he writes about how nanotech could bring an era of plenty to all, but only if there are free designs that people can feed into their nanotech assemblers.

Gilmore argues that the problems we are facing now with information goods - music, movies, games, software - are just the beginning. In a few decades, all products will be in the same situation. Whatever solutions we find now will be the way we handle physical products in the future.

If we can build a world where information goods are plentiful and cheap, that is a good sign that nanotech will bring us a similar bounty of physical goods. On the other hand if we end up with an information market built on scarcity and high prices, nanotech won't bring the world the riches that it could potentially provide.

The ongoing content wars are even more important than they seem. They are putting us on the path that will determine the future economy of the 21st century.

The Liquid War folks claim their game is "truly original". Isn't it pretty much directly taken from the much-older XBattle, but with the units scaled down? Or am I missing something?

Give Liquid War a try...

http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/

It's pretty unique.
Here's some screenshots.

Give Liquid War a try...

http://www.ufoot.org/liquidwar/

It's pretty unique.
Here's some screenshots.

Some other poster also mentioned this, but I want to make a few different points. First think about the sort of thing you want to teach, what is the point of your class - then think about the specifics.

Your list of items seem to hint you want to teach them "Linux rulez!!". That ruffles my feathers a little - classes aren't meant for propaganda. On the other hand, enthusiasm is the best learning aid there is, so probably this isn't so bad...

Things that you'd want kids to know about:

• Windows isn't all there is!
• There is a thing called Free (or Open Source) software. That means that you can usually download it all for free, which is good. It also means you can do what you want with it. This may be a weird notion to kids who can't program and who are used to pirating everything they want to have anyway.
• This stuff is actually useful. Many web computers they interact with (the servers) run stuff like Linux.
• Everything is customizable. Show them how to change the background, how their windows work, how many start bars they have, et cetera. Go all out on this. Kids have fun trying to make their own desktop look more wildly different from the others :-).
• Give a demo of a wild range of software - these systems are just as useful as Windows.
• Simple to program. No need to install anything extra, and you can already make tiny GUI programs with, say, Python and Tkinter.
• Also mention other options than Linux.
• Involve (networked) games. Something like Liquid Wars is very simple to learn, addictive, fun (if it's fast enough) and open source.

As a start. You could teach them how to make a dual boot system for themselves at the end, I suppose, but it's not the main point of the class. As a distro, who cares, they're all basically the same, go with Debian since that's what you know.

Well, first of all, I`ll nitpick out that Linux is a kernel, not an OS, and that while it may contain some low-level innovations, it certainly doesn't innovate. In any case, I'd like to point to Liquid War as an example true innovation. In fact, this is probably the most unique game I've ever played, and it's GPLd. Most games are just variations upon simple themes, and the simple games are usually clones of games which are very old. However, Liquid War shows that innovation on a fundamental level is still possible, and can be created by the Free Software community.

Liquid War is addictive, fast-paced, and easy to learn. Perhaps best of all, there's no installation routine. Unzip it and run it, and watch your cat disappear under a pile of laundry as everything outside the game ceases to be interesting.

There is actually one innovative Free game, its called LiquidWars and actually quite a bit similar to Pikmin, but was released long before it. But well, its not really up to todays standards.

Free Software games lack the tools, the artists and a lot of man power to keep up with commercial ones. And well, if somebody say "Look at the mod" scene under Windows, that doesn't really make a big difference, since they all base there work heavily on the work done by the commercial games. Only few are really independed of that ones.

Liquidwar has released a new version. I havent tried it so cannot say whether or not it is good. However, Im curious to try it myself. From the write up on the U-Foot site, it is definitely multiplayer, involves realtime strategy and, like Civ, isnt FPS.

Especially considering that, say, Python already has MP libraries. A research paper from UO, another fellow who's trod this path before, several MUD/MOO/MP libraries and games, Merchant Empire, Twisted, Eve, and so on.

Using Python would allow this fellow to achieve his goal of learning a new language, fast. He can then properly focus on the important things: program structure and gameplay.

FreeCiv, NiL, Pingus, XPilot, NetHack, Crystal Space, GFingerPoken, Koules, Liquid War, XConq, WorldForge, SpellCast. To name the tip of the iceberg; I don't have time to do this all day :)

Or, in other words: The one who says it cannot be done should never interrupt the one who is doing it.

Cheers,
Daniel