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The Sims Online & "Open Source" Gaming Models

Posted by Hemos on from the black-widow-lesbian-households-unite dept.

One of my old friends sent me a recent story from Business2 that talks about online gaming, combined with The Sims Online and community involvement in a game. It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.

6 of 101 comments (clear)

  1. Interesting but... by Arimus · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Interesting article but think participating in a online game is a world apart from participating in a massive open source project. I might consider wasting an hour online playing a game after work but after programming for 8 hours I don't fancy going home to start programming again (well not all the time).

    Why in this day does everything online have to be compared to something else online regardless of the differences?

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    1. Re:Interesting but... by e8johan · · Score: 3, Insightful

      You are very right! To compare on-line gaming with a productive on-line community, such as an open source project is way wrong.

      I'd actually go so far as to say that the article writer has had no actual experience of real open source development, nor has he really seriously played any on-line game. He speaks of development teams as gaming clans and open source developement as the same as providing game mods. I cannot do anything but say that this article is no better than the usual karma-whoring one can see here on /. from time to time!

  2. Not very incisive by LucVdB · · Score: 5, Insightful
    It's not a very substantive piece, but a good discussion starter.

    The article basically says: Open Source Development projects and Online Game Mods both foster community - perhaps we can make one more like the other. Who knows what might happen! Tim Berners-Lee certainly doesn't!

    I say: Sourceforge has done 100 times more for Open Source Development than Sims Online ever will. Making incremental improvements and getting something out there is going to be more effective than Blue Sky dreaming.
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    Great games
  3. Failure? by palad1 · · Score: 5, Insightful
    From the article:
    More than four years later, Mozilla has generated far more press releases than products and has done nothing to help the Netscape browser retake any ground from Microsoft. This was one massively multiplayer project that never took off.

    Did it? Really?
    Oh, I guess that lizard thingie laying on my desktop is just an explorer glitch then.

    I think that the author of course doesn't give a damn about quality, but quantity. This is exactly the same debate as 'quake 1 sucks, no one plays it.'

  4. Oh dear by Lebannen · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I can't see this getting kudos from slashdot readers. It starts off by saying that Mozilla is a failed project and that the thousands of developers who worked on it should take their cues from the content developers for the sims and the communities building up in the sims online. Yah. Technology reporting at it's best, this.

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    Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" whilst looking for a rock
  5. Re:TSO: A glorified chat room. by SlightlyMadman · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I was beta testing TSO for a few weeks, and in my opinion, it's not going to take off.
    Visualize this: playing a computer game... in which one's avatar is... sleeping. For twenty minutes straight, because your stupid "energy" bar is low. Meanwhile, you are forced to chat with other players to keep your connection alive because they boot you after fifteen minutes of idleness.

    I know that sounds ridiculous to any reasonably sane individual, but that's exactly what playing EverQuest is like, and it's doing quite well. Gameplay in any MMORPG consists of doing some boring and repetetive taks (i.e. killing monsters , making arrows, or selling hamburgers) until your character gets tired (or low on hp), at which point you have to lay down for a while, and wait. People tend to be satisfied chatting or, trying to sell stuff, or getting a group together while they do this, in EQ.

    You also have to remember that The Sims is mostly played by non-technical women. These are people that are likely to hang out in a chatroom, anyways, so that's not idle time to them; it's fun.

    Even if the damn game does inexplicably manage to sell and retain players, it doesn't offer anything new at all to the genre.

    Maybe, maybe not. Perhaps a better way to look at it is that it will have a profound effect on the chat room industry, and the game industry is an innocent victem caught in the cross-fire.

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