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The Sims Online & "Open Source" Gaming Models
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.
I switched from Netscape to IE quite a few years ago (not because it was already installed, but because Netscape started to suck). Now I've switched (back) to Mozilla, because I'm one of those power-users who loves to customize and use all the new whiz-bang features. But the average user doesn't even KNOW there's a "preferences" area - all they care about is that their favorite sites look good and work properly. Unfortunately, I find myself occasionally having to revert back to IE to view a site because some DHTML-this or ActiveX-that doesn't work properly (sure, we can blame the web-site developer, but the average guy will happily blame his browser first).
Arimus wrote:
;)
> Interesting article but think participating in a
> online game is a world apart from participating in
> a massive open source project.
Going online to play a game for an hour is really different from an online game community. In the latter, people spend many hours of time working to create addons to the game to share with others.
Take "Creatures" for instance (the early Windows and Mac game, not the later online playing version). Creatures was a game where you bred, raised and cared for artificial life forms, chiefly "norns" (who had their own simulated genetic code, biochemistry, drives, etc.). Creatures had a thriving online community that created and shared genetically engineered norns, objects (created from graphics and the CAOS scripting language), add on programs, etc.
When Creatures 2 came out, it was badly broken. The community cried and screamed, and then set out to fix it. We couldn't do anything about program crashes, that had to come from the company that made it. Multiple teams tackled the insane zombies that used to be norns; my lab at Feral Farms (yep, I'm that Melantha Bacchae) provided the testing facilities for one of the strains of replacement norns. Objects were created to ease transportation snarls and to keep norns from starving to death if they wandered too far from the few food sources. There were even some open source utilities written as I recall. When we got done with it, Creatures 2 was playable and fun.
For the next version the maker, Cyberlife, got too greedy and tried to hoard the development information. They wanted to cut free volunteer work down so they could charge for what we did out of the kindness of our hearts. It didn't help that their newest generation of Creatures were more automatons than autonomous simulated life forms. I didn't stick around for the "online" version.
Different companies have different reactions to user contribution. Cyberlife at first valued it, but later tried to commandeer it for their own profit. Maxis encourages user contribution, hence all the user add-ons that have helped make the Sims popular. Microsoft squashes user contribution like a bug, naturally.
Creatures, however, stands alone. I have yet to see any other game community raise the issue of the rights of the game characters to the point of forming norns rights organizations (ERFN = Equal Rights For Norns) and making death threats over norn torture. Ah, those were the days.
Professor Melantha Bacchae
Paine University, Albia