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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.
Hey! the ultimate on-line sims. Totally free (well apart from taxes). 6 billion installed user base - it's called real-life.
It's open source too (just read a physics book)
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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.
Great games
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.'
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).
I think it's a good thing if a business publication sneers at Mozilla and encourages suits to stay with IE. Let the business community swim in its own filth of popups and banner ads.
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
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.
Money I owe, money-iy-ay