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Hackers, Slackers, and Shackles
blacklily8 writes "What is the future of free software development for games? Is it possible? Will the games ever equal or surpass their proprietary competitors? Why should we care? After thoroughly researching the free and open source software model, and interviewing both indie and free software game developers, author Matt Barton decided that the future is indeed very bright. Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")"
on how you look at it.
nethack has always been superior in quite many aspects when compared to commercial games, partly because no commercial game can take that kind of risks in pissing off the gamer.
'free' games can continue to fill the niche segements pretty well.
and then there's the 'simple arcade rehash' genre - free games fill that tremendously well as clones of classic arcade games has become easier and easier to write as years pass.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
The following text (not including illustrations) is licensed under a Creative Commons License.
Twenties Retirement
Him and his captitalist pig ideals.
Richard Stallman said that graphics, etc. can be Non-Free? Wow...
But I guess it makes sense. If that weren't the case, many excellent games could not exist-Mario and the likes.
stallman wants all code to be free... but he wouldn't mind music and art to be non-free?
in what way does a coder differ from a graphics artist? according to stallman's views, should a graphics artist not be able to freely obtain the art of a game so he could modify it, without having to pay for it? after all, that is what he demands of software. it has to be free so a coder is free to change it without having to pay for it. does he have double standards?
note: i like free software, but i don't feel that every piece of software that i use should be free. i just think it's a little bit odd that stallman is using double standards.
It's hard to have a Free game which matches the quality and depth of today's main commercial offerings due to the need for artists and other such people who (for whatever reason) are less keen to do hobbyish projects.
I think the only way that this is going to start is if developers put together good graphics engines, up to the standard of the latest offerings from Id and the Unreal guys, and have commercial developers work from these as a base rather than licencing from the commercial vendors. With the GPL-licenced Quake engines we are already some way there, but of course they are (as they come out of Id) already a generation or two behind and need some work to get them up there.
There's also the problem of convincing the commercial development houses that having their game code source available (which would be necessary for GPL compliance) won't hurt because the art and other content will be the product. The main show-stopper here is that you can't really do copy protection in an open-source product, and right now every commercial offering has copy protection.
Free games? Where can I buy them?!
My Greatest Heist - Muisc partly inspired by the unbeatable Qwantz
Just look at tuxracer. Since the company that was developing it turned it closed source nobody has continued developing it. Same goes for tuxkart.
Modern games aren't easy. We could compete in the "graphics engine" field, but that's just 1/4 of a game - the rest is the "art": graphics, music, sounds, maps..."open source" works for code, not for "art". Also, today's games are a modern thing, you can get lot of geeks that can write a SCSI driver or a compiler, but how many geeks can you find that know how to write a 3d driver or a graphics engine or maps for a 3d game? There're a few, but they're not enought. We've can write msql/ISS/oracle/icc, even mac os x alternatives, but where're those unreal/need for speed/doom 3 alternatives?
We need some kind of "open art" license or something, and people working for it.
The limiting factor is organization of talent. You'd think it'd be the artwork, but right now that's not the case so much as getting the artists to work with the core programmers. Happy Penguin's game of the month project (now called the Help Wanted project, for instance, has led to some significant turnarounds for Linux games (especially with regards to graphics). Right now they're working on Lincity, and amazingly enough, people aren't worried about getting good 3d graphics for it, as much as they are about coding them in.
Planeshift is a free 3D MMORPG following the idea "Free engine, proprietary (though gratis) art." AFAIK it's the only free 3D MMORPG out there. :)
The system recently reached another milestone, though it will probably remain in development for quite some time... Maybe some Slashdot hackers will help?
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Independant games tend to have the potential of having far more innovative gameplay and/or unique storylines because they have the freedom to take a chance with a concept while gaming houses are generally more restricted because development costs money and publishers like to stick with safe bets.
On the flip side, dependant games(ie games developed at cost by a gaming house) will generally have superior graphics and sound because those two areas require a lot of man hours to "get right". Thus, gaming houses are better suited to coordinate efforts to supply a superior graphic experience quickly enough before the graphics become dated by hardware advances.
That said, as we slowly begin to approach the photo-realism barrier, and as the tools to assemble graphics improve, we are once again begining to turn back towards the days when gameplay and innovation were what set a game apart from its peers.
In this, independant game designers will have the upper hand, as evidenced by the current generation of "big names in the industry" all having been independant designers back during the last time graphics were less involved(80s and early 90s).
Independant game designers are on the rise again, and you can see proof in the concern the publishing companies are having as they slowly fall away, consolidate, and/or have paniced knee jerk reactions out of concern for their future(Valve vs. Vivendi, EA's buyout frenzy, etc).
You are who you are, let no one tell you different. But, never close your mind to a new point of view.
While I don't think it's Open Source, I do think that America's Army is good example of what a free game can be. Many of my friends prefer it to their store-bought games. (And there's a Linux version.)
Won't simple economics dictate that one person will not spend a good portion of his life working on games, when he could be working on games for money? That will ensure that people have to pay for good(more complicated) games, and compensate these people for the staggering amount of effort that must surely go into designing a good game.
Quoth the server, "404."
Heh. Well, yeah, that pretty much sums up my youth, but:
it's a bit of a red herring to hold up HL2 and Doom3 as models of innovation. They're certainly examples of how the hardware industry is driving games, though. Heck, I've got somewhere around here a card for a free copy of HL2. Does that mean that, if code is free, hardware should be free too?
What about all those people who saw the HL2 source code? Did it help them become better hackers? What kind of educational value did that have?
The number of good games that come through modifications of other's code is fairly small. After a few "training wheel" examples, most folks I know are more comfortable writing their stuff from scratch. It makes debugging a hell of a lot more fun.
The patronage business model is great, only we need a helluva lot more patrons.
I saw this articlen tent&pa=showpage&pid=18)
(http://www.selectparks.net/modules.php?name=Co
And it seems that there is a great base available that oculd lead to wonderfull things. Crystal space (crystal.sf.net) is a free engine that appears to be competitive in quality to modern commercial engines. Go to the games made using crystal, it can be used. I should also mention cube engine (cubeengine.com) and stepmania (stepmania.com) as well as the abundance of free MMO's and VR projects.
Video games and office suites are not the same by any means, but it is the same reason you don't see 100 different full featured word processors or game engines. Unless enough is made to recoup the loss of many programmers time to make the engine in sales and what not.. it ain't gonna happen.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
The act of creating a whole world from art, sounds, abstract personalities, key events, etc, and all the interactions involved is NOT yet an act people will just do on their own, even for a large group working together. It's such a large undertaking in most cases, that money, enough money to pay people to stay in one place with promises of more money, is required in almost all cases to make a truly captivating world.
Even with idealized tools, there's just so many decsions, so many interactions that need to at least be looked into, that by sheer force of choices, the visions of the designers get lost along the way - any only the most simple of stories get told by those who can't devote most of their waking lives to it.
Can more, better open source games be created? Yes. But it's going to take amazing people, people who can establish ever-improving processes, and people who can stay true to their visions on the very long road to making a captivating little world.
Otherwise, we'll get a lot more abstract puzzle games, but the real power of developer imagination may be lost to complexity.
Ryan Fenton
So: give away the engine for free. Sell the adventures.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
The future is very bright... uhh... because... uhh... umm... I say so!
The fundamental problem with the arguments in this essay is that they all apply now, and so far free games has conspicuously failed to take over. Why will they do so in the future if they haven't now, unless you're going to remove a problem or add an incentive?
It boils down to a proof by assertion.
He nearly exhausts the good games currently existing. I've poked through the Gentoo game categorization which is pretty good, and if there's one open source commercial-level game per section it's a miracle. A lot of stuff in there, even some good stuff, but if they were commercial products they'd be from 1990 or so, often even earlier if you strip the graphics from them and look at gameplay. My wife has been playing Dungeon Keeper again lately, which was released in 1997, and I'm still yet to find anything open that compares to that. (Caveat: I can't get 3D in Linux so VegaStrike may match that level of quality, but I doubt much else does. 3D is even harder that 2D to get right.) So, even when I say "commercial level", I even mean from a while ago.
So far, if anything is going to make open source gaming happen, it's going to take more than the mere power of Open Source. We've had that for a while and there just hasn't been much movement. It takes a concerted attempt to close one's eyes to the obvious to think otherwise; you've got isolated anecdotes in favor of the argument but overwhelming evidence against.
...fundamentalism is the fact that he hasn't been laid since he named a module after his ex-girlfriend.
The gaming industry is in many ways very similar to that the film industry sans the overpaid actors.
This leads me to think that we'll have a similar trend in games in the future as we do in films today. The industry will be splitt between high-budgett, spectacular games such and Halo 2 and Doom 3, while a smaller market of independent films will emerge created by people who feel that games can be an art form, and not just entertainment.
I know there are small independent game conferences allready, but we still do not have anything like the independent film festivals which help get the films out to their audience.
As for licenses, I agree with Stallman in that the game engine, which is more cases can be thought of at generalized software should be free, while the artistic part of the projects need to be considered as custom work and could remain non-free.
-- Leo Utskot
Free software can succeed, if the developers do not the same mistakes like the Closed source developers.
But sometimes they do: Have a look at this article
Plot driven games, like movies, are something the player tends to go through once and then shelve. That doesn't seem likely to be compatible with the OSS model of incremental releases by which a package gets polished into an acceptable state. Non-plot driven games (e.g. the multiplayer modes of FPSes and other games) have better longevity but still tend to be relatively short lived.
It seems more likely that OSS devlopment model would succeed with game development libraries and engines.
While one may find the optimal pathfinding route algorithim, most game software is a balancing act between competing resources and is therefore an art. If you look at the Quake 3 engine code, there are a lot of tradeoffs between accuracy (surprisingly innacurate, actually), speed, and memory. And then there are questions like how one will spend their processor cycles... in a complicated rendering engine or raw polys? Character focused or world focused? Do you spend more Ram on Precaching or go for dynamic texture loading?
That having been said, the reason why you can't put game artists, texturers, and musicians in the same class as game programmers is because they generally refuse to work for free. While a programmer may find personal expression through a game, rare is the artist or musician who feels the same way. You can get ones who will work to make a name for themselves, or work because they like the game, but generally you don't find musicians who work on games like they compose their own songs. While working on games is personal for a programmer, it isn't so much for artists / musicians. Why do it then?
And there is no such thing as an optimal software algorithm. There are ones well suited for a task and ones that are not, but there are no software algorithims that are best in all ways.
TFA is DOA, BTW.
The ______ Agenda
I don't know Stallman's view on the matter.
But if I had to guess, I'd say: That's purely hypothetical, mind you -- I have no idea where RMS stands on the matter.
In any case, code is art, in my opinion -- code, painting, music, architecture, literature -- it's all art, art, art.
-kgj
-kgj
I've tried playing in exploration mode, where you can't die, but eventually I'll get to a point where the enemies are so much stronger than me that I can't kill them and can't proceed.
The game is so complex I just can't get the hang of it, and I can't seem to find any good information on the net on how to be a good player. I've read the guidebook, but it didn't help that much. I need a guide on how to effectivly use items (tricks like putting on a blindfold so that floating eyes can't paralyze you), and playing strategies, but there doesn't seem to be one.
Nethack seems like such an incredibly deep game, and because of my limited ability, I'm only able to scratch the surface. The amulet of yendor is forever out of my reach.
I think my ideal game would be something like a cross between Azure Dreams and Nethack, where it has depth (which Azure Dreams was sort of lacking), but also doesn't punish you for every action you take (the way Nethack does).
This comment will make you throw away valuble mod-points for modding it down :)
You will most probably also be meta-moderated positively for modding this down -> adds to karma.
Happy modding.
From the article: "In short, "open sourcing" projects like Half-Life 2 would likely lead to much better games, which would result in much better sales and happier end-users."
This is like saying GM should open-source the blueprints for all their car engines. It's ridiculous. Valve put untold millions into HL2 development, and there's absolutely no incentive for them to just open the source, and there's a strong disincentive: if they were to open it, everyone could just build a highly competitive game on top of it without paying a cent. And what's gonna pay for the programmers? The original game's sales? Will they be high enough given the man-hours that went into the engine, especially since the new competing games would likely cannibalize the sales of the original game?
The HL SDK already opens up most of the engine (sans some of the graphics and networking, I believe), and budding game programmers can cut their teeth on that (that's how Counter-Strike came about). But since it's still copyrighted, and the new game requires licensing with Valve, which helps them recoup the costs of developing it in the first place, and fund the development of the new engine.
To ignore the economic constraints of development is breathtakingly naive.
My other car is a cons.
The problem with most games is that they aren't actually games in the true sense. They are more a form of entertainment. Most people play them for the bright graphics and sound, and the immersion of the game world. Which many people, including myself, love. However, as a Wesnoth developer said "Great graphics make a movie. Great sound makes an album. Great gameplay makes a game."
As much as I love the Final Fantasy series, for example, I don't consider them "games" in the truest sense. They are wonderfully immersive stories, but that doesn't make them a game. The problem is, people are starting to really expect that out of their games. And even though Free Software developers could program a game with a much better engine, meaning it has a more challenging basic set of rules, then a Final Fantasy game; I don't think we can realistically expect free software developers to program the video and sound that people have come to expect. If you take the single opening movie from Final Fantasy VII, (a game that, at 8 years old, is ancient), I don't know how it could be put together without a lot of money.
So I think the basic place for Free Games right now is games for people who love gaming. My favorite game right now, of any type, is Wesnoth , a turn based strategy game released under the GPL. The graphics and the sound are fair, but the game play is truly engaging.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
Why not all IP treated the same?
I'm suprised Stallman takes a halfway house!
A blog I run for the wealth
An Enterprise OSS project that goes well will give the author plenty of business in consulting, book authoring, etc.
But what is the reward for an OSS game maker? Just fame and being hired by a non-OSS game co.?
Think about it. Games are different from enterprise software.
I'm a diehard OSS fan and developer and have been since the day I heard of it in the first place. That's why I run Brasilia Perl Mongers, that's why I've developed everything I have within the OSS paradigm. I'm just saying this to fundament my point, I'm a big fan of OSS.
Games are an optional, recreative, part of software development.
Linux himself on his book "Just For Fun" made the point clear : he loved the profit, the financial reward is important, you gotta have the financial reward.
If you build the game equivalent of Linux would you get the equivalent recognition of Linux? My point being : I don't think so.
Broken Hearts are for Assholes. - Frank Zappa
He argues that software is useful to modify, making it different than most art and creative writings, which usually are quite personal. He does believe, however, that these non-software works should be freely distributable.
He mentions these opinions many places, for example in this interview.
(I personally agree with him.)
Want a almost "free game"? Look into games that have active mod communities. Such as BF1942 and UT games.
Buy one game, and have the ability to play many other games for free.
Not to say that programming can't be viewed as an art; It can. But it is also engineering, which imposes more limits on what qualifies as 'good' programming. (In the same way, architecture is more limited than sculpture, because architecture is about creating buildings, which by definition need to have an inside and an outside and a door, at the very least. Whereas a sculpture has no such constraints.)
So what does this matter for open source? Well, in open source development, anybody can (try to) contribute anything. So obviously you need some kind of 'artistic vision' in order to figure out what parts go in and what parts don't. The thing here is that programmers have a far more akin 'vision' on what constitutes 'good art' (or rather a 'good program') than the rest. Does the code run faster? Have less bugs? Is it easier to read, understand and maintain? And such criteria.
With art (music, images, etc) this isn't as easy. Which makes collaboration very difficult.
(Imagine ten people creating a collage, each with a slightly different idea of what the completed collage should represent. It wouldn't work.)
So, this means that to get good art, you have to break up the total task into rather large pieces. (Say, 3d-models, interface graphics, intro/cutscene graphics, etc.) Because it simply wouldn't work if 100 people created the 1000 required 3d-models for a game, since the differences in style and form would make the whole so inconsistent in its 'feel' that it'd bring down the impression.
So, you have these rather large, daunting tasks which more-or-less require being done by one or two people ('auteurs' I guess you could say).
And for a game of any size on the scale of today's commercial games, it's a lot of work for so few people, unless they're working full-time. And that of course requires resources and money.
So what I'm saying is basically that the OSS development model doesn't quite work, because the investment money isn't there to have artists working full-time, and you can't really get the thing started by having a large group of part-timers.
That's my take on it, anyway.
Aside from making out that Defender was written in BASIC, or assuming that the crowd he was writing for didn't know what BASIC was anyway, was it really necessary to embarrass himself with that whole "Big game companies never innovate" thing and then mention Electronic Arts in the same sentence? Until ten years ago EA were the best thing that had ever happened to games.
- Chris
Some exceptions aside, I don't think Free games are going to come even close to typical commercial games. The reason for that is that making such a game costs massive amounts of man hours from various disciplines. This doesn't fit the open-source model where there may be a few core developers, but there usually isn't a clear plan for the final version, most contributors just submit small patches, and usability comes second to functionality.
The kind of games we can expect from community efforts are simple games, which can be basically finished by a few friends in little time. Once the game is playable, others may chime in and extend it, e.g. by contributing levels or making improvements to the engine.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
Stallman's (commie-style ;) freedom includes "no revenue", so I'm not too crazy about it, as a developer who converts code to food and rent. But opening these game engines to plugins would make them much more popular, even offering a life beyond the publisher's product lifecycle. Much like Doom-style games got new life from opening the "level editors". As more games are networked, the game server can become the gateway for revenue, especially if Web Service APIs are signed, and require authentication, but are also open. Killer apps create demand for services, but are a development/management cost that subtracts from the profit at the server. I'd love to import my Halo2 team into Madden NFL 2005, if a programmer could write the import plugin. Open the APIs!
--
make install -not war
The only future I see for these "freedom games" is engine reimplementation. However, that leads to a situation where people are pirating the original software to obtain the game data.
Stallman is quoted here saying that game engines should be free, but approves of the notion that graphics, music, and stories could all be separate and treated differently (i.e., "Non-Free.")
We have to ask ourselves what Stallman actually said before we swallow the summary. The summary does fly in the face of the underlying ethos of Stallman articles such as The Right to Read. It contradicts what others, like Lessing have to say. It even contradicts what the article itself seems to say, when it compares Stallman to Martin Luther, who translated the bible so everyone could read it.
The right to read clearly demonstrates the cultural consequences of non-free software: complete enslavement to those who control publishing. The reasoning is that no one is equal to the sum of all previous work and that we all need access to knowledge. Those who control that knowledge control society. The phrase "free as in speech" makes it just about impossible to consider art "non free". Nothing could be freer that your ability to sing Woody Guthrie tunes.
People like Laurence Lessing have extrapolated Stallman's concepts and filled in the details for art and culture. His book Free Culture, attributes Stallman as the visionary who first realized how technology and certain anti-social tendencies could cause great social harm. As in technology, if we are not free to build on what has come before, we are lost, ignorant, dependent and enslaved.
We can take this a step further by realizing that the most important knowledge is not practical at all. The "Liberal Arts" are those that involve persuasion, and are called so because their study was once restricted to "liber" or free men. Slaves were not allowed to learn how to persuade their neighbors, though they could be taught all manner of practical knowledge. It does not matter what we know, if we are unable to convince others of what is right.
So, what did Stallman say?
A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction.
That's it and there's really no direct contradiction. The author claims that the story and art work should be covered by copyright law. That's a world different from saying it should be "non-free" as if the author has suddenly adopted the most Zealous stance of the Copyright Warrior. It does not have Richard Stallman claiming that copyright law, as it exists, is correct. The authors of the Creative Commons and the Free Documentation License are not suddenly endorsing "Digital Rights Management". All it says is that source code and pure art are different.
You are fundamentally confused when you ask:
according to stallman's views, should a graphics artist not be able to freely obtain the art of a game so he could modify it, without having to pay for it? after all, that is what he demands of software.
Source code has the ability to be far more restrictive than any previous form of artwork and applying those restrictions to art is a cultural dissaster. You already have the ability to quote graphics and other art work. You may indeed take someone else's image and modify it and present it as your own. You can do the same thing with a song too. No one can keep your from studying a painting and making one of your own. If you think otherwise, it is because people like Bill Gates have expanded and misapplied copyright laws to cover non human readable formats and perverted trademark to cover common words and phrases. The whole idea that you can't use even the smallest quote or part of someone else's work is absurd as someone owning "Word". If you think you don't have this ability, the copyright warriors own your soul.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Instead, you go play something fun.
Nethack has no visual appeal. No music. A shitty interface. It's "depth of gameplay" consists of getting killed over and over until you learn about all the things that can kill you.
It's a huge investment with no payoff. If you want to enjoy the sense of accomplishment you get from doing something hard and tedious (the ONLY appeal of Nethack), go and learn something useful.
If you want to play games and have fun, there are a thousand better ones out there.
He's not "using double standards". He recognizes that not every kind of work requires the same freedoms. We currently have a copyright regime where different kinds of works have different levels of copyright power.
RMS once proposed a system of reduced copyright powers that would work better for readers/viewers/listeners/etc. (since American copyright is ultimately aimed at benefitting readers, not publishers or authors). He framed his system on the kind of work something is--what function does it perform--under which all works may be copied verbatim and distributed non-commercially. Functional works, one class of work, may also be modified. Works which express people's thoughts is another class of work. These works only need to be copied, as changing them runs the risk of misrepresenting the ideas the author was trying to convey (perhaps this is closer to something you'd find amenable). The third class are aesthetic works which are works where the most important thing is "just the sensation of looking at the work" and this class has no easy answers. You can read the transcript of his talk or listen to it online.
Digital Citizen
I know that there are actually a great deal of fans of Descent 3 who happen to be coders, who would be overjoyed if Volition would open source the code.
The article says:
Reading this reminded me of some comments I've seen in discussions about free software. Often, the discussion is framed from the perspective of the open source movement and the values that movement promotes, which are not the same as those of the free software movement. As a result, people frame the debate as if we can have either innovative software or free software, or that software freedom isn't worth pursuing because there is insufficient innovation. RMS addressed this in a recent interview: (emphasis mine)
Digital Citizen
Another free MMORPG - I played it for a while, but the economy is a bit screwy, because cactus is extremely valuable yet easy to harvest. It's fun, though - http://www.eternal-lands.com/. Oh, and don't forget about runescape... urgh.
-ReK
md5sum -c reality.md5
reality: FAILED
md5sum: WARNING: 1 of 1 computed checksum did NOT match
The author assumes that people need freedom to redistribute/modify programs, but not music or graphics. But it's a rare case I have time to modify other people's programs. On the other hand, if a song becomes popular, I may very well want to make a video of myself singing it or dancing to it and post it on my website without restricting who downloads it. Likewise, how do you run a fan site without copying some graphics and video clips?
:-)
For some software like games, it's really not that important for people to have free access to source code - or graphics, music...
Games are not essential by definition and in the worst case you lose part of the value of your $20 investment. There is nothing wrong with closed source model here. RMS should just leave game developers alone
For other software, like word processors and financial programs, open source is highly desirable. Imagine hundreds of businesses losing their customer records because one company flopped and their program has a Y2K bug. I don't know how any company can justify using MSWord.
It's likewise with music, graphics and other data. Sometimes it's essential for users to have free access, sometimes it's not. That depends more on use scenario than the media.
Is this "story" on some type of auto rotation?
"Who are in control, they are not in control of anything - they don't even control themselves!" - Glen Beck
I like the idea of open source games but wouldnt this be making it easyer for the cheaters to cheat? They would have complete control over the client and would make it easy to code a bot, hacks and such... not to mention modify the way the games checks for modified components.
RMS wants you to be physically or altering the art. Same as for code. This has nothing to do with copyright and certainly does not mean you can violate it.
The GPL relies on copyright, if you took Emacs and changed it and gave away your version without source code, you are violating the copyright (the GPL is really just a grant that says "you can violate my copyright if you follow these rules"). If it were not for copyright, the GPL would be meaningless.
So the ability to modify Emacs obviously then does not mean you are free to violate the copyright on it. Same thing with the ability to modify the art in the game, which pretty much means that the source code to the game is available.
Multiplay suffers horribly due to hacks being much easier to create.
Add some kind of checker for the hacks? That's probably going to need to be open source as well (ie modifying the engine), which means that it'll be relatively easy to bypass it etc etc etc..
I'd much rather pay for a game, with the knowledge that it's at least a little to create hacks, than play the open source, completely torn apart version.
As an independent game developer who just released a new kind of adventure game, I disagree that art and code are always distinct. Our game introduces an incredibly accessible user interface for controlling adventure games. I personally believe that user interfaces are an art form, yet UI is ultimately expressed in code. Consider that one example of code as art.
If I use a fly swatter instead of bug spray to kill a bug, does it make the bug any less dead?
Just because programmers are involved in making games doesn't mean that models for OS or Application Software translate over. It's like saying that because I draw art at Marketing Inc. in Illustrator, game artists should use Illustrator too. I mean, what's the difference? We're both artists making art, right?
There are lots of reasons why gaming in the Open Source environment doesn't work at the moment.
* The people making the games are programmers. Now, this isn't a bad thing - programmers just want to have fun too. However, it does mean that even basic game design concepts like iterative design, balancing or positive/negative feedback gets ignored in favor of "I need to implement OBB collision" or "I need to port this to an OS other than Linux so that the mainstream will actually play it". Nothing wrong with that from a programmer perspective, they're fun challenging programming tasks. They just aren't "Make the game fun and iterate on the design" tasks, which should be someone's priority when making a game.
But I hear you yelling "The whole point of Open Source is that anyone can join in! Designers can just jump in anytime and work with a team of other Open Source developers on SourceForge!"
Well...
* The budding designers who want to design can't, because there isn't an engine for them. I wanted to make a quick prototype of a game idea that I had. I looked around, and every engine was either too simplistic, BASIC based and kludgy, complete engines with too much overhead for prototyping, or graphics engines with great 3D rendering but no consideration for actually Making Games.
Having said that, I know some friends who are making just this - the game engine for designers who care more about iterative design than specular lighting. I'll put my 0.02c on them being insanely successful when it gets announced/released.
* I don't care if your game is Open Source or not. Seriously. There's no benefit to me as a player. Just because you've made some racing game with a penguin, I should proclaim you as the second coming of Miyamoto?
No.
How about this? Instead of sitting on your asses and preaching, how about you take a leaf from the books of people making successful mods for FPS's, and assemble a decent team first.
How about you write a design spec, prototype the game, then once you've iterated over the design until the game is fun and you have a team of artists, programmers and content creators, you go through and implement your planned game?
How about once you've done that, you get some external people to iterate over it some more, then announce that you have a game? Then, if it's a good game, people will declare it's awesome, and you can be a successful game developer first, OSS poster boy second.
The difference between artwork and code is the same as the difference between architecture and civil engineering -- they're both creative and contribute to the final work (the game or the building), but one is art and the other isn't.
Your code is "art" in the old sense of a word, but that's because programmers are artisans, not artists. It is not, however "art" in the sense of "exhibit your source code in a museum so that people can be emotionally moved by it."
I prefer to use "art" in the classical sense of the word -- that is, everything imagined in the mind of man, and created by the hand of man. Poetry, sculpture, engineering, architecture -- everything.
My wife, a sculptor, vehemently disagrees with me. In her view, "art" is made by "artists", who are always painters, sculptors, other types of visual artists -- but never coders, architects, etc.
In my view, her view is elitism: "We are artists, we know art when we see it." Similarly, she and her fellow artists make a big deal out of "art versus craft", "outsider art versus (real) art", etc. I have no time for these petty limitations: what the mind imagines and the hand makes, that is art to me.
-kgj
-kgj
No, see, that's actually the opposite of irony. What's truly ironic about that particular example is that he spends the article articulating the thesis that open-source games are MORE innovative than closed-source, and his crown-jewel example is a CLONE of Elite, a closed-source game.
It's not that he's wrong, it's really just that he needs to learn how to present his case less dumb-assedly.
>>So how exactly is that different of when I take Firefox, name its "Grumbels Personal Browser" add some stuff to it and release? Why should I be allowed to do that with Firefox, or any kind of free software, but not with movies, videogames or whatever?
>You're not allowed to do that with Firefox, or any Free Software; doing so would be misappropriation.
Are you for real? Firefox was a stunning example of how someone did exactly what was decribed above. Someone (I don't think it was grumbel) decided that mozilla was too damn huge, and getting huger. So he decided to remove all the thunderbird extensions, the irc extensions, the huge preferences menus, etc and just bring the size down in any way possible. Eventually it was called phoenix, and given to people, without the explicit support of the Mozilla foundation. It was only after it was clear that phoenix was not only not going away, but was pulling developers away from the Mozilla effort that the foundation decided on the firefox directives. You can find similar examples, even within the GNU foundation; gcc 3.0 comes to mind as a fork that became official.
I Browse at +4 Flamebait
Open Source Sysadmin
I agree with your wife, but I don't consider it to be elitism (although the people who think craft is somehow inferior to art are snobs). I just think it's a useful distinction to make. I don't want to say "art" and have to explain whether I'm talking about "art art" or "craft art" or "useful [engineering] art" or whatever.
Besides, if they want to be elitist, I can too -- after all, those snobbish artists are obviously just too stupid and lazy to get a REAL job that requires logical reasoning and extensive knowledge -- and their "art" doesn't even do anything! At least what I do is useful! Neener neener neener, so there! : P
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
We don't have this. Popularity and engine technology are definitely important reasons, but I think it could also be that it's not as easy to make mods for Free games, because nobody bothered to make good (i.e., easy) tools to do so.
Unless there are good tools, and I just don't know about them, which is another problem in and of itself....
"[Regarding the 'cloud,'] ownership was what made America different than Russia." -- Woz
Games similiar in style with older arcade games will succeed to a certain point and be availble for Linux. As far as OSS game engines, that is possible if a programming team or a company decides to make it availble to others just to produce more competition (which is good for business since products/services get better, trust me, I own a business). But OSS games that can be played on PS2, etc? I doubt it. It requires too much effort for a small team. Just the sounds, voice acting, artwork, and modeling for characters would require many skills and large skill set most programmers lack. The closest we can get to an OSS for consoles or PC would be game engines or maybe game interface. Just my 2
1) Much Ado About Nothing.
2) The Tempest
3) Comedy of Errors
4) Romeo and Juliet
I was taught that there were only a few basic stories and tha Shakespeare had done them all - every thing else is just a variation on a theme, if you want to see the other four, get reading.
Sera
P.S. Or at least rent the video of Much Ado About Nothing with Kenneth Branagh and Emma Thompson, IMHO it is some of the best film ever made.
Slashdot, where armchair scientists get shouted down and armchair theologians get modded up.
I dispute the notion that somehow visual and music artists are a different breed to the "artistic" programmer.
To demonstrate this fallacy: I am all three. Here are my free pictures. Here is some free music. And here is some free software.
There is a bunch more personal expression out there than you know. What do you make of this story, for instance? Or this site?.
I'm certain there are more and better examples out there.
insecurity asks the wrong question irritation gives the wrong answer
I'm surprised he didn't mention Katamari Damancy in the article. This game is probably the most innovative game of 2004, and Namco, the company that made it, isn't exactly the indiest of indie companies. (Oh, and it's for PS2, a console system.)
I'm not sure you can truly say the innovation in gaming was on the computers and not consoles. Sure, MMORPGs were on computers first (but now there's also X-Box live).. but actual multiplayer games were on consoles first!
Ethan
Code and art can be the same thing. What do you call the AI? Or the more innovative level design?
It was ARTFUL to give the Halo AI a blind spot, so that you could sneak up behind them and whack them. It was ARTFUL to give the Half-Life 2 Gravity Gun an upgrade at the end of the game. It was also ARTFUL to do real-time, multi-source lighting in Doom 3, because of the environment it was in.
It's true that these are high-level design decisions, but you will find the same kind of decisions and tweaks throughout the code.
That said, it's much harder to do incremental patches to any medium other than code, at least right now. I have yet to hear of an Open Content project getting anywhere near an Open Source project. Still, Wikis are a step in the right direction.
The problem is economics and cheating. How do you make money if the game is free? If it isn't, how do you prevent piracy, even if you copyright the content? How do you prevent people from cheating if you can't control the client with an iron fist (Microsoft's "Trusted Computing")?
The problem is way, way too many goals and motivations from every angle. I want to be able to fix the MANY bugs in Steam and Half-Life 2, but I don't want others to be able to cheat in Counter-Strike or steal Half-Life 2.
There needs to be a new model, we just haven't found it yet.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
In the article, Stallman said "A game scenario can be considered art/fiction rather than software. So it is okay to split the game into engine and scenario, then treat the engine as software and the scenario as art/fiction."
This does NOT mean he believes the scenario can be legally protected. RMS does NOT believe art or fiction are entitled to copyright protection except under limited circumstances.
I had the chance to discuss the issue of copyright protection for art with RMS over Labor Day weekend 2004 at the World Science Fiction Convention in Boston. Also present during the discussion was Keith F. Lynch, a long-time friend of mine.
I asked RMS under what circumstances a person who creates a work of fiction is entitled to restrict its further redistribution, according to his personal beliefs. Initially, he said there were no such circumstances. I described a hypothetical situation in which a person has written down a private sexual fantasy, perhaps for therapeutic reasons, and the document has come into the possession of another person. I asked RMS if the author was entitled to limit the distribution of the document-- basically, if the person had a unique right to control copying it, the essence of copyright law.
Reluctantly, RMS agreed that such a document must be covered by a special exception to his beliefs. After considerable further discussion, he set out the terms of the exception: it applies only to creative works that are highly personal in nature and which have no value to the general public.
This position leaves no room for copyright protection for other kinds of creative works, especially including commercial fiction, video game storylines, or the images and sounds associated with video games.
In his article, Matt Barton clearly failed to comprehend Stallman's position on this issue, and has misled his readers.
. png
"I think that some software can be artistic in the sense that it is written creatively but that has nothing to do with it being a "balancing act between competing resources"."
Art is satisfying one constraint. Engineering is satisfying multiple constraints.
You do realize your entire post contradicts the reining philosophy that "money's evil. and "the world doesn't need money". We can run the entire planet on love.*
*Just read around every time business, outsourcing, or IP is discussed on "/.".
"...and then bam, sell the modules or 'books' =D"
:d
Or download them off P2P because "Your adventure just wants to be free."
So many ways to die suddenly and unexpectidly.
Some of the other replies seem to be trying to give you advice on how to "win" at the game. I'll offer a counter-proposal: You basically understand the game already. The game isn't really played in the context of the execution of the nethack binary on a computer. The game is actually acquiring arcane knowledge to forstall death. The knowledge acquisition part of the game is played on Usenet, message boards, IRC, and Slashdot. It is possible, theoretically, to acquire the arcane knowledge via trial and error in the game, but this is so time-consuming that no sane person would try it. Examining the source code to the game, contrary to some people's opinion, is not cheating. It is merely another option in the game to acquire the arcane knowledge required. Also, it won't entirely help you, since there's some randomness to it.
The whole game, ultimately, is a metaphor for the life of a hacker. The hacker acquires arcane knowledge (either by learning from a master, trial and error, or inquisition). He uses the arcane knowledge to advance himself in life through his career. Ultimately, he either dies or achieves independance and can retire.
It's more complicated than that, of course, but that's basically the jist of it.
My other first post is car post.
This well researched article struck a chord with me.. As a recent graduate of a well known (in australia at least) software engineering course, the battle of open source vs closed source has plagued my mind for the past 6 months. Prior to this i had completed my thesis which invloved the development of (in my and my supervisors opinion) a very inovative piece of software for medical diagnosis. No sooner had i printed it than i was deluged with business liason offices, lecturers, and business interests asking me.. Why don't you comercialise this? What ever you do, don't publish acadmically because then you can't patent it! I'm sure i am not the first to say this, but to me, the open v close source debate draws so many parrallels with that of Capitalism Vs Communism ( / Socialism ). The old addage "communism is great in theory but lousy in practise" (which incidentally, many people use to justify their beliefs but have nothing but pop-culture-come-dogma to back it up) has some applicability when it comes to this question.. What should i do? A) Commercialise (keeping the source code secret), thus perhaps make money for myself, while prevent anyone from learning from my work, and destroying the chance of better diagnosis tools being produced based on it because the work no longer took my fancy. B) Publish (along with the source code), thus telling all-and-sundry about the work and paving the way for future development of a raft of diagnosis tools which i would never have had the time to develop. For me this translates seemlessly to:- A) Take the money and run (leaving both your cows and everyone else's to die of otherwise diagnosable diseases) B) Do what a real communist would do (Keep one of my cows: what i learned from the project, and give the other one to society). So what happened? B. But don't get me wrong.. Though ideolism runs strong through my young vains, would i have done the same if i had not been offered other work / had had two kids and a mortgage / had just had my cardboard box washed away by a tsunami? Who knows.. but as a programmer who inhabits a planet that is inhabited by millions of other programmers, i sincerly hope we all realise that what we decide affects more than just the quality of our games...
"The reason for that is that making such a game costs massive amounts of man hours from various disciplines. "
And yet people see no problem with downloading movies, music, books, and games, because...hey anyone can do that.*
Funny what happens when reality takes one's world view, and smacks it upside the head.
*Hey everybody! Since no one can "own" things. How about pulling some good games, movies, books, and music from our kit bag ala Felix the Cat (TM)?
"This position leaves no room for copyright protection for other kinds of creative works, especially including commercial fiction, video game storylines, or the images and sounds associated with video games."
That's fine. Then we're going to keep revisiting this topic until people get some sense in their heads.*
*Saying one desires something to be so, and it actually being so are different. That's why I'm not flapping my arms and flying around the room.
There's just one fundamental flaw with your supposition. There are game engines that are free (F/OSS), and "effectively" free (Commercial games with editors). The barriers to entry couldn't get much lower.* The problem everyone's dancing around is the acknowledgement that it's the artistic element that's missing from F/OSS games. Not a technological one. The next step is reconcilling the OSS philosophy with the artistic philosophy. And if all the talk around here represents out there? Then it never will be completely resolved.
*The only one that's high is developing game engines from scratch (as opposed to modifying preexisting ones).
http://eternal-lands.com/
They use blender, its a fairly nice game if u like that kind of game
If you look at games as similar to movies, ask yourself how many free movies you watch. By free I mean indie films put online. IFILM serves stuff like that, and for the most part, people aren't really that into them vs. the next big budget sequel coming out.
It's all a problem of scale.
You will never see a free game of the scale of a Halo 2 for the same reason you'll never be able to download a movie that looks like Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings.
The amount of time and money it takes to create works of that scale go beyond what anyone is willing to donate for free.
The few exceptions to the rule out there where games have been created that look halfway decent usually came about because a handful of people made MAJOR sacrifices in their life. It's not something that is going to be commonplace.
Look, lots of people like playing flash and java applet games. But it's a whole other category from the mainstream game industry. These games are not a threat because nobody would pay for them if they had to.
It doesn't mean they aren't fun. It doesn't mean they aren't games. It's just a whole different sector.
When you buy a game you are buying the production values more than anything else.
Having game engines closed-source does slow innovation somewhat, but money is a strong motivator. People will reinvent the wheel in order to implement their own feature to match what the competition can do. It's not a terrible situation. Plus a lot of problems can draw upon theories from elsewhere in the computer field (AI for instance) or just continue to build within the knowledgebase of the corporation (which would be extensive in the case of any major publisher today). It's not necessarily a matter of starting from scratch the way the article implies.
To make a shameless plug - anyone wanting to play or help develop a great open source (GPL licensed) roguelike should check out my little game:
Tyrant
I't a graphical roguelike with a rapidly growing world and a dedicated development team. Some notable features are:
Highly extensible and flexible game engine
Comprehensive skill-based character advancement system
Randomly generated world with outdoor regions
Over 1200 items and 150 monsters to discover
God mode for playtesting and fun!
Yeah, because new stages aren't forthcomming. With open source, you could play through the game, then wait a few weeks, download the new stage, and start where you left off.
In fact, we've basically seen how that works for movies, as the Animatrix was released in this fashion... It could make movies (and games) more like TV shows, or an over-all leader could be more restrictive, and force each release to just further the plot of the last, making it sequental, and more like a normal movie (or game).
It sounds to me like you just don't like to stick to a single game for long... I think that, with a death-match type of game, incrimental improvements would make it playable forever. New weapons, new doorways to new rooms, newer moves, etc. It could be the ultimate LAN Party game.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
what ever happened to LGdev's 'Angry-Pixel' group?
I'm not sure it's entirely true that people won't spend a major portion of their lives working on something without financial restitution.
Most writers don't make any money from their work, and even if they do manage to get published, the pay is pathetic. (For example, current payrates for short stories [in professional genre magazines] are the same as they were eighty years ago.) A novelist may spend two years on a book knowing the chance of seeing anything for it is pathetic.
In games, there are mod groups that spend years working on something they will probably never get paid for. The Counterstrike folks couldn't have known that they would one day be able to get money out of their game--most groups never do.
It's not the motivation, often, but that people want at least the _potential_ of payment to remain. That's why writers will keep on sending their work out instead of just putting it out on the Web.
Also, I think it's possible that when someone does spend that much work to create a world, to write a really good engine, to create textures or write a story--especially if a few people spend years of their life on it--then they don't want other people going in and mucking around with their work.
I don't think it's that there aren't people out there willing to work with little chance of financial reward. It's that they at least want to think there might be a chance of reward, and they want control over what they make.
(I think I may have strayed from the issues your post addressed... ah well.)