Brave New World of Open-Source Game Design

Greg Chudecke writes "The New York Times recently ran an article on game companies that get design input from gamers. The article is branded as 'The Brave New World of Open-source Game Design.' The title may be a little misleading as it isn't exactly like the game design is open source for editing, however it is interesting that gamers are getting an opportunity to shape the games they play."

Comments

Bad title

[Anonymous Coward]

The title may be a little misleading as it isn't exactly like the game design is open source for editing

Indeed. The correct title is, Finding Syngergies with Valued Customers Through Web 2.0 Social Methodologies.

...

The scary part is that title actually makes sense. 0_o

Re:Bad title

[vivaoporto]

As well summarized by mengwong

Web 2.0: We make the apps. You make the content. We keep the money.

Web 2.1: You make the content. You make the apps. We keep the money.

The REAL world of open-source game design

[Anonymous Coward]

www.nexuiz.com
www.openarena.ws
www.tremulous.net

Re:The REAL world of open-source game design

[Qbertino]

Vegastrike.

This is new how?

[cortesoft]

So the 'input design input' is basically beta-testing. It is in NO way open-source, by any of the definitions people use. A game company asks people to play the game before it is released and then uses their input to adjust the game? Shocking!

Re:This is new how?

[AKAImBatman]

That is new.

Really? I seem to remember a game written back in '96 called "Subspace". The players of the game were the ones driving its design and development based on their feedback. The bad news is that the game effectively tanked in the market. The good news is that it's still around thanks to all the players who poured their efforts into the game not wanting to see it die.

Been going on for at least 6 years at EA

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't know how this is considered "new". It's been going on for at least 6 or 7 years. I know because I've been involved from the community side of things since then with EA on their Need for Speed titles. In fact EA flys community webmasters out to thier studios quite regularly and puts them under NDA's to talk about what's coming up and what they think, especially on thier bigger franchises. As webmaster of Racerplanet I've had lots of interaction with the developers, mostly EA but other Publishers have stopped by the forums at least over the years.

Re:Take a deep breath

[sesshomaru]

It's not linguistic snobbery. For example, in the case of hacking versus cracking, the fact that hacking now equals malevolent programming means that people who want to refer to the old definition of hacking have to come up with yet another word, or qualifier to refer to it.

The other problem is that it makes other documents that refer to hacking in the archaic context seem confusing to the modern reader. Example, someone reads "RMS was a Unix Hacker," goes to a pointy-haired boss meeting and says, "Look, another reason why we shouldn't use Linux is that it encourages criminal behaviour, I just read an old story that said that one of the main programmers of Linux was a hacker!"

This is more of a problem with Open Source because the meaning creep is relatively recent. It would be very confusing for a company to tout a product as "Open Source," if what they mean is that it includes the ability for user created content.