Brave New World of Open-Source Game Design 105
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CmdrTaco
from the up-up-down-down-what-comes-next dept.
from the up-up-down-down-what-comes-next dept.
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."
Re:Bad title (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:This is new how? (Score:1, Interesting)
So the 'input design input' is basically beta-testing.
No, it's not. The first couple of paragraphs are misleading, yes, but if you actually read the entire article you'll find that what they've done is get players involved involved with the basic conceptual design before ever writing a line of code, as well as things like voice-acting and localization. That is new.
It's still not open-source, but it's pretty cool.
Eamon: My first experience with open source gaming (Score:3, Interesting)
Eamon was framework for a text-based adventure game on the Apple II long before the New York Times was writing articles about open source software (and getting the definition wrong.)
Re:Take a deep breath (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:The REAL world of open-source game design (Score:1, Interesting)
I was reading through freegamer.blogspot the other day, and it boggles my mind just how many Free titles are either *direct* rip-offs of existing commercial games (e.g. LinCity, WormUx, etc), or existing commercial games which have been open-sourced. Where are all the original Free titles? About the only one I can think of is Kiki The Nano Bot (which is awesome, BTW).
Interesting.... (Score:2, Interesting)
Truisms of Game Design (Score:2, Interesting)
Truisms of Game Design:
1) Not only is the customer NOT always right, the customer is often dead wrong. (If you think they're always right, sales is just down the hall)
2) Fun is HARD. Much harder than you think.
3) Staring at anything 10+ hours a day for months on end will cause blind-spots in your overall understanding of it - this is why you do focus testing.
Revamping Tux's image. (Score:2, Interesting)
I have the perfect compromise! Just draw boobs and vampire fangs on Tux. If that isn't enough, draw him having sex with a hot ass female penguin while he sucks the blood out of a mermaid and stabs Bill Gates with the Sword of Gnu. Mwahhahaha!!!
Re:This is new how? (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not new and it's definitely not open source at all.
This is a closed source game copy, Acclaim, that finds grindy, asian-themed MMOs made by small studios. They buy the US rights to the game, and use the beta testing community to do their translation for them, because they can't even be bothered to spend the money to localize their own content...
I played one of these terrible, terrible games called 9 Dragons for a couple days. It's an asian-themed martial arts based MMO, which sounds like it could be very cool, but when you realize it's like World of Warcraft but with 10x the grind and half of the dialog is in Korean, it makes you want to scrape your eyeballs off with a cheese grater just to stop the pain.
Acclaim releases free to play shovelware, asian grind themed MMO games for dirt cheap in the US, and basically admits that they don't want to spend money to do localization and voice acting, so they just let the community do their work for them for free.
Why is this news?