Second Life in a nutshell

I’ve been meaning to blog this video forever. It was made in Second Life and does a good job of summing up SL in less than 4 minutes.

Why no open-source games?

I started wondering the other day why there have been no successful open-source games. There are open-source alternatives to just about every sort of software, but no games. It’s not simply a matter of it being too much work: Linux is far larger than any game.

A lot of people do open-source work for the recognition. Given the number of people who would like to get into the game industry, it seems like there would be a strong incentive for people to contribute to an open source project.

It has been pointed out that game development is more cross-disciplinary than most other software, requiring artists and modelers and game designers in addition to programmers. Unlike programmers, the artists and game designers are generally unable to build on what has been done before. Each game requires totally new art, and the lifespan of games is usually quite short. By comparison, Linux developers are adding to a code base that’s been around since the mid 80’s (GNU Project), a clone of a system created in the late 60’s (Unix). Similarly, the end-users for Linux (which include the developers) continue to use Linux, and will for years if not decades. People lose interest in games in a few months to a couple of years, tops, and will stop contributing.

If an open-source game were to be sucessful, it could not be content-based, but rather would rely on interesting game-play. It would probably be a casual game with addictive characteristics: a Tetris for the 2000’s.