4.6 KiB
Game
Game (also gayme) is software whose main purpose is to be played and entertain the user. Sadly most games are proprietary.
Among KISS software proponents there is a disagreement about whether games are legit software or just a meme and harmful kind of entertainment. The proponents of the latter argue something along the lines that technology is only for getting work done, that games are for virgins, that they hurt productivity, are an unhealthy addiction, wasted time and effort etc. Those who like games see them as a legitimate form of relaxation, a form of art and a way of advancing technology. The truth is that developing games leads to improvement of other kinds of software, e.g. for rendering, physics simulation or virtual reality.
Despite the disagreement about games' validity as a genre of software, all sane people agree on one thing: the typical AAA games produced by big corporations are harmful, bloated and designed to be malicious. These are one of the worst cases of capitalist software. Such games are never going to be considered good from our perspective (they're considered shit pretty much by everyone now anyway).
PC games are mostly made for and played on MS Windows which is still the "gaming OS", even though in recent years we've seen a boom of "Linux gaming", possibly thanks to Windows getting shittier and shittier every year. However, most games, even when played on Linux, are still proprietary.
A small number of games nowadays come with a free engine, which is either official (often retroactively freed by its developer in case of older games) or developed by volunteers. Example of the former are the engines of ID games (Doom, Quake), example of the latter can be OpenMW (a free engine for TES: Morrowind) or Mangos (a free server for World of Warcraft). Console emulators (such as of Playstation or Gameboy) can also be considered a free engine for playing proprietary games.
Yet a smaller number of games are completely free (in the sense of Debian's free software definition), including both the engine and game assets. These games are called free games or libre games and many of them are clones of famous proprietary games. Examples of these include SuperTuxKart, Minetest, Xonotic, FLARE or Anarch. There exists a wiki for libre games at https://libregamewiki.org and a developer forum at https://forum.freegamedev.net/.
Some games are pretty based as they don't even require GUI and are only played in the text shell (either using TUI or purely textual I/O) -- these are called TTY games or command line games. This kind of games may be particularly interesting for minimalists, hobbyists and developers with low (zero) budget, little spare time and/or no artistic skills. Roguelike games are especially popular here; there sometimes even exist GUI frontends which is pretty neat -- this demonstrates how the Unix philosophy can be applied to games.
Another kind of cool games are computer implementation of pre-computer games, for example chess, backgammon, go or various card games. Such games are very often well tested and fine-tuned gameplay-wise, popular with active communities and therefore fun, yet simple to program with many existing free implementations and good AIs (e.g. GNU chess, GNU go or Stockfish).
Legal Matters
Thankfully gameplay mechanisms cannot (yet) be copyrighted (however some can sadly be patented) so we can mostly happily clone proprietary games and so free them. However this must be done carefully as there is a possibility of stepping on other mines, for example violating a trade dress (looking too similar visually) or a trade mark (for example you cannot use the word tetris as it's owned by some shitty company) and also said patents (for example the concept of minigames on loading screens used to be patented in the past).
Trademarks have been known to cause problems in the realm of libre games, for example in the case of Nexuiz which had to rename to Xonotic after its original creator trademarked the name and started to make trouble.
Some Nice Gaymes
Anarch is an example of a game trying to strictly follow the less retarded principles. SAF is a less retarded game library/fantasy console which comes with some less retarded games.