6.5 KiB
Game
Game (also gayme) is software whose main purpose is to be played and entertain the user. Sadly most games are proprietary.
Among suckless 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 losers, 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 arguments about the usefulness of games, most people agree on one thing: that the mainstream 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 (and even the mainstream is turning towards classifying modern games as shit).
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.
We might call this the great tragedy of games: the industry has become similar to that of illegal drugs. Games feel great and can become very addictive. Today not playing latest games makes a person left out socially, out of the loop, a weirdo. Therefore contrary to the original purpose of a game -- that of making life better and bringing joy -- a person "on games" from the capitalist industry will crave to constantly consume more and more "experiences" that get progressively more expensive to satisfy. This situation is purposefully engineered by the big game producers who exploit psychological and sociological phenomena to enslave gamers and make them addicted. Games become more and more predatory and abusive and of course, there are no moral limits for corporations of how far they can go: games with lootboxes, for example, are similar to gambling, and are often targeted at very young children. The gaming addiction is so strong that even the FOSS people somehow create a mental exception for games and somehow do not mind e.g. proprietary games even though they otherwise reject proprietary software.
Therefore it is crucial to stress that games are technology like any other, they can be exploiting and abusive, and so indeed all the high standards we hold for other technology we must also hold for games. Too many people judge games solely by their gameplay. For us at LRS gameplay is but one attribute, and not even the one standing at the top; factors such as software freedom, cultural freedom, sucklessness, good internal design and being future proof are even more important.
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/.
{ NOTE: Do not blindly trust libregamewiki, non-free games ocassionaly do appear there by accident or even intention. But it's a good resource for finding libre games. ~drummyfish }
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.