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Game
Most generally game is a form of play which is restricted by certain rules, the goal of which is mostly fun, challenge and/or competition. A game may have various combinations of mental elements (e.g. competitive mental calculations, ...) and physical elements (based in real life, e.g. football, marble racing, ...); nowadays very popular games are computer games, or video games (also gaymes or vidya, e.g. Anarch, minesweeper, Doom, ...), which are played with the help of a computer. Game is also a mathematical term in game theory which studies games and competition rigorously.
A fun take at the very concept of a game is Nomic, a game in which changing the game rules is part of the game. It leads to all kinds of mindfucks.
Computer Games
Computer game is software whose main purpose is to be played and interactively entertain the user. Sadly most computer games are proprietary and toxic.
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 MUH 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 that's pleasant both to make and enjoy as a finished piece, and also a way to advancing technology along the way (note we are NOT talking about consumerist games here; any consumerist art is bad). Developing games has historically led to improvements of other kinds of software, mainly e.g. 3D rendering, physics simulation and virtual reality. If games are done well, in a non-capitalist way, then we, LRS, fully accept games as legitimate software; of course as long as their purpose is to help all people, i.e. while we don't reject games as such, we reject most games the industry produces nowadays. We further argue that in games it is acceptable to do what in real life is unethical (even to characters controlled by other live players) and that this is in fact one of their greatest aspect as they allow to satisfy natural needs that were crucial in the jungle but became harmful in advanced society, such as those for competition, violence, fascism, egoistic behavior and others -- provided the player can tell a difference between a game and real life of course. As such, games help us build a better society in which people can satisfy even harmful needs without doing harm; in a game it is acceptable to torture people, roleplay as a capitalist or even verbally bully other players in chat (who joined the server willingly knowing this is just a simulation, a roleplay), even though these things would be unacceptable to do in real life.
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, toxic, badly made and designed to be highly malicious, consumerist products. They 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. Many normies nowadays are practicing "mobile" or console gayming which may be even worse. However, most games, even when played on GNU/Linux, are still proprietary, capitalist and bloated as hell.
We might call this the great tragedy of games: the industry has become similar to the industry of drug abuse. Games feel great and can become very addictive, especially to people not aware of the dangers (children). Today not playing latest games makes you 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 -- an individual "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 microthefts and lootboxes, for example, are similar to gambling, and are often targeted at very young children. The game industry cooperates with the hardware and software industry to together produce a consumerist hell in which one is required to constantly update his hardware and software and to keep spending money just to stay in. 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. Even most of the developers of free software games can't mentally separate themselves from the concepts set in place by capitalist games, they try to subconsciously mimic the toxic attributes of such games (bloat, unreasonably realistic graphics and hardware demands, content consumerism, cheating "protection", language filters, ...).
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 probably (one can rarely ever be sure about legal status) 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/. Libre games can also be found in Debian software repositories. However WATCH OUT, all mentioned repositories may be unreliable!
{ NOTE: Do not blindly trust libregamewiki and freegamedev forum, non-free games ocassionaly DO appear there by accident, negligence or even by intention. I've actually found that most of the big games like SuperTuxKart have some licensing issues (they removed one proprietary mascot from STK after my report). Ryzom has been removed after I brought up the fact that the whole server content is proprietary and secret. So if you're a purist, focus on the simpler games and confirm their freeness yourself. Anyway, LGW is a good place to start looking for libre games. It is much easier to be sure about freedom of suckless/LRS games, e.g. Anarch is legally safe practically with 100% certainty. ~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 to 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 implementations 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).
Games As LRS
Games can be suckless and just as any other software should try to adhere to the Unix philosophy. A LRS game should follow all the principles that apply to any other kind of such software, for example being completely public domain or aiming for high portability. This is important to mention because, sadly, many people see games as some kind of exception among software and think that different technological or moral rules apply -- this is wrong.
If you want to make a simple LRS game, there is an official LRS C library for this: SAF.
A LRS game will be similar to any other suckless program, one example of a design choice it should take is the following: while mainstream games are built around the idea of having a precompiled engine that runs scripts written in some interpreted language, a LRS/suckless game wouldn't use run-time scripts but would rather have such "scripts" written as a part of the whole game's source code (e.g. in a file scripts.h), in the same language as the engine (typically C) and they would be compiled into the binary program. This is the same principle by which suckless programs such as dwm don't use config files but rather have the configuration be part of the source code (in a file config.h). Doing this in a suckless program doesn't really have any disadvantages as such program is extremely easy and fast to recompile, and it brings in many advantages such as only using a single language, reducing complexity by not needing any interpreter, not having to open and read script files from the file system and also being faster.
Compared to mainstream games, a LRS game shouldn't be a consumerist product, it should be a tool to help people entertain themselves and relieve their stress. From the user perspective, the game should be focused on the fun and relaxation aspect rather than impressive visuals (i.e. photorealism etc.), i.e. it will likely utilize simple graphics and audio. Another aspect of an LRS game is that the technological part is just as important as how the game behaves on the outside (unlike mainstream games that have ugly, badly designed internals and mostly focus on rapid development and impressing the consumer with visuals).
The paradigm of LRS gamedev differs from the mainstream gamedev just as the Unix philosophy differs from the Window philosophy. While a mainstream game is a monolithic piece of software, designed to allow at best some simple, controlled and limited user modifications, a LRS game is designed with forking, wild hacking, unpredictable abuse and code reuse in mind.
Let's take an example. A LRS game of a real-time 3D RPG genre may for example consist of several independent modules: the RPG library, the game code, the content and the frontend. Yes, a mainstream game will consist of similar modules, however those modules will probably only exist for the internal organization of work and better testing, they won't be intended for real reuse or wild hacking. With the LRS RPG game it is implicitly assumed that someone else may take the 3D game and make it into a purely non-real-time command line game just by replacing the frontend, in which case the rest of the code shouldn't be burdened by anything 3D-rendering related. The paradigm here should be similar to that existing in the world of computer chess where there exist separate engines, graphical frontends, communication protocols, formats, software for running engine tournaments, analyzing games etc. Roguelikes and the world of quake engines show some of this modularity, though not in such a degree we would like to see -- LRS game modules may be completely separate projects and different processes communicating via text interfaces through pipes, just as basic Unix tools do. We have to think about someone possibly taking our singleplayer RPG and make it into an MMORPG. Someone may even take the game and use it as a research tool for machine learning or as a VFX tool for making movies, and the game should be designed so as to make this as easy as possible -- the user interface should be very simple to be replaced by an API for computers. The game should allow easy creation of tool assisted speedruns, to record demos, to allow scripting (i.e. manipulation by external programs, traditional in-game interpreted scripting may be absent, as mentioned previously), modifying ingame variables, even creating cheats etc. And, importantly, the game content is a module as well, i.e. the whole RPG world, its lore and storyline is something that can be modified, forked, remixed, and the game creator should bear this in mind (see also free universe).
Of course, LRS games must NOT contain such shit as "anti-cheating technology", DRM etc. For our stance on cheating, see the article about it.
Types Of Games
Besides dividing games as any other software (free vs proprietary, suckless vs bloat, ...) we may further divide them by the following:
- by genre:
- by game design:
- by number of players:
- by information:
- by interface/graphics:
- 2D
- 3D
- "pseudo3D"/primitive3D
- command line/text
- audio
- ...
- by time management:
- by platform
- by budget/scale/financing:
- by business model:
- freeware
- shareware
- free to play
- subscription, "software as a service"
- buy once
- pay to win
- pay what you want/donation
- adware
- spyware
- ...
- ...
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.
Advice on cloning games: copy only the gameplay mechanics, otherwise make it original and very different from the cloned game or else you're threading the fine legal lines. See this as an opportunity to add something new, something that's yours, and potentially to apply and exploit minimalism, i.e. if you're going to clone Doom, do not make a game about shooting demons from hell that's called Gnoom -- just take the gameplay and do something new, e.g. why not try to make it a mix of sci-fi and fantasy with procedurally generated levels which will additionally save you a lot of time on level design?
Some Nice Gaymes
Anarch and microTD are examples of games trying to strictly follow the less retarded principles. SAF is a less retarded game library/fantasy console which comes with some less retarded games such as microTD.
Chess is pretty nice, if we can count it as a computer game.
{ I recommend checking out Xonotic, it's completely libre and one of the best games I've ever played, though it's bloat. ~drummyfish }
Non-Computer Games
TODO: board games (table comparing them), ...