So I'm giving a talk about FOSS games

[hokomoko]

I've submitted a talk proposal for a local convention (basically the Israeli nerd con) together with Jeru from 0AD about the sociological and psychological phenomena behind open source games.

We plan to talk mainly about motivation: What drives people (players, devs, content creators) to invest their time in FOSS games?
and about conflicts/decision making: The tensions between different groups in the community, the lack of a clear organisational structure etc, what conflicts arise, how are they solved and why don't we hit a fork every 2 days.

These two questions can also be paraphrased as: How the hell do these projects exist in the first place and what prevents them from disappearing tomorrow?

I'm posting here to ask for your help:
1) Stories from your personal experience that can shed light on the aforementioned points
2) Suggestions of things to mention during the talk
3) Anything else you think can help me

I'd prefer to conduct this in the IRC/lobby or PMs so we can discuss touchier subjects privately.
Comment here if you want to assist.

Thanks!

[PepeAmpere]

My experience:

• I do not care about FOSS, I like "games". FOSS is for me irrelevant prefix.
• I'm happy to create games, which anyone can play. Free spread without obstacles of any kind is not mandatory and its only logical aspect which makes spreading game as easy as possible => there is chance some people can find the game and try to play it. Lowering the price of the access to game to the minimum is the common technique in any competitive space.
• Other motivations except enjoying the game: exploration, experiments, getting experience, getting restecp or power or bloody money, relax

Can we get a link to the event page (if there is some)?
Feel free to ask in PM for more, if you want.

[Silentwings]

What drives people (players, devs, content creators) to invest their time in FOSS games?

I got interested in writing/maintaining lua addons because it was a nice way of finding short puzzles to solve in my free time.

why don't we hit a fork every 2 days

Because there is a strong correlation between people who are patient enough to contribute something significant and people who are nice enough to want to work together.

The tensions between different groups in the community, the lack of a clear organisational structure

We do have a clear organizational structure afaics - it is usually clear who is responsible for what, even if not written down. What we don't have is a community wide structure for coordinating peoples coding efforts. Although this is a source of tension, it is mostly mitigated by my thoughts above about forks; and we naturally arrange ourselves. I don't know if on average we gain or lose from this, but we do continue to produce stuff amicably so I'm personally not inclinded to try and cause any change.

3) Anything else you think can help me

I think players do sometimes learn useful skills from cooperative rts games e.g. it makes the value of communication and teamwork painfully obvious to anyone with eyes in a way that (at least in my country) the education system fails miserably to do.

I imagine some devs have got useful experience or even cv worthy material out of it as well, plus there have been student projects in the past.

[hokomoko]

My experience:
Can we get a link to the event page (if there is some)?

The talk is in October (so a page doesn't exist yet) and it's in Hebrew (so even when the page will exist, it won't be much help for most here).

[FLOZi]

and about conflicts/decision making: The tensions between different groups in the community, the lack of a clear organisational structure etc, what conflicts arise, how are they solved and why don't we hit a fork every 2 days.

Slightly tangential to this as I was thinking about it the other evening.

<ramble>
S44 lacks a certain amount of polish (consider especially vs its stablemate Imperial Winter), which has had some influence over the direction and focus of priorities for MCL.

Previously we considered this as the downside of the 'open beta' approach that S44 took vs closed testing for IW, but now I am seeing it slightly differently; MCL has really only 2 major contributors to game design, myself and Spiked. By and large it is Spiked's vision and I implement it, though I will sometimes disagree or implement some new game design element on a technical whim (e.g. sectors) though we always discuss things in depth.

With S44 through the years ultimately myself, Spiked, Nemo, Zerg and Yuri have had more or less free reign to go off on a tangent, though with a similar consensus model with Nemo being the ultimate arbiter. S44 is known as being deep and complex, though sometimes in ways that are opaque to the player; I feel like that is partially due to the freedom to implement new ideas on a whim (this is not a criticism of any of us, I love S44 and the team that built it) without always considering the ultimate ramifications (prime example is myself tacking gliders into zerg's cruise missile code, something he made pretty much on a whim to start with). Despite the fact that Spiked's design for MCL is constantly evolving (often despite my complaints; so in some respects I am a more conservative force in MCL vs a radical one in S44) MCL somehow feels 'tighter'; complex but in a way that interlinks and makes sense. With that in mind I want to move to a more open playerbase for MCL (more difficult with dwindling server numbers) despite it's chronic lack of polish.

I suppose ultimately it boils down to 'fewer people means better communication of ideas' but also 'fewer people means slower progress' - it may ultimately be that I feel this way about MCL just because it doesn't change as rapidly / unconventionally as S44 as it doesn't have the manhours to do so?

This also ties in somewhat to the issue of motivation; I make games first and foremost because I enjoy the process of making them, getting people to play them (including myself) is a secondary concern to me.
</ramble>

[Nemo]

<ramble>
With S44 through the years ultimately myself, Spiked, Nemo, Zerg and Yuri have had more or less free reign to go off on a tangent, though with a similar consensus model with Nemo being the ultimate arbiter. S44 is known as being deep and complex, though sometimes in ways that are opaque to the player; I feel like that is partially due to the freedom to implement new ideas on a whim

Totally agree, although I see it in a slightly different light: every design has an audience, and because we (the devs) were the primary stable playerbase for most of S44's existence, we tended to develop game mechanics that we found fun and rewarding. [1]

I think this hyper inward focus in the design evolution will always converge on baroque games: lots of depth, nooks and crannies, but hard to learn and poorly discoverable for new players. Dwarf Fortress is a more extreme example of the same principle. A lot of open source software ends up this way: if you're scratching your own itch, your back-scratcher is going to be a fairly specialized piece of equipment.

On the one hand, this is because we weren't good designers [2], and we had a substantial design crutch in the form of direct communication with the other core players: there are lots of mechanics which can be made sensible when you can explain them in the lobby. [3] Perhaps unsurprisingly, new players tended not to fare well, but the ones who stuck around long enough to get a grasp on things often remained in the teeny tiny community for a long time. After years of this, I think we've all learned to focus on a) visually explaining mechanics, and b) designing things with better internal consistency and discoverability.

On the other hand, I would never trade that process for something aimed at producing a widely appealing game. All of us got years of happy toil out of the bargain, and generated loads of amazing stories (both in-game and out). I strongly suspect that if we been designing for the masses outside our group, or if I had tried to exert a firmer hand in the game's direction, it would have been a much less rewarding hobby for all of us, and probably ended as a project much, much sooner.

TL;DR: design newbs without consistent wider-audience feedback design stuff for themselves: most find it impenetrable, but dev team derives much joy and satisfaction, and some players like it anyway.

[1] To play, and in some cases, to design/implement >_<
[2] Where "good designer" means "able to design something for people other than themselves"
[3] However, this exact same 'crutch' is what let us play around with such a variety of ideas, and thereby become better designers...

[Nemo]

All of that said, anything I design in the future is going to be much more conscious about balancing new vs experienced player interests. Fixating on the core group is unquestionably a newbie designer trait. At this point I'm much more motivated by designs that do a good job of balancing depth with accessibility than I am by making something fun for me and my expert-level understanding of a game I've helped design.

[hokomoko]

I gave the talk today with my friend!
Although there wasn't a large audience (some celeb did a panel on the exact time slot), those present seemed to enjoy it and a few followed us outside afterwards to ask questions and keep discussing.

Since the presentation is in Hebrew, I don't think it'll help if I upload it here.

Thanks guys for your wonderful help!
Another thank you to gajop, I've reused some of the screenshots in your presentation in the section explaining about spring.

[gajop]

I'm glad you found my slides useful. Can you upload the presentation anyway? I might not understand the language, but I'd like to see how you structured it.

PS: Do you think that English might present a barrier to some non-native speakers? (especially Israelis since you have experience with that)

[hokomoko]

With Israelis, not at all. English level here is quite good and no games were localised since the early 90s.