quote:Original post by Oluseyi
There''s a saying that comes up often on these pages - usually when someone claims to be reluctant to divulge details about their game idea for fear of someone "stealing" it: (paraphrased) ideas are cheap; implementation is what counts.

Personally, I wouldn''t mind if someone stole one of the ideas I had helped develop in an OGD project, and made a great product out of it. This is because, for me, the "higher goal", with OGD is to further game design as a whole and improve the overall quality of computer games. This might sound a bit starry eyed, but it actually is why I started thinking about OGD in the first place...

quote:But these individuals cannot start new projects in Open Source. Their prestige rewards are also low because they can''t code and therefore can''t actually engage in debugging or adding new features. In essence, they are fringe players whose opinions are only useful when brainstorming in abstract fashion. When it comes time to sit down, design code interfaces and structure and do some implementation - they are shut out.

Yes, but I''m not sure it really matter. Indirect contributions can be as valuable as direct ones. Sure, implementation is what counts, but there are probably much more implementors around than there are people with really good ideas. A highly competent software developer without (original) ideas isn''t worth much at the early stages of a project. The same goes for a highly competent game designer; it doesn''t matter how strutctural his thinking is, or how well he translates his ideas into a working game design if he has run out of ideas or inspiration. What''s even worse, he might not realise that he has but continues to churn out mediocre games for the rest of his career.

quote:If you truly have a bazaar from the get-go, the articulate ones will be drowned out by the ignorant - something that has been borne out many, many times (look up the Indrema and the Indrema Developer Network, which Nurgle, another moderator, and I were both involved in, for corroboration of this sometime.

This is probably (and sadly) true, but how does one avoid it without risking to shut out people with new ideas? If you only invite your friends or people with the same values and ideas as yourself you will probably not produce anything revolutionary. [Btw, I looked up "Indrema" and I actually read about it back then, but had forgotten all about it. I''m afraid this proves your point quite well.]

/Henrik

quote:Original post by henrikb
Personally, I wouldn''t mind if someone stole one of the ideas I had helped develop in an OGD project, and made a great product out of it. This is because, for me, the "higher goal", with OGD is to further game design as a whole and improve the overall quality of computer games. This might sound a bit starry eyed, but it actually is why I started thinking about OGD in the first place...

"Stealing" wasn''t the issue; "it''s implementation that counts" was.

quote:Yes, but I''m not sure it really matter. Indirect contributions can be as valuable as direct ones. Sure, implementation is what counts, but there are probably much more implementors around than there are people with really good ideas. A highly competent software developer without (original) ideas isn''t worth much at the early stages of a project. The same goes for a highly competent game designer; it doesn''t matter how strutctural his thinking is, or how well he translates his ideas into a working game design if he has run out of ideas or inspiration. What''s even worse, he might not realise that he has but continues to churn out mediocre games for the rest of his career.

Without some form of regularized "par" for prospective participants to attain, the community is likely to be flooded with clueless individuals who think they have "cool" ideas - usually completely devoid of grounding in reality, awareness of current state of the art, etc. Remember, Indrema (though it had other problems, which I shall refer to shortly).

quote:This is probably (and sadly) true, but how does one avoid it without risking to shut out people with new ideas?

Good ideas require a conducive environment to flourish. It is necessary to first develop the "movement" and its paradigms - the basic vocabulary, a library of patterns and idioms, etc - in a rigid (and likely boring) setting. This phase won''t be revolutionary, but creates the tools necessary to empower others to innovate. Find direct correlation in the early work of the FSF on GNU (binutils, GCC, etc) which have now enabled anyone anywhere to enter the bazaar and churn out whatever innovative product may come to mind.

Indrema didn''t do this. They involved the communiy too early so they had a bunch of "developers" (I use the term loosely; I wouldn''t let some of those kids near my compiler) sitting on their hands, asking for specs and delivery targets and making feature requests - the system specs weren''t even nailed down! - which caused the entire project to spiral out of control. Jumping, unprepared, into the publicity arena too early (that stoopid "Top Ten Reasons to Skip a PS2 and Buy an Indrema" list) didn''t help either, as Indrema was thoroughly roasted and pronounced DOA before it was ever born.

If I were to have handled Indrema - and I said this then - I would have developed a working prototype, pretty close to the final version, before uttering a peep to anyone. By the time I involve the developer community, we''d be using late beta hardware so that software titles can be written and will require little to no change to run on final hardware. Once I had a few graphics-intensive demos, I''d start showing it to the press, and I''d make sure my platform had at least one thing no other platform had or planned to have soon.

Go, with OGD, and do likewise.

For those of you interested in reading even more opinions on my idea, I can recommend the thread I started in comp.games.development.design a few days ago. It''s also titled "Open Game Design - dream or possibility" and has resulted in quite a few interesting responses. The thread is easily accessible through Google Groups:

http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&safe=off&q=open+game+design

/Henrik

Take a look at http://tiles.ice.org. While it''s not directly translatable to the gaming paradigm, conceptually, the idea could be applied to gaming. Each artist gets an the "edges" of the "world" that they create ... and in the end, these worlds come together to form an entire piece. If a set of rules was established for a gaming framework, I think this same concept could be applied.

It wouldn''t be easy, and it almost definitely wouldn''t be productive, but I think it''d be possible and might be interesting to see what the outcome would be.

Telstar