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> because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus

I've worked on enough commercial software to know that most large, practical products aren't designed from an auteur perspective, and that many that are, shouldn't be. My perspective on game development is different than it is for tools -- some of the most impressive OS tools I've seen (Blender, Krita) are where they are specifically because they've been designed by committee, and because it turns out that a committee of artists generally produces better art-tools than a committee of programmers and marketers.

> The community can maintain stuff that is "boring," where there is no controversy. When the right approach is clear to all. The community can write an emulator, but cannot write a video game.

A good 90% of the tools where reliability matters are boring, and I want them to be boring. I compare this to other tools that I use outside of a computer. I don't want a radical piano when I'm composing music, I want a finely tuned, boring solution. I don't want radical pencils, I do most of my artwork with tools that I know extremely well.

When I picked up digital drawing, my approach was the same; I didn't want an auteur experience, I wanted extremely consistent drivers, and consistent software that allowed me to focus on my artwork, not the user interface.

I think you're hitting on an interesting artistic point with game development, but you're misapplying that point to a field with different concerns. I use Linux because it's boring. It gets out of my way and lets me focus on creative tasks.

That isn't true of Blender at all, it was built by one software company from 1994-2002, quirks and all.

Open software runs the gamut from anarchic, to focused community development, to benevolent dictatorship, all the way to closed-development models, and I can cite success stories from all of those approaches. Just pointing out that Blender isn't a good example of design by committee, it's still essentially the same program it was when the Blender Foundation was established.

> it's still essentially the same program it was when the Blender Foundation was established.

I completely disagree. Blender's interface has undergone a large number of revisions since the original program was launched, even prior to its giant 2.5 rewrite.

I chose Blender as an example in part because I think its single-company origins make it a better example of how Open committees can improve UX. Blender in the early-to-mid 2000s had a strong reputation for being unintuitive and hard to use. It's only because of some really hard work from a dedicated community that Blender doesn't have that same reputation today -- and I don't think it's a terribly controversial claim to say that Blender's close relationship with artists has been one of the elements that has elevated it so far above other art tools on Linux (see Gimp), and that has allowed it to make so many smart iterations on its UX over the years.

> and I can cite success stories from all of those approaches

Sure, I do agree with that. I didn't mean to suggest that the community development model is the only way to write software; just that the community development model is a viable way to write software (especially for creative tools) and that it shouldn't be dismissed.

There are several 'auteur' style programs that I love that I think would have benefited from having more community involvement in their UX design. Git has a wonderfully elegant core; it definitely benefited from having a single person come up with the idea. But the CLI that was built around that core is really bad, and would have benefited tremendously from having more input.

There are also a lot of single-dev OS efforts that shine. But I don't think that's the only way to design software, or that community-run design should be dismissed because they exist.

That's fair, although Krita still seems like a more central example, since without the original, complete program, there's no Blender at all.

As I get older, I have more moments where I'm saying to myself, but I've used Blender! It's kinda unintuitive and hard to use! and then realize that, er, that was in 2010, and it's now a solid decade past that...

I happen to think the common narrative of git having good plumbing and bad porcelain is still considerably overselling the virtues of that program, but, that's a topic for some other thread.

Eh, gits porcelain is wildy successful for how 'bad' it is. There are a million attempts to 'fix' its porcelain, mostly related to somebody's wish to meet some arcane workflow...

But for standard development (and with some sort of gitflow) most people need only ten or so commands to operate an otherwise complex algorithm for diffing and merging code, compared to the inexorably complicated UIs which at best offer the basic ten and then usually ten more random local idioms, or at worst don't offer the basics and still have the extra complexity...and then offer to drop you to shell for anything else...

I would argue that the situation is quite different.

Open source is quite good in two domains: large collaborative efforts where the collaborators may have diverging or competing interests, as well as addressing the needs of the open source community.

This has nothing to do with CLI verses GUI. There are many excellent GUI based applications. The lack of game development has little to do with the vision of an auteur. Game development simply depends upon a rapid development cycle and hasn't fared well with the more iterative approach of open source software. Open source software is often more radical than boring given the freedom to experiment with ideas. There are also plenty of people packaging it up nicely to provide the best possible user experience. Quite frankly, the user experience from a competently managed Linux distribution is better in most respects than its biggest competitor.

The lack of adoption of open source likely has two sources: first is that it doesn't have the marketing muscle of the commercial alternatives. Heck, most people are blissfully unaware that they are using open source software or software with major open source components. The second is that the open source world is more accessible to people with a deep interest in technology. It doesn't matter how friendly the software is when you actually have to discover what is available then decide upon what reflects your needs.

So, as someone who has worked on both commercial and open-source video games, I can say this: You're wrong in a way that is non-obvious without getting really deeply inside the creative perspective.

The thing that games accomplish is to allow a study of some idea. The idea can be frivolous like Mario's jump and run, it can be a grim war simulator, it can be a portrayal of biographical experience or a mathematical exploration.

But the intent of the vision, whatever it is, is negotiated between the author and audience as with every experience. This is why players of online games fret so much over small balance patches: is the game going closer to, or further away from, their vision? When it's open-source, author and audience are nearly the same, and so the loosely encompassing visions with broad-sweep productions that tend to be produced by commercial teams are mostly filtered out: in their place is a sense of evolving play to the extent that the game can encourage further study and development.

Open game projects that are positioned to allow study through the development itself do well: People like contributing to Nethack because it's intrinsically interesting to work on, and the basic gameplay is such an established formula that it's not hard to accumulate more on top - development just extends to new scenarios indefinitely. On the other hand, visual novels are best suited to open engine tooling, because the study goal is not accumulative - you don't add more characters and subplots to develop a story - it's to use a common framework of storytelling and fill it up with a specific kind of study of your choosing, a mode of portrayal and thematic content. It would be like if Nethack supported alternate gameplay models that happen to share the style of graphics and menus. Even though visual novels tend to have simple rulesets, they all differ from each other.

And I do agree that where proprietary stuff succeeds most is in that "singular new vision" context: but the moment you start generalizing and adding configuration knobs, it loses steam, and in the perspective of study, gaming often needs some configuration so that the space is further explorable.

I will say that some of the best gaming communities have an active modding scene, and ideally that scene is intentionally fostered by the gaming company. Elder Scrolls is the obvious example. It was made far better by the community, and that symbiosis created something better than either could've individually.

But the companies can produce something quite impressive without a community, whereas the reverse isn't true.

And the modding scene follows the same kind of trend where Total Conversions require an auteur, but the community as a whole can cooperate on unofficial patches, graphics overhauls, and the like.

Battle for Wesnoth might be a counterexample to your argument about games: http://wesnoth.org It's an open source video game that's of high quality with good user experience, developed by lots of folks over a long period of time and available on many platforms.

See also some rougelikes, such as Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead or (IIRC?) Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, which are often strong examples of open-source development, though perhaps as many are one-man teams.

I think it depends on the type of game. It’s hard for me to imagine something like Celeste, Cave Story, or Journey coming about through the open source process. These games had very specific artistic visions, and I’m not sure how you’d execute that.

(A small team could perhaps release a game under an OSS license, but it wouldn’t be what we generally think of as open source development.)

...here’s the thing though: I don’t really games to be software. I mean, of course they are software in a literal sense, but then an Encyclopedia and Harry Potter are both books.

> A small team could perhaps release a game under an OSS license, but it wouldn’t be what we generally think of as open source development.

This is... definitely what I think of when I generally think of open source development? The vast majority of open source projects seem to be by one person. How many zero-star projects are there on GitHub? Half the libraries I use on a regular basis are authored by one person.

I think you are conflating contribution with direction. I'd argue most successful OSS projects have strong direction led by a small team. Postgres core. Python's BDFL, while it lasted. Even projects like Git have people like Junio, who are wonderful and knowledgeable and without which the project wouldn't even be remotely the same.

> These games had very specific artistic visions, and I’m not sure how you’d execute that.

There is no requirement for consensus-driven democratic decision making for a project, so I really don't get why you feel this way.

One of the first projects I contributed to was BZFlag, a game.

What about Colossal Cave Adventure? Rogue? Nethack? Hell I spent probably a few dozen hours playing Tux Racer since it's release.

> It is not possible to imagine a video game produced by an open community, because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus.

I'm impressed with 0 A.D.[1]

Desktop Linux is also at the point where if a Chromebook would satisfy a user's use case, then so would something like Ubuntu. I've had my parents on Linux for a while now, and it just works.

[1] https://play0ad.com/

0 A.D. was a commercial project that was open-sourced, not a community project.

> It is not possible to imagine a video game produced by an open community, because it requires the vision of an auteur, not design-by-consensus.

A lot of modern videogames use art assets and define gameplay behavior with JSON. Stallman says proprietary data and art is allowed in free software.

To the extent that corporations are capable of producing "Free Software" as defined by Stallman then I would find it likely that they would succeed, but the comment I replied to argued that commercial software was inferior and that seems obviously false outside of what I called "boring" stuff. But I think the boring stuff is really important and good, and wish more things became "boring" in the sense of being solved problems rather than open problems.

I think a big problem with open source games is in the vfx side of things where the work that needs to be done is long and arduous, it needs to have a coherent visual language and gfx artists just don't seem very interested in doing that. Plus for a lot of gaming platforms that are relevant you have licensing fees etc which are big blocker for FOSS projects.