Unfinished, unfair and brutally difficult

Rust, a Dayz-like game from the makers of Garry's Mod, largely fixes the issue. When a player suddenly logs out, their body collapses to the ground unconscious and can still be killed and looted.

Your job as a survivor is to build a shelter safe enough that your body can 'sleep'

It's rather simple, I think. An unfinished, but still very entertaining game will be better than a beautifully polished boring game. The "finished parts" can out-weigh in entertainment an entire competing game.

The big reason, in my opinion, for there being few successful FOSS games is that the only thing bringing the team together is a shared vision. This makes it much harder to succeed at a large project unless the project is inspired by/a clone of a nostalgic game, or is in one of the dream-niches that are now being colonized by Kickstarter projects. It's the same reason there are a lot of failed mods: putting a team together is hard, and content production isn't exponentially scalable like code is.

Which is not to say that there aren't lots of open source games: every Ludum Dare Compo game is required to be open source, which is tens of thousands of games right there.

There are a few "big hits" in the FOSS world: Battle for Wesnoth, Vega Strike, FreeCiv, 0 AD, Nethack, Angband, etc. The ones that don't start of clones of commercial games tend to be at the end of a long heritage of open source development: roguelikes, Netrek, and the like. _Playable_ projects with ongoing development often accrue a very dedicated fandom. It's just hard to get to "playable enough".

The real breakout for FOSS and games has been in development tools: open-source engines and libraries have been one of the major reasons that this as become a golden era of indie game development. Even commercial tools like Unity rely on the existence of Mono, for example.

Arguably, the unfinished-ness was part of what made World of Warcraft so wildly popular.

There is much more to explore and enjoy in an open and chaotic environment, than in a streamlined and closed world.

Obviously, we move away from it in real life simply because one generally does not wish to die, but in a no-consequences game, that isn't (much of) a factor.

I think the problem with FOSS games tends to be that they get started for the wrong reasons. Like, most of them spawn from "it'd be neat to make a game like X" and "I believe in FOSS". That's fine, but when you get into the gritty details of making a game, it's /really fricking hard/. To actually finish something takes an enormous amount of passion and dedication. And people that put in that level of passion and dedication usually don't just want to give away their work for free after that much struggle.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying that FOSS people lack passion or anything like that, it's just that for your average non-game FOSS project you usually start by scratching a small itch, and then if it other people like your itch-scratcher, momentum grows. Or if nobody likes it, you abandon it with minimal time lost. A game takes a lot more upfront investment before you have anything to show.

Yes, very true. But in a way, aren't the social interactions within the game at least part of the gameplay?

Surely Minecraft is as popular as it is today due to its amazing community, but you can't honestly say it "isn't about gameplay anymore," or that Minecraft isn't a game.

Minecraft is a clever and well-built game environment that is both nostalgic and progressive at the same time. It would not have gotten any traction at all if it was not fundamentally fun and interesting to play. Minecraft grew because of modders, let's-play-ers, and socializers, but none of that would have happened if Minecraft, as a game, was not able to capture peoples' sense of wonder and fun as they explore landscapes, caves, and endless seas.

I think a more balanced way to look at things is that perhaps you can get away with half a game or three-quarters of a game, by involving the fans and building a community around the project. Dwarf Fortress is another great example of this.

That's an interesting point of view. Do you think single player games may still be able to attain success in the current landscape?

And then there are people like me, who play TF2 to blow off steam. I don't look for my friends on servers, and I only keep a list of "favorite" servers because I know they always have the map I want to play.

That's an interesting point of view. I'm less interested in multiplayer games today than I was in the 90s, but I'm glad to report that single player games seem to be doing rather well. I just finished Arkham Origins, and thus find the statement "it's not about game play" a little tough to believe.

The whole networking aspect lets us make our own games. I agree to an extent that the programmed logic of the game falls into the background a bit with these kind of games. There still has to be rules - but it's more like the rules of real-life than an actual "game" that is being played. In real life, nobody can really prevent you from shooting someone else - its just that most people agree that you should be put in jail (or killed) for doing something like that, and therefore there are consequences. People find it interesting that there can be other worlds with similar dynamics (but the stakes are lower, since you can't really die).

I think the ever-increasing computer horsepower and network speed is contributing to us wanting more of a simulation/charicature of real-life than a fixed set of games to play.

I wonder if we'll continue on this trend in the future to the point where it's truly more entertaining to play inside a simulation than live real life (I know you can argue that is already true for some games, but I mean much more common).

Possibly it's not about the baked-in gameplay anymore. But both day-z and minecraft have rich metagames (is metagameplay a word?) that have developed as a result of both the restrictions and freedoms given to the players.

That's one of the reasons that some of the commenters here "don't get it". They've looked for gameplay, and found it lacking, whereas what they should have been doing is creating their own games within the worlds provided.

That's part of why I gave up on EVE Online—I felt that to make any sort of progress towards having fun, I would have to be a terrible person.

Something I noticed recently while briefly playing GTA V online was that people seem to be able to think of infinite ways to unfairly troll other players. I know the game itself is geared up for player versus player battles, but I'm talking about ways that the game isn't even designed.

Some examples I saw in a short space of time: - Trapping people in shops by parking vehicles next to the door so they have to leave the game, re-enter or quit. - Going around purposely damaging vehicles (tyres) so that people doing jobs have no getaway. - Standing outside common spawn areas and just killing folk as soon as they arrive.

Perhaps using GTA as an example isn't great but it did make me wonder for a moment - does anyone actually just want to play the game in the way it was intended?

It depends upon how you approach the game. If you try to navigate the game morally, treating all other players as humans, potential friends who you don't want to kill, you might find your experience frustrating. Personally, I found embracing a sort of wild west, shoot first, ask questions later approach was the most fun way to play, since indeed there is little reason to trust other players. Since DayZ was originally built as a mod for an FPS military simulator, it makes at least as much sense to view it primarily as a first person shooter as it does to view it as a social MMO experience.

OTOH, this article[0] about a player whose primary mission in the game is to act as a heavily armed, on-call doctor helping injured players in the field is what got me interested in the first place, so, different strokes.

[0] http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2012/07/the-healing-touch-dr-w...

I think it's because it has appealing gameplay. It's all about PvP that drives the fun of this really engrossing survival action genre. It helps that the lead developer/creator, Dean Hall, is very obsessive and meticulous about really doing this right. I'd love to hear more thoughts.

It's like staying in an "actual" haunted hotel versus taking a disney ride of a haunted house. The disney ride is a more consistent and probably enjoyable experience, but the former is more ... interesting. Maybe nothing happens, maybe something happens and you're terrified, but either way the experience feels like it has more substance. You're not just a tourist looking to be entertained, you're exploring something.

I think that video in the middle sort of captures it. I mean on one level it's just.. weird, but on the other hand, how many other games can you describe where you're searching through a house in the dark and all the sudden some psycho player starts slowly chasing you down playing tiny tim music through his microphone?! And not just as a griefer that's going to inconvenience you, but in a "oh god this character I built is dead forever if this crazy person does what I think they're going to do" way. I mean, that's a fundamentally STRANGE experience, but it's also entirely organic in it's own weird way.

Most games nowadays are about moving you through a bunch of set pieces so you can experience the most "content". I think DayZ is interesting because it completely throws that paradigm away and gives a sandbox where things just happen. It's uneven, but playing it, it feels like you're experiencing /something/. Even if it's not always "fun", it's interesting in a way that most games aren't.

So, I had a long response written out, but I decided it didn't really get to heart of the matter. Here's the short response:

Every time you start a new character, it takes a while -- at least a couple hours -- to get to a comfortable level of survivability (by that I mean: food, water, equipment, weapons). Even once well equipped, it's incredibly easy to die. So, when you're scrounging around for some food or poking around a military base for better weapons and you hear a gun shot, the adrenaline rush is like nothing else. The two hours you spent gearing up could literally be wiped out in an instant by sniper that you never even saw on some hill side.

Even better, everyone else is in the same situation as you no matter how long they've been playing, which leads to some really intense/scary/funny encounters in game.

Part of the key is that its a mod of a "realistic" army simulation. This is what makes the slow parts still fun. If you were just bunnyhopping around in a quake engine style thing, yeah it would be boring.

The environment is HUGE, and the engine is designed for the maximum draw-distance. When you start, you have no map. When you do get a map, its just a graphic, and your location is not marked on it. All the markings are in russian. Later if you're lucky, you might get a compass, with which you can manually take bearings.

Basically, the engine and the setting is realistic enough that you become invested in the apocalyptic survival thing for it's own sake.

An important fact not mentioned in the article is that you need regular water and food to survive. This forces you to go into towns to raid buildings, which is extremely dangerous and tense, involving a lot of creeping around in the dark. This turns the "hiding out in the woods" part of the game into a blessed relief compared to crawling in the gutter at a snails pace in the pitch black, gently wetting yourself.

The inverse of this could be developers patching out quirks that enable emergent gameplay contrary to the direction they wish the gameplay to go in.

So rocket jumping has become a feature of many FPS games, whereas in counterstrike they patched out strafe jumping.

I feel like there's a big difference between the unfairness inflicted on you by a Random Number Generator, and the unfairness inflicted on you by being hounded through the streets by a gang of other players.

The two games share the same medium but are very different in nature.

There actually is a consequence, if you kill a player on sight you ruin a lot of the gear you would hope to steal from them. It's actually better to rob them while they are alive and you never know if they will pull out a revolver and pop a cap in you.