*a poll for Free Software enthusiasts specifically*

*please only vote if you have strong positive views regarding copyleft licenses for software and cultural works*

Can you name several video games you've played and enjoyed that match this criteria:

1) The game was first published in 2023 or 2024.

2) The entire game (all source code, art, music, etc) is freely available under appropriate open source licenses (permissive or copyleft)

If the answer is "yes", I'd love to hear about them.

@aeva Do my own ones count? 😂

@dos yes

@dos and please list them if you voted yes

@aeva Turns out time flies faster than I thought and I only have one that matches the first requirement - so that's a "no" I guess 😅

But here's the one: https://git.flow3r.garden/dos/PetalHero/

@aeva Though while I did play some games last year, I'm actually not sure I have played *any* game that fits the first requirement, FLOSS or not.

@aeva I haven't played so many new games in 2023-2024 at all. But I did personally release 3 or 4 games, depending on how you count, in 2023, and I like them all, and they're all OSS. So.

https://pocket.runhello.com

Note: This software only runs on a bare RISC-V chip with a framebuffer. But you can't possibly ask for open source software and then complain it's exclusive to open source hardware

@aeva later this year I want to release a full version of the breakout game.

@mcc so by your professional estimation, which one of these is the FOSS GOTY 2023

@aeva I want to say Minibreak, due to it being by far the worst, and also the only one with all the legal properties of a "game" (it is possible to both win and lose it, there is music, there is something resembling a final boss)

@aeva "The smallest thing we are legally allowed to call a video game"

@aeva However, the one of the group everyone who's playtested was most impressed with was Fungus

Well, this isn't what I was hoping to find, but these results do more or less match what I was expecting.

I think it's reasonable for me to say without a citation that there's tons of new games published every year that meet the criteria of this poll.

The results of the poll show that there is a nearly perfect disconnect between all of the people making new FOSS games and the group of people I would expect to be the most interested in supporting the development of new FOSS games.

Which is really sad? Clearly there's both an audience and people doing the work, but there is no connection happening.

Attention is the easiest and most basic form of support you can give to a new project, especially games. Without attention, there's no way a game is going to punch through the noise of internet, much less reach the rest of the community.

@mcc personally I'm of the mind that with the right attitude any interactive digital media can be a video game, but I'll admit that I'm readily willing to compromise on both the "interactive", "digital", and "media" constraints.

@aeva I categorize (in the Pocket menu) "Fungus", "ot3" and "Cellular Toy" (not software) as "antigames". This is a term I used for my favorite works of 2009-2014, where something has the interface of a game but rather than being goal - oriented or progress-oriented is a kind of unguided audiovisual experience, with the point not being to "win" but to explore the system's configuration space and discover the various unique "points" within it. I feel Fungus is an unusually good one of these.

@aeva @mcc

needs one of those 9x9 grids and somewhere a cell with “a flipbook is a videogame” ;-)

@oblomov @mcc consider: the video game in a dream about a video game is a video game.

@aeva it is amusing, to me, to pass off as a "game" something wildly ungamelike, but it is also amusing to imagine I invented (though not without precedent to draw from) an entire medium distinct from games

What I was hoping to find was more people to respond "yes", and a ton of replies with valid examples. If there was a healthy connection between authors and audience, then there would be some contemporary games that stood out in their popularity, which would then make up a candidate pool for a very late FOSS GOTY type competition which someone else could litigate if they wanted to. I was only hoping to see if such a pool existed at all (at least on activitypub).

The results of the poll do match what I've generally observed by participating in FOSS communities over the last ~20 years:

You will find a fair amount of people who will claim they're interested but never be there for you (poll option 2), and with effort you can sometimes find a few people who will actually support new projects (poll option 3), but virtually all community attention stays on a small handful of successful (and, imo, wonderful) long running FOSS game projects.

My long time theory for why this is, is because the FOSS community (especially the Free Software community) at large is primarily focused on maintaining parity with (and in some unusual cases, getting ahead of) better funded proprietary software development. Most institutional funding does not go to the development of cultural works, and most general development work relies on over worked volunteers. I think there's also a general misconception that new FOSS games simply don't exist.

@aeva also, it seems like most FOSS devs don't spend much time on developing a strategy for funding (including but not limited to grant-writing).

i blame early FOSS leaders, who didn't seem to spend much time thinking, "hey, developers are people, and people need to eat & pay rent, so maybe if we want this project to succeed we should focus on funding a lot, and emphasize its importance to people who are more focused on technology."

@JamesWidman and somewhere along the way it became taboo to even acknowledge this as a real problem much less seek guidance on it

@aeva Honestly it's not like people don't care about FOSS games, but there aren't that many notable ones coming out each year. There are some great ones like Mindustry and Veloren but there was never a huge movement of open source games. Most of them are recreations of old games (Unciv, OpenTTD) or honestly games that aren't very good compared to what's in the market. I say this as someone who loves these.

It's a funding issue for sure, but there aren't many that would fund something for free.

@JamesWidman if I had a penny for every time a person who asked in good faith was told very harshly that they were wrong to ask and also redhat is profitable so how dare you, I'd probably have a modest but sustainable source of income to fund a small free software project with

@aeva interesting!

@aeva I think the disconnect might just be the lack of a fan website for FOSS game news and discussion. If I went and made a FOSS clone of a popular game, I'd know exactly where to find players. If I made an original FOSS game, I'd be stuck with a github or itch.io page floating in the void where nobody would find it.

@aeva Maybe it falls into that misconception, or I just misunderstood the assignment, but i've played a lot of recent PICO-8 games which I didn't count because PICO-8 is not open source.

@popcar2 @aeva I see a few open source games that come up often for discussion, but they're not new.

I use Debian Unstable, in part so I can see new software as it enters the system of repositories, but I rarely see games.

I don't know where I'd learn about new open source games.

@noisyowl I agree

@noracodes in my experience, most Free Software definitions generally considers software with proprietary dependencies to be Non-Free, so unless/until there's a FOSS pico-8 clone available, pico-8 games are likely to be considered problematic under that lens even if the games themselves are totally FOSS.

That said, lots of FOSS enthusiasts are privately pretty ok with installing a few little binary blobs here and there, so I think the real answer here rests in the heart of the person voting.

@aeva I think probably more the second than the first (I'm not aware of ones that exist outside of the long running projects like 0AD). Maybe my answer would be different if I had a steam deck or one of those handheld arm Linux gaming gadgets, but most all my gaming is on my switch because I don't want to sit at a computer to game after sitting at a computer making open source software all day. Now I'm all guilty feeling 😭

@foolishowl @popcar2 the only way I know of right now is to be embedded in such a community (follow lots of game devs and pay attention to their work and what they boost, follow FOSS game jams, etc).

If there's any general resources to help people with less time on their hands find new FOSS games that are aligned with their interests, I don't know of them :(