Re: The nature of the beast

From: David desJardins <desj@math.berkeley.edu>

Date: Tue, 23 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000

Tim Franklin <tim@leaphome.pelican.org> writes:
> Can I take it you're not particularly familiar with hacker[0] culture?  The
> gift culture is alive and well, where amongst your peers, your worth is
> measured by the value of what you give to others.  Most of the best software
> currently in existance is a result of this (although strangely not so much
> in the gaming world.  Galaxy is, of course, the major success story here).

There was a lot of game software written this way before the dominance
of the modern commercial computer-game industry oriented around mall
stores pushing packaged software.  Some "success stories" that come to
mind are Adventure, Rogue, Zork, Empire, Moria, Hack, Angband, and
Xtrek.  (Some of these were later commercialized in one form or
another.)

I don't think it's so strange that free PBM/PBEM hasn't thrived to the
extent of other free game software.  Most PBM/PBEM fundamentally
requires a moderator who keeps the game running.  It's relatively hard
to get your free PBM/PBEM game out there without not just writing all
the software free, but also spending a lot of time moderating it for
free---at least to get it off the ground.  It doesn't really work to
turn it over to someone else to moderate, in the early development
stages, because the author needs to be involved to see how the game is
working and fix things.

As computers get more powerful, some of this kind of stuff is getting
easier, and in line with this I think we are seeing a steady growth in
the quantity of free PBM/PBEM.  (I won't get into debating the relative
quality of free vs commercial games.)

David desJardins

References

Re: The nature of the beast
spamfree@metropolis.net.au (Henry Penninkilampi)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000
Re: The nature of the beast
tim@leaphome.pelican.org (Tim Franklin)
Tue, 23 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000
Re: The nature of the beast
htp@dove.net.au (Henry Penninkilampi)
Fri, 19 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000
Re: The nature of the beast
lindahl@pbm.com (Greg Lindahl)
Mon, 22 Feb 1999 00:00:00 +0000