Anarchism and Social Ecology @slrpnk.net pbpza @lemmy.dbzer0.com 1 yr. ago

Anyone interested in making video games?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/5915428

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/5915426

Hi, I with a few people are trying to start a remote game-dev studio inspired by Motion Twin, we would horizontally make decisions on what game idea to work and we would horizontally decide salary if we ever got to the stage of creating games with commercial potential. If anyone is interested you can join us, we are so far mostly interested in using Godot for development cause it is FOSS. We have not incorporated yet anywhere because we have just started and I think that for a long time this will be a part time project with various people having different amount of time to work on the project. If anyone is interested then we can get in touch. We are anarchists/libertarian socialists and we think of this as a political project too.

11 comments

I did create, just today, a document called 'Games I Would Play' in my notes. So far the only entry is:

Tycoon game that has to be tweaked till you create an Anarchist society

But other than being a translator for Gaming engine documentation and having some vague clue of the basics because of that, I know fuck all about game design.
- How would that work though? The point of city and transportation builders like tycoon is to privilege the agency of the player over simulated beings (ie sims). Privileging sims over players is simulation intensive and isn't very fun except to watch like ants in an ant farm. IMHO, an anarcho video game can still work, since the point of any and all video games are to privilege player agency, but I'm not sure how it would work for city builders.
  
  I can totally see the point of a solarpunk city builder tho.
  
  So maybe a multiplayer where a solarpunk city has to collaborate against a simulated tycoon.
  
  I would like to create game narratives that avoid heroes and fighting - in accordance with Ursula K- LeGuin's Carrier Bag theory.
Sure am, I have tons of (mostly unfinished) games in my folders, I participated (made the only playable demo) in the /r/france/ effort to make a memes-loaded game and while I don't want to say that this proposal can't work, here are the few pitfalls I think it will encounter (and I wont be willing to help until there is a good reason to see them addressed)

for a long time this will be a part time project with various people having different amount of time to work on the project

Here is what I predict will happen: 3-4 people will actually work on it seriously, with 5-10 making occasionally making contributions, and 50 cheering. That's fine for a FOSS project. That's a problem when you decide how to split revenues: you'll need a way to gauge peoples' contribution and there will be disagreements. Mostly because:

Of the people who did actual work, half of them did unusable things. There won't be anyone to tell one person that their art is crap or just does not match the rest of the art, that their programming style does not work, that their game design ideas just suck. Diplomatically, what usually happens in the absence of a hierarchy is that we work around them (that's additional work) and in the final product, their work is just given lip service. But then comes the sharing of revenues and there, you have 2 ways to handle that:

Gauge the hours worked and pretend their work has the same value. They are happy and want to continue in the project. The competent people who had to work around their contributions quit disgusted.

Tell them their contributions did not help the project much and they bring the whole thing into a drama masterclass.

If you claim anarchist principles, it is fair that cheerers will also want to have a say. Most FOSS projects are do-ocracy: the doer is the decider. If they want to do something that's liked by the others, they have to listen to the feedback, but they also have the power to ignore some feedback even if cheerers are demanding it very loudly (e.g. I don't have a mac so I wont do a mac version)

If the proposal is to sink a few hundreds of work in a project without being paid, and with little hope to ever be, I'd rather do it on something I love in a pure FOSS fashion without having to deal with drama and compromise.

Have a business model, address the problem of gauging the contributions, have explicit decisions mechanisms (saying "we have a horizontal structure without hierarchies" is not enough to make it true) and then we can talk.
- In practice we will strive to reach consensus with majority vote when we cannot find one - that's how we will decide everything I think. Not the purest, but good enough for me I would say.
  
  I understand, but in practice, when a work can only be done by one person who volunteers, he or she has a veto. May as well go with what they want. To take the example above, everyone may agree that it would be great to have a mac version, but if the programmer doesn't have a mac, it won't happen anyway. FOSS projects are do-ocracies by default. When you have 1 dev for 10 users, and you want everyone to have equal voice in what should get developed, then you need a way to coerce the dev into following the majority.
  
  FOSS do-ocracies become real anarchism when everyone is a dev: you are free to fork and no need to coerce anyone to put in some work to make the project go one way or the other. Maybe the key to anarchist dev is in lower the barrier of entry for people who want to contribute. But other than that, there will be a mean of coercion if non-contributors advice need to be equal to contributors'

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