Talk:Games

Pingus

Would pingus run on the laptop? I imagine the game trains logical thought (to a degree) and is interesting enough to get children to play with it for a longer time. (at least that's what I did when I got Lemmings I for the Amiga) --Fasten 09:32, 16 January 2007 (EST)

or, maybe, Charly? --Fasten 14:07, 16 January 2007 (EST)

Game review

Is it interesting to review existing Linux games for desirable and undesirable properties? --Fasten 15:38, 17 January 2007 (EST)

(list moved here [1]) --Fasten 09:46, 18 January 2007 (EST)

-+-+-+ I wonder what happened with my proposal, about Team competitive games to promote self in-team learning, team & group work habits, leadeship, etc. (I remember my times at the Scout´s), it got lost in this jumble of ideas, at [[2]] At Mexico, AGS, --Dagoflores 18:15, 18 July 2007 (EDT)

Exploring the Mesh

Having fun is great, but what are the chances that any of these games actually could exploit the share-aspect of the OLPC? Ok, some of these games I presume (haven't really checked the list, sorry :) will be 'network games' - that basically pitch one player against another or others... lots of fun, I agree, but. I remember a game (The Incredible Machine, iirc) that were lots of puzzles in 2-D that could lend itself to be more collaborative. Does anybody know games of that sort? Or where collaborating and sharing are more the spirit of the game? --Xavi 12:58, 17 January 2007 (EST)

FYI: Someone actually started writing an "Incredible Machine" clone, but only got partway through implementation: The Penguin Machine —Leejc 17:06, 9 February 2007 (EST)

I already made a selection of games that, at least at first glance, seemed more suitable than the average game. Is there a list somewhere what games will be included in the main distribution? --Fasten 14:13, 17 January 2007 (EST)

There is nothing wrong with competitive games, they can also be quite motivating. I don't know what share-aspect you mean. No matter if the games are collaborative or competitive in nature the pedagogical aspects might be interesting so any accompanying documentation can recommend to educators what games are useful for what age group and what type of education. Happypenguin.org doesn't state that so it might be useful to give every program a page here to discuss topics like this. --Fasten 14:13, 17 January 2007 (EST)

It might be nice to have network games use the Presence Service DBus API to negotiate network games, if that's what you mean by "Exploring the Mesh". --Fasten 14:13, 17 January 2007 (EST)

About local pages

I wouldn't include a local page if it doesn't exist - just leave it blank.

Another thing, I don't know if you are aware, but you are using Games/SomeGame which creates a link to a SUB-page... --Xavi 09:25, 18 January 2007 (EST)

Interactive Fiction

Anyone thought of porting Inform to Python? I think Interactive Fiction games would work really well on the XO. text games easy to translate, they are not resource intense, they aid in the development of an active imagination, and they are culture neutral. --Basique 21:03, 4 March 2007 (EST)

Interactive fiction on the OLPC is a great idea, but I don't think they are as easy to localize as you assert. For one thing, they contain much more text than more visual games do, so they are not "easy to translate". When translating most applications, you can hand the translator a file of all the text that needs to be localized, but with interactive fiction the translation of each line can be dependent on the others; the player won't get far, for example, if you translate a word to "sabre" in all the descriptions but to "sword" for the item name. Also, lists of commonly used synonyms need to be recompiled: The Infocom games would let you use "put on", "wear", and "don" to put on clothes; translators need to anticipate all the ways the user would commonly express themselves to do the same things in different languages, which may require the translator to partially rescript the game. And the language parser may need to be rewritten for the different word orderings of other languages. So, the translator not only needs an intimate knowledge of how all the text is used in the game, but may also need to know how to reprogram and test the game, which greatly limits the pool of available translators.—Leejc 19:47, 5 March 2007 (EST)

Would it be possible to structure the implementation such that the commands are expressed as logos in a toolbar, or even a large toolpanel if many commands are possible, and the tooltip text is localized to text in the target language, yet the software uses the click on the logo as the command. This would sort of reverse calibrate the system so that available words are presented rather than have the system try to interpret all possible words. There could be a verb toolbar and a noun toolbar such that one needs to click on a logo in the verb toolbar and then on a logo in the noun toolbar in order to make something happen, such as wear coat. The system could refuse to carry out the action if the coat is not nearby. It would not be necessary to have the toolbar logos either lit or greyed out to imply what can be done. The toolbars would just be there with all logos always lit. Maybe there could be an adjective toolbar and an adverb toolbar as well for rich interactive fiction: for example quickly build yellow house. —86.136.209.151 07:32, 17 March 2007

Sure, that would ease the translator's burden on the input side. It does change the nature of the game, though, as the player would know something about what he was expected to do beforehand — not that that's a bad thing. It makes the game more like the LucasArts adventure games, which I actually prefer to interactive fiction. But I'm sure others feel differently, preferring instead the conversational nature of interactive fiction and the fun of guessing what you're supposed to type next. —Joe 11:41, 17 March 2007 (EDT)

And I believe many existing interactive fiction games make cultural assumptions that may not translate well. Any riddles or wordplay will be particularly hard to translate. Any puzzles that rely on knowledge of cultural history, deities, or customs won't translate at all and will have to be totally rewritten. (I recall the game Wishbringer punished you if you opened an umbrella indoors, because that's "unlucky". How would that play in another culture, with a totally different set of "unlucky" things?)

Making matters worse, the quality of translation directly affects the player's ability to complete the game. Unlike visual games, which can sometimes be quite playable despite a shaky translation (Zero Wing comes to mind), the player has nothing else to go on than the text that you provide.

In fact, I think it would be hard to find a more difficult genre of game to localize. (Other word games (crosswords?) or story-based games (visual novels) may be as difficult.) But that doesn't mean it wouldn't be worth it. I still think it's a great idea. —Leejc 19:47, 5 March 2007 (EST)

• Thanks! I do see the weaknesses now that you point them out, cultural translation and cultural artifacts would be a huge issue, unless you deliberately target a specific indigenous culture in the game with intent to use their artifacts in a compare/contrast. --Basique 11:49, 16 March 2007 (EDT)

Is it possible to allow users to write their own text-based games? Maybe that's even more ambitious but if it's possible to create a simple object based language to use, that would definitely reduce the translation issue. And given the opportunity, I can think of kids definitely rising to the challenge to create a game of their own... Okita 2:44 PM, 13 April 2007 (EST)

Looks like someone is working on it. :) —Joe 00:21, 24 April 2007 (EDT)

Multiplayer games

the problem with multiplayer games on the Xo is, that they use the mesh network of the marvell mesh driver, which is not open source, this means you build games on closed source. Maybe there are different alternatives for multiplayer games?

As I understand it, this is not quite correct. The mesh driver is actually open source (you can read it here), but the chip's firmware is binary blob that must be loaded on initialization — not an ideal situation, but not all that different from, say, the firmware in a printer (which is also a binary blob loaded on initialization, but loaded from flash memory or ROM instead of main disk). According to an open trac ticket, Marvell is not opposed to moving to an open-source version, and several people have expressed interest in helping them. —Joe 16:02, 15 November 2007 (EST)

GDC 2007 game ideas?

It sounds like a lot of developers had good game ideas at GDC 2007, but are any of them documented anywhere? I only see entrants' names and the titles of their games in this article. Did the competition winners ever do anything with the XOs that they received "to make their games a reality"? If not, are the ideas written down somewhere so that others could perhaps work on them? —Joe 00:19, 6 March 2008 (EST)

Kye ?

I keep reading in some places that python kye is in OLPC, but this page does not mention it? Could we get official confirmation? 190.103.74.109 01:59, 20 August 2009 (UTC)