As you probably don't know, May 25th is the 1st birthday of Free Gamer. :-D
To signify this momentus occasion, and because I've always wanted to do this, I'm going to run the first official Free Gamer awards!
The purpose of the awards is to not only recognise the best the open source game scene has to offer, but also inspire those striving to bring us new and original free games, so I'm looking for ideas and feedback on how to organise the award categories. I especially don't want a predictable set of categories (Wesnoth and Frozen Bubble shouldn't win everything they go in for) and I definitely want to acknowledge upcoming games as much as the popular ones. I'm thinking that the categories could be based more on game aspect rather than genres i.e. most original, best storyline, best artwork, etc. I also don't want too many awards so they stay fairly meaningful - but not too few so they are not predictable and recognise more than a couple of games. Of course, all this needs planning...
So, with great pleasure, I am happy to announce the unveiling of the official Free Gamer Forums, kindly hosted by freeforums.org who provide an awesome service for, it seems, no gain whatsoever.
Discussion on the format of the awards is welcome both here [in the comments] and in the forums where I have started a thread for discussion on the award categories.
My hope is that the FG forums can become a little hive of activity around open source gaming and provide a great resource where developers and players alike can share and help eachother to consolidate the vibrant (if a little disorganised :-) open source and free gaming scene.
My plan of world domination for the awards is to have 2 weeks for votes to be cast, which should be enough time to effectively canvas the open source game playing community. That gives us 10 days to come up with and finalise the voting categories.
Also if anybody wants to create some cool graphics to hand out to the award winners, please volunteer because I am (you might be surprised to know) quite a busy person. :-)
I did have some game news but I'm saving it until tomorrow. ;-)
I think you should rate the games on creativity rather above anything or at least make it a major factor.
ReplyDeleteFor example Wesnoth is highly creative because it has its own storyline, characters, etc. Whereas if you look at a game like Wormux it is almost a worms clone with the weapons and even the voices of the characters being the same.
Not that it is bad, Wormux is suppose to be a clone but that is how I would go about rating different games from different genres and licenses effectively.
Also another factor which is more technical would be how complete the game is. When I mean complete I mean in game content terms not bugs in the game because that could be platform specific.
While I'm all for rewarding creativity in free gaming, I don't think it should be the be all and end all of our considerations.
ReplyDeleteFor one thing, there's a danger of promoting scrappy ambitious vaporware over polished and playable games. Which needn't be a bad thing in itself, but we risk reinforcing the stereotype of free gaming as being filled with buggy games and bad graphics.
On the other hand, by all means let's have a "most creative" category. Also probably a "most promising alpha".
Some other categories I'd like to see:
Best Art. Best Backstory/Game World. Best Free Resource Project (sprites, textures, models, WAVs, what have you...) Best Modding Support.
Best Modding Community.