Don't bother reading this if you want anything informative. It's a rant.
It's been a while since I had the lists on the blog, and they will return one day. Not least because I'm fed up of seeing list after list after list of ~7-20 open source games pop up in cheap attempts to get web traffic.
Often the lists just comb over the same popular games that most people should know about already and are much listed all over the net, but they still get dugg or fsdaily'ed or whatever-the-latest-craze-site-is'ed. The standards are often too low on these sites (in general). I'm sure people just click '+' without really reading.
What's worse is that these lists are usually poorly researched, such as this one (don't click unless you want proof - link). Very little info is given on each game, just youtube vids of the games most people are likely to already know about. The author states all the games in the list are open source, then puts America's Army in at #3 (AA was not open source last time I looked). And linking Tux Racer despite it being long ago abandoned? Why not do the world a favour and bother looking this up? I mean this information is not hard to come by - the Wikipedia entry covers the current Tux Racer king which is Extreme Tux Racer, and the ETR site is the 4th bloody result on Google for 'tux racer'. So all these people do is probably hurt ETR by directing traffic away from it to an old dead game. Meh.
Every "hey look at me I know 5 games" list I see has some kind of annoying issue like the above. It's disinformation, it's cheap crap, and it bothers me (probably more than most since I put a lot of time into getting correct information out there).
Maybe I'm just being a bit overly touchy about the issue, after all, the noise gets traffic to go to [mainly] open source games and that's a Good Thing (tm). However, the best thing people can do is raise awareness of the proper places to find such information. Next time you see a crap list, redirect them to LibreGameWiki or Qubodup's list or this list on the Ubuntu forums or perhaps even here.
I feel better now. Thanks for reading (or not).
I agree with you.
ReplyDeleteSeeing the very same games over and over and over again in every list is pointless.
That's why I love your blog, many of the games you publish here are new for me.
Every week you can see a new thread on Ubuntuforums about top X games...why is the search button for ?
America´s Army is also at the top of the ubuntu list you mentioned ?
ReplyDeleteYes, and it is also a list that the author does not claim to be all open source games.
ReplyDeleteYea. I mean, at first I was ecstatic when I started seeing these lists pop up on fsdaily. But after about the fifth list wihout me learning about one new game, I've started getting exasperated. I wish there were more fervor in these people to get new projects going or point promotion and funding at particular projects and it weren't all just an attempt to ape other low level bloggers for content.
ReplyDeleteI agree with you...
ReplyDeleteI am kind of peeved of the lists (and many of them have this problem even the good ones) have dead links.
Its not good. New comers will not take us seriously if these dead lists exist. I gave up on anything that wasn't on source forge until I found your blog.
Wikipedia has a list of a fair few open source game, the only problem is that you have to go through the list of 50+ games to find which ones died 4 years ago.
ReplyDeleteThis comment has been removed by the author.
ReplyDeleteIs libregamewiki.org working? It's been months since I could last check the site: it can't be reached, no matter how long I wait.
ReplyDeletehttp://libregamewiki.org has been up and working every time I tried it for the last several months and is up now...
ReplyDeleteWell, I don't get it. My firewall (ipfilter/firesterter) is blocking the connections to the site, but I have no such rules. I'll need to check it. I thought the server was down.
ReplyDeleteLists are not articles, lists are lists. It'd be nice if more detail was provided, but if that's not the focus of the post, so be it.
ReplyDeleteIf people keep '+'ing them, that suggests that they're new to the readership of that particular blog/site at least, which has got to be a win for OS gaming.
I totally agree with the rant. I was feeling the same pain actually and then I searched on open source gaming and added the word "blog" to it and found your site. Glad someone is watching this space because it is really impressive. I am a 38 y/o dad and have found my kids (3 and 6) LOVE Tux Paint and Pingus and so I've been looking for more in that vein. Thanks for the links to the good lists.
ReplyDelete