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C I R C U M L U N A R
T R A N S M I S S I O N S
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Issue One May 2021
by wholesomedonut
Since getting into the FOSS community, I see a lot of pushback towards the gaming industry as a whole. I can see why: DRM runs rampant, terrible business practices regularly conflagrate internet forums, anti-cheat programs are basically consensual (and mandatory for official online play in some cases) trojans, and to make it all worse it costs a mint to get into the hobby nowadays due to scalpers and crypto miners running rampant in the market.
I agree with all of those observations. They tire me. They concern me. They frustrate me daily.
However! There are still reasons -not- to go the route of some I see in the FOSS world and eschew gaming altogether on anything but a FOSS platform, with FOSS games, because.... FOSS. That argument is just as dumb in practice, because it's an artificial limitation that stands on somewhat subjective, opinionated reasoning. "But wholesomedonut, thou angereth me!" I hear in the imaginary comments section because this is Gemini and you can't do that. I am certain you will find peace through measured contemplation and a cup of whatever warm or cold liquid you enjoy.
Well.... everyone else that isn't a computer nerd usually does too. And the overhead for getting people of minimum technical understanding (that like playing video games) into FOSS gaming generally is much more costly in terms of mental and social capacity than the clout I usually have with my friends or family on such matters.
King's English: If I have to instruct them to download the latest version of the game directly from Github in the Releases tab, or from some random website they've never heard of (even if it looks nice and is HTTPS secure) instead of just adding it on Steam or Epic or Microsoft Store or PS/Xbox or some-other thing, there is a solid 90% chance I'm going to lose that argument unless they are very specifically interested in that particular kind of game, its' content, or have a better socially-driven reason. This comes from years of trying and f'nagling with people from many walks of life; the UI and UX of FOSS gaming needs to be on-par with modern commercial offerings; this means all the way from landing on a page, to funneling through a sales conversion or free download, to playing the game with their friends needs to be understandable, unobtrusive and transparent. That is, if the overall userbase is to grow and sustain itself on a higher magnitude than current.
People are intelligent, generally. They're very skilled in a multitude of things that aren't computers. But asking someone who -isn't- tech savvy to figure out how to pull down the right version of a FOSS game from a code repo (or heaven forbid build it themselves with cmake or whatever) is like asking ME to diagnose a car's problems using nothing but a flashlight and a screwdriver. I have no idea what the hell I'm doing anyway in that department. Without the proper tools and education too? I'm screwed. Therefore I urge empathy and patience in introducing others to FOSS gaming. It's a bit more finicky than the plug-and-play mentality commercial systems have fostered.
A good example of a FOSS game that has plenty of good and bad would be MegaMek. It's basically a fully computerized version of the Classic Battletech rules, which is a board game that's existed since the 1980s and is going on 40 years of conniving, number-crunching tomfoolery that only a particular subset of people even enjoy. All in the name of combined-arms strategy on a hex board that involves groups of multi-ton robots, tanks, airplanes and infantry taking and giving damage to individual components, weapons and armor locations in a somewhat realistic and highly detailed simulation of 31st-century warfare.
To alleviate the issue of significant calculational overhead for every-single-action-attack-or-damage-roll-ever, this program does all of the math, calculations, and rules proofing for you. So you can enjoy the game with others, wherever they may be, instead of reaching for your G.A.T.O.R. card for the tenth time to show the newbie of the group what happens when an SRM-6 missile spread hits a light vehicle whose armor is already exposed on its' left flank. There are plenty of grognards out there who know these rules well and can do half the game in their head: they're obviously not the target of this article.
I shiver at the thought of doing all that stuff manually if I don't have to. That kind of tedium takes away from the moment-by-moment gameplay, forcing everybody to get ox-in-the-mired over details that don't matter overall instead of letting their big stompy robots blow each other up.
Megamek works wonders in that regard. A game of Classic Battletech that could easily take 5 or 6 hours in person without any sort of calculator apps or an otherwise breakneck pace of gameplay and rules-lawyering will only take an hour or two maximum with Megamek. It's a godsend for a hobby that would otherwise be relegated to local play over predetermined days, not a "Hey want to play a match? Sure!" kind of casual pickup on a boring afternoon.
Nope! Megamek is, in my humble and donut-shaped opinion, a terrible example of UI and UX. I played a round recently, and another aficionado of the series played against me. Quoth my opponent: "This program looks like something out of Windows 95." Neither of us had played the most recent version of the game. I hadn't touched it in a year at least.
Some changes were welcome, and the development progresses smoothly. But it's still just as much a spaghetti plate in terms of user experience: configuration options laid out in long lists of check boxes organized by multiple top-window tabs; a decidedly 15-years-old design language that clashes with modern perceptions of UI and UX (which is bad considering that taking in new blood is crucial for both userbase and developer contribution reasons); and the final nail in the coffin is the fact that the much easier and more recent Alpha Strike ruleset isn't included at all by default, to my knowledge. You might be able to configure something like that using plugins, but we're already putting the cart before the horse at that point.
The project started in 2000. It's 21 years old in some places, if only in logic and not literal syntax. It's written in Java. And it's been a community effort by dozens of talented people over the decades. The fact that it's alive at all is impressive, but so's the fact that the franchise whose boardgame it emulates even has a fanbase still. BT fans aren't quitters, certainly. And this is all considering the fact that trying to automate, obfuscate and de-FUBAR the mountain of minutiae that Battletech's rulesets and technical data (on a per unit and per variant basis no less) is a monumental task. I can hardly think of a video-game adaptation of a more complex board game that does a better job, in proportion to the complexity of the physical source material and gameplay flow.
So considering it was made in the waning days of Win98 (because Windows ME doesn't exist and you can't convince me otherwise) it's expected that it's ugly as most things were back then. It was written in Java (yea verily, begone foul JVM!), which for all its' foibles makes a very easy cross-platform distributable program. It's solidly a relic of an earlier time of online gaming, where dial-up connections were still common. That's a given. And it is what it is. I won't waste time bemoaning those facts that are immutable in this context. I'm only stating them to set the stage.
There is no other way I could ever play Battletech with friends from all over the world in such a great degree of fidelity. Megamek serves its' purpose very well for what it is: a highly detailed computerization of a niche franchise that has a fanbase spanning generations. However, it also stands out to me as one of the prime examples of a FOSS project being understandably opaque to newcomers. It's hard to use at first, hard to look at always, and sometimes hard to find other people to play it with. Those three things will nail the coffin of any fledgling game shut. That concept is true regardless of genre, art style, or UI/UX.
So, I leave it to you to put the pieces together here. I can choose to play with average people that A) aren't technically inclined, B) don't have a heart that beats for free-as-in-freedom, and C) want something that "just works," or confine myself to a much smaller content base with an even smaller playerbase to share it with.
Call me the gaming nerd Whore of Babylon, but I don't see the point in beating my head against the wall overtly trying to make my hobby free and open if there isn't a platform for those newcomers to even stand on and explore once (or if ever) they choose to get involved in FOSS gaming of their own volition.
I encourage people who play video games which are also interested in free and open source software to consider the prospect of inviting others into this world of free-as-in-freedom/beer/whatever with a grain of salt. Until we make it easier to onboard new people from all walks of life, significant adoption of FOSS systems or the games that run on them will not be seen. And therefore we will not see the requisite uptick in talent, contribution and playerbase that will consequently drive a growth in production quality, variety, and competitiveness in the market space of people's free time.
external email: wholesomedonut at tuta dot io
mastodon: at wholesomedonut at fosstodon dot org
matrix: at wholesomedonut colon matrix dot org
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