Re: Policy for accepting new games in gnome-games

["Corey Burger" <corey burger gmail com>]

On 8/25/06, Jason D. Clinton <me jasonclinton com> wrote:
> Andreas Røsdal wrote:
> > I therefore don't think that we should begin accepting new games, but
> > rather focus on improving the current ones already in gnome-games. We
> > don't have an objective way of selecting new games, or deciding which
> > games to replace.
>
> I think that there are certainly some games which could be removed and
> indeed even some push from distros to do so (see Callum's email from
> 2006-05-30). And given that those games are removed, we could then
> consider adding a strong candidate for inclusion.
>
> This will not be popular unless the games replacing them have a wide
> appeal, low learning curve and high quality. This also fits in to the
> larger debate which was brought up by Tomboy: what is the identity of
> GNOME? What does module inclusion give to an application? Why does a
> GNOME Desktop exist at all and not just a Platform? For blessing? For
> translation? These are important questions which haven't been answered.
> I suspect that Jeff Waugh's recent "swimming upstream" has something to
> do with his desire to drive out some answers to those questions. In the
> mean time, we are left to figure it our for ourselves.
>
> So for now, I think that following games are strong candidates for removal:
>
> * Gnometris: almost unmaintainable; somewhat embarrassingly simple

There is a problem with removing this: It is one of the most popular
games and tetris is far from "embarassing simple". However, if the
code is unmaintainable, we have an issue.

> * Robots: low quality graphics; doesn't scale to screen size; not really
> our target audience, really targets the hacker/TTY folks who really
> probably aren't all that interested in playing a GTK+ version anyways.

I agree. My totally non-scientific poll reveals few play this as well.

> Games which are probably popular (will need to take survey to know for
> sure):
>
> * Aisleriot, Blackjack, Freecell
> * Mahjongg
> * Mines
> * Tetravex

Aisleriot, Mines and Mahjongg are certainly very popular. Tetravex is
somewhat and Blackjack non at all. However, I suspect all are very
popular, merely that the forums users who I polled don't play
blackjack (one mentioned his father plays it).

Part of the goal of bring new games in also involves bringing new
developers in. Hence why I spoke to moderately active projects with
existing developers, in the hopes they would come and help.

Corey