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Paraphrasing, art (as opposed to software) is something contributed to society for enjoyment, software is for work. How is a game for work? To qualify this, I

by bmj 14y ago

Paraphrasing, art (as opposed to software) is something contributed to society for enjoyment, software is for work. How is a game for work? To qualify this, I don't necessarily disagree completely with RMS' aims for free and open software, but I don't see the functional distinction between the functionality of a game and the art used in the game.

Jach 14y ago
Here's the non-paraphrased portion (which I should have just copied verbatim beforehand, I suppose): "If you use something to do jobs in your life, you must be free to change it today, and then distribute your changed version today in case others need what you need. "Art contributes something different to society. You appreciate it. Modifying art can be a further contribution to art, but it is not crucial to be able to do that today. If you had to wait 10 years for the copyright to expire, that would be ok." So it's more that a program is a tool for work, such as simulating physics, running an AI state machine, animating skeletons, or rendering polygons, while art is just there to look at. You could argue that the game isn't complete without both, and you'd be right, but the art can be swapped out for random pixels and the game will still work whereas the code cannot be swapped with random other code. The functional distinction comes from software being breakable, it's a machine. Art isn't really breakable, it's just ugly (to some people). If the physics engine of a Free game has a bug, users could fix it themselves and announce their changes in case someone else hits that bug--or even report it to the game maker's public bug tracker with a patch. There's also a factor of urgency involved that I didn't mention in my paraphrasing. If a game is broken, it needs a patch ASAP. If it's just ugly (to some people), that doesn't really need to be fixed right away. Plus if non-commercial modification is allowed, people who find it ugly can release "better" versions (which may be new assets or may be a hack to the game engine that adds new shader programs). It does seem to get more complicated in the video game world where sometimes the distinction between program and art is blurred. In a hypothetical game with a completely free engine, I'd expect the non-free "art" to consist of base graphics that are manipulated by the engine. The manipulating code is free (and will work for any piece of art fitting the requirements it has, which may be quite restrictive), the input to the engine is not.
- aidenn0 14y ago
  I really don't get where the line is. Which of these are art, which are code? 1) A Windows Metafile (A list of commands to send to the windows GDI API, used to store images, but may also run code) 2) An SVG 3) An SVG that is programatically generated animated with Lua 4) A demoscene type demo 5) A postscript document 6) These postscript documents: http://home.thep.lu.se/~bjorn/postscript/ http://home.thep.lu.se/~bjorn/postscript/

by bmj 14y ago

Jach 14y ago

Here's the non-paraphrased portion (which I should have just copied verbatim beforehand, I suppose): "If you use something to do jobs in your life, you must be free to change it today, and then distribute your changed version today in case others need what you need. "Art contributes something different to society. You appreciate it. Modifying art can be a further contribution to art, but it is not crucial to be able to do that today. If you had to wait 10 years for the copyright to expire, that would be ok." So it's more that a program is a tool for work, such as simulating physics, running an AI state machine, animating skeletons, or rendering polygons, while art is just there to look at. You could argue that the game isn't complete without both, and you'd be right, but the art can be swapped out for random pixels and the game will still work whereas the code cannot be swapped with random other code. The functional distinction comes from software being breakable, it's a machine. Art isn't really breakable, it's just ugly (to some people). If the physics engine of a Free game has a bug, users could fix it themselves and announce their changes in case someone else hits that bug--or even report it to the game maker's public bug tracker with a patch. There's also a factor of urgency involved that I didn't mention in my paraphrasing. If a game is broken, it needs a patch ASAP. If it's just ugly (to some people), that doesn't really need to be fixed right away. Plus if non-commercial modification is allowed, people who find it ugly can release "better" versions (which may be new assets or may be a hack to the game engine that adds new shader programs). It does seem to get more complicated in the video game world where sometimes the distinction between program and art is blurred. In a hypothetical game with a completely free engine, I'd expect the non-free "art" to consist of base graphics that are manipulated by the engine. The manipulating code is free (and will work for any piece of art fitting the requirements it has, which may be quite restrictive), the input to the engine is not.

aidenn0 14y ago
I really don't get where the line is. Which of these are art, which are code? 1) A Windows Metafile (A list of commands to send to the windows GDI API, used to store images, but may also run code) 2) An SVG 3) An SVG that is programatically generated animated with Lua 4) A demoscene type demo 5) A postscript document 6) These postscript documents: http://home.thep.lu.se/~bjorn/postscript/ http://home.thep.lu.se/~bjorn/postscript/