Free Culture Gaming!

This page will lay out some guidelines for games to be played at Free Culture Gaming sessions.

In general, there are two major components to any game: Engine and Media. The Engine of a game is the programming logic that makes the game go — how characters move and act, how a HUD is displayed,  and other parts that make up the game’s mechanics. The Media of a game is the set of the game’s visual, aural, and textual elements, including character models, music, sounds, and story text.

The aim of Free Culture Gaming is to promote games that contribute to a free and open commons of content. Therefore, for any game to be played at a Free Culture Gaming session, the following criteria must be met:

1. The Engine of the game must be released under a license compatible with the FSF’s Free Software Definition.
2. The Media of the game must be released under a license compatible with Freedom Defined’s definition of a Free Cultural Work.

Any game with an article at the Libre Game Wiki meets these criteria.

In addition, there are some additional practical considerations that people should keep in mind when suggesting games for play:

1. The game should be complete enough to be reasonably playable.
2. The game should allow play between multiple people.
3. The game should be as cross-platform as possible so as to include the most number of people.
4. The game should be easily installable; RPMs, DEBs, and Windows installers are ideal. Other situations depend on context; being forced to compile from source may work for Linux, but may prove cumbersome for Windows users.
5. One session of the game should take about 3 hours or less. People are busy, and may not have time for a marathon session of FreeCiv.

Games not meeting these criteria may still be considered, but it may be harder to get a game of it going. A long game may be delayed and given its own day-long session, for instance.

Discussion on any of these points is welcome.