The Gaming Philosopher

The number of voters was particularly low this year, but those that did vote made The Baron the winner of this year's Spring Thing ! I'm hoping that some reviews will pop up on the newsgroup later today.

Reading up on the struggle for a free information society, notably in Lawrence Lessig's Free Culture and Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks , I was inspired* to think about the similarities and dissimilarities between the Open Source Software community and the Interactive Fiction community. Both consist of individuals creating software for each other to enjoy for free; but the OSS community seems to be more 'open' in at least three different ways. I believe that it would be immensely beneficial for the IF community if it were to get rid of the following three kinds of closedness: Most Interactive Fiction is published under closed source licenses, or under no explicit license at all. Even when the source is available, this is never (or next to never) used by people to improve the works of others. Quite in general, the ethos seems to be that only the original authors of a work should change it, and that it is off-limits for others to do so. But a large part of th...

I am not allowed to discuss the piece for the duration of the competition, but I suppose I am allowed to link to the first - as far as I know of - publicly available review of The Baron : link . Ooh, and here is another one .

Well, look what I came across in Guy Debord's 1967 book The Society of the Spectacle : The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. The statement seems tailor-made for RPGs. And I have to admit, I like this notion of 'the spectacle'; it is a great word, which carries a lot of significance.