Gaming Daily A-Z

Today I'd like to talk about how free culture can be (perhaps counter-intuitively) good for the commercial games business.  I'm using Dungeons & Dragons (and its recent and highly successful fork, Pathfinder ) as a concrete example of what I'm talking about, but there's no reason this couldn't also apply to computer games as well. I've been a Dungeons & Dragons geek for 20 years now, pretty much since I was introduced to it my freshman year of high school.  Back in my high school days, D&D was in its second edition and the internet was in its infancy.  Dungeons and Dragons was owned by a litigious beast of a company called TSR, which was well known for sending nastygrams every time someone put up a web page with any fan-created D&D content.  This was particularly ironic, since the whole idea behind Dungeons & Dragons was that they threw some rule books at you and then told you to create your own content with them. In the late 1990s, for a var...

A long time ago, on the old FreeGameD ev forum, I heard of Purity ; an original game based on the idTech3 engine. Recently, I was wondering what the project had become, and with the help of a few people on the irc channel, we managed to find the website, unfortunately, it appears the development stopped two years ago. But the game is pretty cool, let me explain you what makes it interesting: In Purity, there are no enemies! The enemy is the map, and you have to get you to the end. In order to do that, you have 4 weapons: -The PULS attack : a red rocket. It allows you to activate red switches, and it allows you to jump. Right, in purity, you have no "jump button". You wanna jump? Shoot your feet, and you'll be sent in the air. There is no lives or damage in purity, so it is not a big deal to shoot right between your feet. You can also shoot the walls while you're in the air to project yourself higher. People who know DeFrag won't be surprised by this technique. -Th...