Unvanquished: Building a community as a service (Debian Conference)
Channel: La boîte à malice - Thomas Debesse
Date: 2020-12-23

00:00:00 Introduction
00:00:32 Building a community as a service
00:02:35 A story of id Tech engines
00:08:46 Competitor: Epic and Unreal engine
00:13:20 Competitor: Valve and Source engine
00:15:55 On Open Source side of things: Godot
00:16:47 id Software engines, editors and tools were templates
00:19:11 File formats meant to be forked
00:22:33 Editors meant to be forked
00:27:39 On software development and child sacrifice
00:31:24 Code induced mindset
00:34:35 On open source code and sharing human communities
00:38:54 Building a community and an ecosystem as a service
00:45:42 Questions


English full transcript: https://unvanquished.net/building-a-community-as-a-service/

French full transcript: https://linuxfr.org/news/batir-une-communaute-comme-un-service


From November 19th to 22nd, 2020, Debian organized an online “MiniDebConf” with video game as main theme, and nattie invited the Unvanquished project to submit a talk. As an active member of this project I proposed the following topic:

« Building a community as a service: how to stop suffering from “this code is supposed to be forked”. »

And here is the presentation:

« Earlier id Tech engines were well known to have seen their source code opened when they were replaced and thus unprofitable. While this was a huge benefit for mankind, game developers still suffer today from design choices and mindset induced by the fact such code base was meant to die. 20 years later we will focus on id Tech 3 heritage, how both the market, open source communities and development practices evolved, and embark in the journey of the required transition from dead code dump to an ecosystem as a service. »

Starting with various examples from the video game industry, the conference is the result of fifteen years of observation and immersion, and is developing a broader reflection on the nature of a service, the need to develop communities, the place of collaboration in an open source community, how design choices can induce a mindset that feeds design in turn, etc. Some issues are addressed such as the (possibly hidden) cost of certain practices, the nature of an economy, or how certain methods more readily encourage the production of waste or else the recycling of production.

Disclaimer: This conference topic chooses to study the legacy of id Software’s liberated code from a perspective that has been neglected by studies: what can be improved. id Software’s legacy has deeply changed the landscape, code liberation has fueled both academia and a lively passion in many people, and our Unvanquished game itself would simply not exist without this legacy. Thus, nothing should be taken away from the gratitude to the various actors who have made this possible. However, beyond focusing on what is very good, it seems interesting to also study what is less good, because it is often less success than failure that makes it possible to learn and surpass oneself.

This talk features personal opinions and makes use of colorful (if not doom-esque) metaphors.

This 45 minutes conference was given online, in english, on November 22, 2020 at 19:30 UTC.

Video on Debian peertube: https://peertube.debian.social/videos/watch/9063a45f-041e-4e48-a7c6-9dd31be49c1c

Git repository of the conference: https://gitlab.com/illwieckz/building-a-community-as-a-service/