Some of the current games don’t appeal to normal users, I would prefer to see them split off like has already been mentioned (Klotski, Iagno, and Robots are some I’d prefer not to have).

I don’t think the size of the package matters (within reason), because the internet is getting faster, and hard drives are getting bigger, but, even now, the games menu seems bloated, so I would vote for games sub-menus.

Pinball would be fun too…

So, say there are a set of game categories, like “Card game”, “Chess/checkers game”, “Falling blocks game”, “Bouncing ball game”, “Invaders game”, “Platform game”, etc. and one game “package” for each category able to implement multiple variants of that type of game. So the “Card Game” category game might play several different solitaire variants, cribbage, poker, etc. The “Bouncing Ball Game” entry might do pong, breakout, billiards, foosball, and pinball.

It sounds like there is an issue currently, in that Gnome Games gets many proposed *new* games, but has a harder time attracting maintainers for already accepted games. There seems to be good motivation for getting *in* - namely, seeing your game and your name installed on every Gnome desktop - but less motivation for maintaining/improving the game.

A thought for addressing this might involve encouraging a “engine + implementations” architecture, where certain code, artwork, and so on is shared by multiple games. A requirement could be set that a game implementation must be no larger than X mb’s, but that anything it uses from the engine (and shared resources) is not counted against it. This would allow people the freedom to create new games, but encourage them to reuse or update the shared portions.

To combine both of the above ideas, Gnome Games could allow anyone to propose a replacement for a given category, so long as it implements ALL the games and functionality of the current entry in that slot, *plus one* new game implementation, and must fit within specified disk, memory, and cpu requirements.

As such I would nominate Mines, Solitaire, and whatever games people actually play out of windows. Any distro can create a games meta-package, I don’t see why Gnome would want to be involved in that.

On the counter side, that’s not so say each individual game must have it’s own package - some grouping is probably desirable just to avoid a massive increase in package numbers, if nothing else.

Less is more: It’s important for a default GNOME install to have some games but having a wide selection of games is not as important. A smaller selection of games should make it easier to maintain. 17 is really too many.

Consistent Look and Feel: One of the things that makes good games great is great graphics. I’m not talking about fancy 3D stuff and fog and what not but just easy-on-the-eyes good looks. I would love it if we could have a sort of Tango for games - a set of color and drawing guidelines for game elements so that things look good and look like they belong together. Why is frozen bubbles more popular than monkey bubbles? graphics and music - that is all.

Just Works™ Networking: Avahi should be used in games where it makes sense to make it brain-dead simple to play against someone on your local network. Perhaps tubes / xmpp to play against friends elsewhere. Again, though, consistently. Any game where network play might make sense should have the same UI for it. It might be prudent to work out some protocol guidelines as well.

Instant Gratification: GNOME is used by people who should be working. One major qualifier for inclusion should that the user can play for a minute or two with some sense of gratification and then stop. A game could be addictive so that the user doesn’t want to stop, but if I only want to play to relax a little and then get back to work I should be able to. That probably rules out nethack

What if the gnome-games future is not as a big pre-installable collection of games, nor as a split-apart collection of individual packages, but as a sort of “MiniClip on your desktop”, a desktop front-end of a free games “portal”, where the games can be downloaded from? Unlike the typical web games portal, this would be focused on *free* games (in both senses of the word), could support either games that work in a web browser, or those easily installed to the gnome-games sandbox (that obviously doesn’t exist now, but could). Like the portals, it could offer online highscores, a meeting place for finding multiplayer opponents, updates, and latest games recommendations.

Just a thought.