Crowdsourcing Video Game Development

There has been a rise of crowdfunding video games recently: the process of asking the community for money to make a game. This is a great paradigm shift in the video game industry, giving smaller developers the funds to make high-quality games. But I believe that this crowdsourcing movement can become even greater still! Instead of crowdfunding developers to make games, I foresee crowdsourcing game development, where a community contributes wholly to the creation of a game. Instead of contributing money to a developer so that they can make a game one would contribute their time and energy to the community, being part of the game development process.

Think for a moment of a wiki-like community effort to build a computer game; volunteers would contribute according to their skills and talents, with writers writing the lore and dialogue, artists drawing the world and it's inhabitants, musicians composing the background soundtrack, and programmers programming the functions in a modular way! Instead of a closed production where the users only grasp the surface of the design, this would be an open, creative commons of development.

We have seen open source development of software. Why not open source development of video games?

Linking Mental Abstractions

A collection of portals to great places, some of which may be mind-altering, set into some categories:

Renaissance men:
http://jaytholen.net/ - Incredibly bombastic chip music, pixel artist and game designer
http://themorlock.deviantart.com/ and http://themorlock.blogspot.ca/- Opinionated performer and artist
http://torley.com/4/ - A time-traveling, universe-crossing, autistic, cyberpunk monk
http://triobelisk.com/ - Mysterion of the Zoneplex, explorer, documenter of sound, lost pilot
http://wiki.xxiivv.com/ - Multi-media digital artist

Music Artists/Labels:
http://www.benhouge.com/ - Music composition, video games, performance, digital art
http://www.ektoplazm.com/ - Techno psytrance goodness
http://www.perelandrarecords.com/ - Chiptune hailing from the far off planet of perelandra
http://www.theprotomen.com/ - Facemelting rock inspired by megaman

Nth Dimensional thoughts:
http://alternativenonfiction.com/ - Modern magic
http://www.greatdreams.com/ - Unfathomable depths of deep dreaming
http://www.imperial-library.info/ - Archive of all knowledge of Nirn
http://larrycarlson.com/ - Legendary visionary psychedelic artist
http://www.rationality.net/ - Tranquility and happiness
http://www.techgnosis.com/index.php - Psychedelic insights

"Don't blame the wizard for where the portal takes you, for your own mind determines the destination."
I will keep revising and adding to this compilation in the years to come.

Photo Field Project 1

A slideshow of a small collection of photographs taken for a photo field project

I really like geometric shapes

 

FRANTIC | TRIANGULAR | ATTACK

Created by Evan using Java

The First Digital Medium

I believe that the first digital media was lightning, making the first digital medium the atmosphere.

The atmosphere produces both visual and audio, lightning and thunder, through the transmission of electricity. Electricity on, electricity off. It uses binary to create light-shows in the sky. Bearing that earth's atmosphere was created millions of years ago, this digital media has been around for quite some time. Although this media satisfies some definitions, unfortunately it does not satisfy others which bring into account human expression. But although not human expression, lightning may be the self-expression of another.