The Money Donating Game
qubodup, June 1st, 2009
I donated 92 EUR (130 USD) to OpenGameArt (OGA). The money will be used to finance art commissions chosen by OGA’s admin, Bart. The art will be released under the GPL2/3+ and CC-BY-SA3+ licenses.
I was not just donating money towards a cause that I like, I was also playing a massively multiplayer game of “fill the progress bar”. The rules are simple: you and other players around the world donate money until a donation status bar is filled. For clarification, take a look at the “Mixing Games and Applications” presentation, in particular p. 41.
For a status bar to exist, there needs to be a limit and when the limit is reached, something has to happen.
- In OGA’s case the goal is “commision of a freely licensed piece of game art”.
- In Howitzer Skirmish’s case it was supposed to be “development of an open source game” (technical problems prevented success).
- For Ardour it is “allowing the developer to work maximum possible time on the free software DAW”.
Ardour features monthly subscribtion-donations. A yearly donation produces 3.30 USD less fees though. You can also finance Ardour feature requests. However they lack limits and thus progress bars and people seem to underestimate their value (or are just not interested).
Projects that want money should figure out limits/goals and use progress bars. Or at least graphs - something to feed the eyes - players usually like to consume graphics after all. For example PMLE could use them, as there are “donation limits” set for some compositions already. Unfortunately, there are no freely available scripts for automated donation visualization.
PS: Ardour’s developer told me that he uses the Drupal lm_paypal module for the subscription system. The rest is being done through some PHP, which he might release in a month or two.
