Looking for a FLOSS interactive game/story/fiction project for research (Help!)

[Sean Hammond]

I'm doing research that involves computer games, specifically games
which involve the player in a narrative of some form - story games,
adventure games, interactive drama, interactive fiction, ideally I'm
interested in childrens games and fairy tale games with simple
stories.

I know that's a vague definition of a type of game, but I intended it
to be vague. I need a game, or some games, which I can design
experiments around and which maybe I can build research tools on top
of.

Can anyone recommend any game(s) like this which are FLOSS, or which
are at least freely available and easy to get working on Linux?

Most academic research in this sort of area uses commercial games like
Unreal Tournament, Neverwinter Nights or Half Life 2. They either use
these games directly in studies, or they make their research tools as
'mods' to these games (usually removing the combat-oriented elements
in favour of more character and story stuff). There are some projects
which develop their own games, such as the Facade project
(http://www.interactivestory.net/), but, as with the facade project,
the code developed always seems to be proprietary and will only run on
Windows XP.

I believe in doing research using free software. Particularly, I want
any software I develop as part of my research to be free software, and
to not depend on any proprietary software. Ideally I'd like to have
some code at the end of my research which, after some finishing up
work, I could attempt to package for Debian or Ubuntu, or I'd like to
have contributed to some FLOSS project. Additionnally, I can't get
Windows to run on my PC, at least not without going to extreme
lengths. And lastly, I find having to work with and depend on and
generally come into contact with Windows and proprietary commercial
products from the games industry very depressing. It causes my
motivation to drop very steeply, and I need to be motivated if I'm
going to succeed at this research.

I just wasted a few hours (once again) trying to get Unreal Tournament
to install on Linux, which is probably pointless anyway because the
research 'mod' I want to test with it was written in Java and there
are no instructions to get it working. It probably has other
proprietary dependencies that aren't documented.

So, this is a call for help. I don't want to get sucked into this
commercial hell. I need some sort of FLOSS project which I can design
my research around.

Any suggestions would be appreciated.

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