Comp Games Should Be Playable on the Web & Downloadable

[matt_weiner (matt w)]

@dfabulich

@matt w

If we are to permit only downloadable games, and frown on locally executable games that aren’t run on interpreters – well, then we’re stuck with the formats supported by the interpreters that you can compile yourself, forevermore.

This thread is pretty long, but I think Hannes’ proposal was just that the games should be downloadable, not that we should frown on executables. As I understand it, all three of the games in IFComp 2012 that didn’t provide files for download could easily have done so, just by shipping the HTML+JS in a zip. They wouldn’t be playable in Gargoyle, but they would be playable in a web browser by double-clicking, which I think satisfies the goal of archivability, within reason.

Well, I was thinking of this:

@Hannes

(On a sidenote, I am of course aware of the possibility of embedding spyware/whatever in a locally executable game. Which is why I frown at them, too. However, I would assume that running a game in the controlled environment of an interpreter which I have compiled myself is safe enough.)

I take it that this means that, if you’re concerned with spyware and malware, you don’t want to play local executables either, unless they’re sandboxed files that run in interpreters. In fact, in at least one case that I can think of a homebrewed downloadable game had some malware issues.

Downloading the HTML + JS so the game can run in your browser wouldn’t address this issue, would it? The JS could still run scripts you might not want. I don’t really understand the technical aspects of it (for instance, I don’t really know whether I used “sandboxed” correctly in the previous paragraph).