Talk:PlayPower

defunct?
Their website now says it has become a for-profit company. One of the co-founder lists it as a "project finished in 2012" http://danielrehn.com/projekt/playpower/ The source code for the games is no longer available (it was hosted in Ning, it seems): https://www.hastac.org/blogs/derek-lomas/2010/01/24/games-playpowers-workshop-india It would be nice if an editor modifies the page to mention this.

What happened
So, what happened in the end? Derek took the $180,000 grant and bought a house? There's certainly not much to show from the project, apparently a single game, not available in any physical cartridge form (ie useful to it's putative intended audience).

What's he done with the cash? He could've spent just a thousand, or a few hundred even, buying up the $10 Famiclones and shipping them to programming volunteers. Or setting up a small-scale facility to produce cartridges as cheaply as possible. Which would've been quite cheap, since you don't need the Nintendo proprietary 10NES chip to make software work on the bootleg Famiclone hardware.

I wanted to start work on this project myself, I had a couple of ideas and some programming ability. Not for the NES in assembler, but would've learned, or else used one of the small C compilers available.

If I were one of the poor Africans who was meant to have learned to type, and thus be able to earn $1 a day instead of $1 a month or whatever it was, I'd be a bit pissed off with Daniel and Derek.

If anyone decides to do this again, I'd be interested to hear.

94.197.121.144 (talk) 22:14, 16 December 2017 (UTC)

Worth sharing details on spending areas. The objective of the MacFound grant was to create an opensource devkit and community to facilitate new content creation for this platform. I feel pretty good about what we did there. Creating games and manufacturing them was not expected. Here's what we spent money on:

University overhead: 35% of the money. Hosted Workshops: In India, Brazil, NYC and Chicago (~$40k) Research Expenses: Travel + some paid local staff (published 3 papers, too) (~$5k) Equipment & shipping: production equipment (e.g., RetroUSB, EPROM burners), shipping stuff back and forth between USA and India (~$7k) Staff: we paid stipends to a bunch of folks (~$25k) Paid content development: while open source contributions were essential for the development platform, we paid for the actual development of the 3 games (~$20k), which we justified as being useful for the community Legal: we had to set up another organization to administer the grant (~$3k) Fun: we bought a bunch of old gaming platforms and games, like the Intellivision and Famicom BASIC. Some were then donated to computer history museums (e.g., Bill Buxton's). (~$3k) So, that's most of it. I still don't own a house :(

Other relevant events: having a baby and doing a PhD at the same time as managing this project was a challenge! That's part of the reason we started to develop online games, as it enabled us to run large online scientific experiments. The underlying goal of Playpower.org was to design software that could make a large-scale social impact on low-cost computers. It was pretty clear, even in 2009, that second-hand smart phones and computers were going to be a bigger long-term channel than famicoms. We've since contributed to XPrize edu and our web and mobile learning games have been played by over 3 million students. 145.94.153.160 (talk) 15:09, 24 January 2018 (UTC) Derek