EA Open-Sources SimCity With $100 Laptop
The One Laptop Per Child initiative which strives to give children of developing nations equal and affordable access to modern educational tools, has received the gift of SimCity from Electronic Arts. The 18-year old franchise was donated to the OLPC project by EA as a time-honored piece of "edutainment" software.
"The game should prove to be an incredibly effective way of making the laptop relevant, engaging, and fun, particularly for first time players," said Steve Seabolt, the vice president of global brand development of The Sims franchise.
But the gift is not a version simply ported for use on OLPC's Linux platform. Though a multi-player educational version for Linux/X11 was developed several years ago, EA's gift is the original 1989 SimCity open source.
While it may not be the children in third world countries adopting Sim City's blueprint to develop their own games, perhaps this means that versions of the game will be tailor-made to better suit the needs of children in developing countries.
12:25 pm EST November 12, 2007 - Last Thursday, when BetaNews asked EA if the version of SimCity it had intended to donate was the port in which programmer Don Hopkins had taken part, EA told us no.
But Hopkins told BetaNews this morning the gift is the source code of his multi-player educational version which he ported from Mac to Unix in 1993, and recently adapted to the OLPC.
"The mission is to rewrite the multi-player mode in terms of the OLPC's advanced mesh networking libraries, using a much more modern and efficient architecture than the X11 protocol used by the old multi-player mode," Hopkins told us, "The whole point of the OLPC program using Open Source Software is so the countries using it can customize the software to their own needs."
"The multi-player support is still in there, but it is hard for kids to use, because it requires entering an IP address and disabling X11 network security," he continued. "It can be turned back on by a command line switch, which is disabled by default. We decided to disable it for the time being just to get the game through Quality Assurance and out the door. But since it's open source, you can turn back on if you like."
Hopkins then took issue with our contention that a version of SimCity might need to be re-tailored to meet the interests of children in emerging nations.
"The OLPC project has every intention of teaching kids in developing countries to program computers and create their own games," Hopkins told BetaNews. "To imply that kids in 'third world countries' can't learn to program just as well as kids anywhere, or that the developing countries aren't the ones who know best what their own needs are, is bigoted and condescending, and reeks of cultural imperialism. The whole point of the OLPC program using Open Source Software is so the countries using it can customize the software to their own needs."