Video Games and FOSS

The FOSS community have generally grown a kind of tacit acceptance of proprietary computer games. Everyone loves them, so nobody wants to make too much of a fuss, but I think we have good reasons to treat them differently.

Computer games do not - by default - require environment interaction. They can (mostly) operate in a container, without the need for theming, or opening various system files. They have no need to access a user's home directory.

At this point, we may as well treat them like a jpg, or a pdf. Nobody opens a book, then becomes sullen they don't have the source files. Source files for a book might be useful, but we're not worried, because the book doesn't pose any danger. It won't let some remote actor take our workflow hostage, or send advertising data back to some mothership.

The Steam launcher still poses problems, but if we could have a FOSS launcher, which handed out resources to the games (for saving games, updating, et c.), and could tell generally determine which resources the games could have access to, I don't think having proprietary games would pose any more problems than a proprietary pdf.