Playing computer games can be a very relaxing and fun experience, especially after a hard day at work. Does this mean shutting down your Linux and booting straight into Microsoft Windows? Not at all! You can play plenty of games in the Linux environment.
Wine and Cedega
You can try running your favorite games that were designed for Microsoft Windows with Wine, a set of libraries and helper programs that translate Windows API calls to Linux system and library calls. This actually works pretty well for many games -- check the Wine application database for evaluations and hints on how to get your game of choice working. In 2D games, for example Age Of Empires II, you might experience a heavy speed penalty due to the still outstanding DIB engine.
If Wine doesn't do the job, you might try Cedega, a subscriber-based version of Wine with lots of additions and a focus on gaming. Cedega also has a database of games where you can check how well your favorite games work so you don't have to buy a pig in a poke.
Adventurous gamers may also try compiling Cedega from source: their CVS repository is public, although a bit of special functionality (like copy protection support) is missing. Transgaming, the company behind Cedega, has a regular release schedule and tries hard to keep the most popular games running.
Codeweavers, best known for selling "Crossover Linux" (formerly "Crossover Office"), an enhanced WINE version with a focus on productivity applications, has also recently decided to get more active in the field of gaming; like Transgaming, they naturally put most effort into popular games like World of Warcraft, but they have a history of working closely with the WINE project and contributing all of their work back. Transgaming, on the other hand, does so only in part.
Commercial and non-free games
And yes, some commercial vendors actually offer Linux binaries for their games. Loki Games, authors of the Simple DirectMedia Layer, used to port a lot of games to Linux, but they have been out of business for six years.
Nowadays you can buy games directly from Tux Games, or look out for games that offer Linux binaries for download. id Software, creators of classics like the Doom and Quake series, are well-known for their games' Linux support. The popular Neverwinter Nights series also come with Linux installers. Another big vendor is Epic Games, creator of the Unreal Tournament series of First Person Shooters, who releases well engineered GNU/Linux binaries with its products.
Since the games industry is not everyone's favorite source of commercial games, there's more information about independent games.
Free games
Most commercial games are not free software. For those of us that want to enjoy the four freedoms when playing games, a huge number of games in a multitude of genres are available.
You can start browsing them at general software development sites like Sourceforge or specialized Web sites like the ones mentioned in the next section of this article. Using the latter ones has the advantage that they often have reviews, offer user-contributed commenting functionality and let you immediately look at a screen shot.
To see examples of high quality games from different genres, take a look at the Breakout clone LBreakout2, the first person shooter Cube, the turn-based strategy game Battle for Wesnoth and the card game collection Aisleriot. Air plane enthusiasts definitely need to check out FlightGear, an advanced flight simulator with a host of scenery, map and aircraft add-ons. In case you'd rather stay firmly on the ground, you might want to try the 3D racing simulator torcs which is FlightGear's ground-based counterpart in terms of quality.
Of course, you might already have installed a bunch of games without knowing! Gnome and KDE both come with collections of excellent games, with a focus on the Arcade and Puzzle genres. The aforementioned Aisleriot, for example, is part of the Gnome Games package. Another example, this time from the KDE games collection is the innovative KSpaceDuel that challenges you with simulated gravity.
Emulators and engines
You can also use emulators to revive the games of the past. Most systems have at least one mature emulator for them, among them real classics like the Commodore C64, the Super Nintendo Entertainment System (SNES), the Commodore Amiga and the Sega Mega Drive, also known as Sega Genesis. Arcade cabinets are taken care of by the xmame system.
But not only hardware is emulated. Great efforts are underway to use the data files of games by reverse engineering their format and writing new engines for them. A very successful project in this category is ScummVM, an adventure game interpreter with focus on Lucas Arts adventures -- classics like Monkey Island or Maniac Mansion.
Staying informed
Over the course of the last decade, Linux gaming content has clustered significantly around some central Web sites, the most popular of which are probably Linux Gamers, Linux Games, and the Linux Game Tome.
They all help you to find games you might like, keep you up to date on the latest versions, and share your experiences with other players. The Linux Gamers' FAQ has a lot of useful information as well. Another comprehensive resource linked from this FAQ document is the Linux Gamer's Game List.
If your graphics adapter isn't strong enough for the games you'd like to play, you don't have much choice in getting a new one: until the Open Graphics Card is available (see next section for more information on this), your only pragmatic options are cards from Nvidia or ATI. Both require you to use non-free, binary-only drivers to exploit all of the card's functionality. Free software alternatives are faced with the difficulty of writing drivers for hardware without specifications; not an easy undertaking. They thus offer only a comparably small subset of their non-free counterparts' functionality or are still in their infant stages, like the Nouveau project that aims to write a free Nvidia driver with full 3D support. I don't know how well ATI packages their drivers nowadays, but about two years ago it was pure hell trying to get ATI cards to work, compar ed to the Nvidia driver -- especially on distributions that did not use the RPM utility for package management. My best advice back then would have been "buy an Nvidia" card, but nowadays ATI's drivers seem to have improved a lot and I'm tempted to try an ATI card as my next graphics card. Of course, only if the Open Graphics Card won't be available at this time!
What's next?
Gaming is not only fun, it's something with huge economical and social impact as well. If Linux wants to gain acceptance in the desktop segment, it has to attract the game-playing audience and their developers. Projects like Planeshift, an MMORPG show what the free software and content community is capable of, and a host of high-quality tools helps them in all stages of development.
For example, graphics artists have Blender and the all-famous Gimp. Programmers can use the power of advanced 3D engines like Crystal Space and Ogre, as well as 2D real-time strategy engines like Stratagus.
Sound creators will hardly miss anything with the readily available professional-grade Linux sound applications. The community in all likelihood gets their own graphics board soon! With all these assets, it is only a matter of time, effort and determination until Linux gaming has fully caught up with the competition.
As Ryan Gordon from icculus put it in a recent interview, "I guess you're asking what Linux gaming will look like in five years and, in a roundabout way, I'm answering: whatever we make it look like."
Leslie P. Polzer is a free software consultant and an experienced pastime gamer.