[MUD-Dev2] Austin GDC meet: Web 2.0 and Games

[Matt Chatterley]

On 31/08/07, Bristle <bristle2008 at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> Adam Martin said:
> > For anyone going to AGDC, a couple of us are going to get together and
> > chat about the head-on-collision between games and Web 2.0. Come along
> > and see if you can outdo everyone else by picking an even larger
> > number and sticking it on the end of a word (why stop at Games 3.0?
> > Let's go to a hundred!).
> >
>
> Web 2.0 is an interesting concept if you step up a notch from forums and
> IRC chat.  With a little bit of squinting, you will see a backwards mud
> since the goal is to 1) provide a rich-media environment and 2)
> real-time multiuser interaction.
>
> Actually text-based muds fit nicely into the Web 2.0 model. It's time to
> kick out IRC and put muds in.  3D could still be a problem - look at
> VRML 1.0, 2.0, 3Dweb for a history of that.
>
> The old argument was that people would only use one web browser and this
> is still true. But IRC is done with a Java client that is a plugin. This
> is the time to really push on a great java-based mud client. I mean a
> nice clean client, not like the ugh thing that Yahoo puts out.

I'm going to chance my arm a bit here and make a bold statement.

For "Web 2.0" to become more than a buzz-word, it is going to take an
imaginative, passionate and driven group of people to do something truly
ground-breaking and adventurous.

Sure. Some of the web-apps which are springing up make good use of the
technologies which are cited as cornerstones of web 2.0 (previously
known as DHTML, AJAX, etc - its all been around for donkeys years, just
not seen as mainstream) - Google Mail is a nice AJAX application;
windows live mail a poor one (very slow), and there are far more
examples out there.

However. It's not really that new or exciting. Its the same old bread
and water, just a bit slicker.

Games tend to push technological boundaries, particularly when
technology limits the vision and desires of the game-makers.

The same simply is not true of 99.99% of application developers -
firstly because you tend to design tools within known boundaries, and
secondly because I just can't imagine a circumstance where someone
creating a word processor would say "Damn. It'd be so cool if we could
spellcheck words BEFORE you type them. Lets invent the QUANTUM SPELL
CHECKER!".

Game developers on the otherhand, often shoot at the
hard-and-nigh-on-impossible - solid NLP, Artificial Stupidity, and so
forth.

I'm certainly waiting for something exciting to happen!


Cheers,

Matt