[Standards-JIG] Re: proto-JEP: User Gaming

[Frank van Schie]

Andreas Monitzer schreef:
> On Sep 01, 2006, at 11:06, Heiner Wolf wrote:
> 
>> For such an opportunity we need a really useful spec and a really  
>> good and widely deployed client. Most of us are not experts in  
>> designing IM clients specifically for the need of gamers. We would  
>> need hard core gamers of different games to tell us what kind of  
>> information a real gamer would like to see. I (as a level 60 WoW  
>> player) can only make informed guesses.
> 
> 
> My stance is, as soon as you have to think about different kinds of  
> games, you're not designing generic enough.

Paragraphs are your friend.

I agree with your point.

> I'd suggest separating the generic information just between "looking  
> for someone for playing", "currently playing" and a place to put the  
> required game-specific information to (using its own namespace). If  
> someone really wants to use XMPP as the game communication protocol  
> (definitely viable for round-based games), it should just use message- 
> packets containing some custom extension (in its own namespace).

There is essentially two attributes of a game that are constant:
- Whether or not you are playing it (or wanting to play it, or 
insert-status-here)
- The name of the game.

All the rest can vary, sometimes slightly, sometimes greatly.

It seems to me that that the only way to properly offer information 
about a game that is of use to that particular game, is to make the 
actual field names and their contents freeform, backed by some registry.

You may also want some sort of language-independant ID for a game or 
piece of software. MSN uses such IDs to start games and other software 
with a value stored in the registry (games ensure they have updated the 
registry with appropriate startup information for their ID-tag) to allow 
all sorts of nice client-side stuff, when it's supported by games.
-- 
Frank