[Standards] ProtoXEP: Game Support

[Andrew Plotkin]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2008, Richard Dobson wrote:

> Sure exactly, as I said you need some kind of neutral third party for a lot 
> of games, be that a server or a bot it doesnt matter, but you cant do as the 
> previous poster seemed to suggest (as far as I read it) and just use bog 
> standard MUC and RPC between the players for all games.

Just to be clear, I *did* mean that we have a referee bot in the MUC. (The 
bot is the entity that sets up the MUC, in fact, although it currently 
doesn't use any MUC administrator functions beyond that.)

I also want to address this bit from an earlier post:

Torsten Grote <Torsten.Grote at gmx.de>:

> In my opinion this is one big hindrance for a large-scale adoption of
> Jabber. A fast growing pool of interoperable and fascinating games would
> drive many users to create and use Jabber accounts.

What we've found is that there's no need to drive people towards Jabber 
accounts -- you say "use your Livejournal or Google Chat address" and 
everyone's there. Or you tell them to register on a web site (people do 
that six times a day anyway) and then provision them a Jabber account. 
("Plays games, plus you can chat with it!")

The sticky point is getting people to download software. We find, in this 
day and age, that people won't play a game unless it runs in software they 
already have. That's a big obstacle for Jabber gaming: you want that to 
be a *fast-growing* pool of games, but nobody is going to download a new 
client update every week because another game came out.

Our solution was to have a custom client which could download individual 
game plugins itself. (In the form of Javascript code.) That worked great, 
but then nobody downloaded the custom client in the first place.

The current plan is to grit our teeth and make it a web app. Yes, it's a 
cliche, but people have web browsers and they expect everything to run in 
them. We're still using Jabber on the back end, so they will still get 
chat and federation with all the other Jabber users of the world.

We realize that "Jabber on the back end" doesn't do much for XMPP 
advocacy, but it's better than nothing, and our primary goal is to get 
people playing games. Whatever that takes.

The only flaw with the current plan is that it's a lot of work and it's 
not done yet. :/

--Z

-- 
"And Aholibamah bare Jeush, and Jaalam, and Korah: these were the borogoves..."
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