D&D On Google Wave 118
Jon Stokes at the Opposable Thumbs blog relates his experience using Google Wave as a platform for Dungeons and Dragons — the true test of success for any new communications technology. A post at Spirits of Eden lists some of Wave's strengths for gaming. Quoting:
"The few games I'm following typically have at least three waves: one for recruiting and general discussion, another for out-of-character interactions ('table talk'), and the main wave where the actual in-character gaming takes place. Individual players are also encouraged to start waves between themselves for any conversations that the GM shouldn't be privy to. Character sheets can be posted in a private wave between a player and the GM, and character biographies can go anywhere where the other players can get access to them. The waves are persistent, accessible to anyone who's added to them, and include the ability to track changes, so they ultimately work quite well as a medium for the non-tactical parts of an RPG. A newcomer can jump right in and get up-to-speed on past interactions, and a GM or industrious player can constantly maintain the official record of play by going back and fixing errors, formatting text, adding and deleting material, and reorganizing posts."
More like forums, really (Score:5, Interesting)
Pretty much all of the described things (three separate threads. Private messages. Logs.) are exactly as they would be in PbP (play by post, usually on a forum) game. In addition, RPG oriented forums (Myth-Weavers, GiantITP...) often have dicerollers, character sheet managers, etc... Those could be added as gadgets here too, I guess. But nothing there seems revolutionary as in offering anything new.
I think that the point is easiness of use compared to other options and stuff like that. Rather than letting you do something new, wave lets you do all the old stuff in one program instead of having multiple ones. One useful scenario for this could be: A PbP game that is played normally on forums, but on wave you see "Ah, those two guys are online now", send them a message "Want to do some playing in real time?" and begin chatting with them. Much easier than telling them to fire up IRC, connect to a server, etc. (especially if they aren't "computer people").
So I could see wave potentially being useful for this (like many other things). There just has been too much hype about it so people first act more among the lines of "This will cure cancer and HIV and everything!" and then go "Uh, this isn't THAT awesome. We'll need to desperately look for things in which this is superior to other mediums!" instead of going "Oh, a new alternative for forums and chats. Neat. I'm sure we'll come up with some interesting uses for this over time."
I have been designing a program to play DnD over the internet lately. One with battlemaps, chats, dicerollers, stuff like that. I am aware of OpenRPG and similar products but I'm not completely happy with them (the UI, the functionality, a lot of things) so I've decided to write my own one. I think that writing a wave plugin for the missing stuff instead might be worth giving some thought.
Re:Kinda sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
Persistent wikified irc with integrated permissions management?
That, right there, is a killer app.
Re:Kinda sounds like (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Kinda sounds like (Score:4, Interesting)
Swap character sheets for "business plans," and you can see the potential, here.
There's also the convenience factor. It does everything for you. Unlike IRC, you can edit within the Wave itself. Logs don't have to be outputted to a .txt file before you can edit them. You just do it right there.
What'll be interesting is if/when Skype can be added to it in a gadget. VoIP with audio/video chat, the ability to display documents to an entire group, and to collaboratively write something with real-time editing.
If you want to say it's just a repackaging of IRC and a Wiki, sure, go right ahead. It's just shaping up to be a very well done and potentially ubiquitous repackaging.
Colossal Cave Adventure (Score:3, Interesting)
In a related note, over the past couple of weeks I have been porting Colossal Cave Adventure [wikimedia.org] to Google Wave. Send a ping to colossal-wave@appspot.com to play :-)
In my humble opinion. (Score:4, Interesting)
The google web Wave client is tryiing too much things, and give the feel of a alfa client, with the speed a bloated "v14.0"-ish app.
1) It will be better if it try less things. FIRST. Using waves to configure things, is like using emails to store emails settings. Is just a bad idea. It could be cool, and good for devs (eat your own dog food), but is bad for users. Since the use of waves is slow, changing settings is slow. A normal interface, like the one that Gmail have for his setup details, will be much faster and easy to use, also more "normal". Future versions of Wave could have something different, but for the current version is just too much. This wave client is trying too strong to be a 2020 client, and need to be a 2009 client.
2). Again, is 2009. For most people Wave is slow, It just do too much things automatically. Opening and closing waves sould be much faster. It feel like everything is automatically autoupdating all the time. Thats sould stop, and only the active wave be this active. Maybe broadcast the "modified" flag. A future 2020 version could get that feature back, once our computers and the whole internet is much faster.
3). Too much!!!.. Is too much!!. Wave is complex beyond needing a manual, It almost need special training. It seems some features are unwanted, but present everywhere. ..more about this soon..
Who created a wave?. It seems a wave lack the "headers" of a email. It sould have a way to know the name of the wave creator (the OP in forum parlance), the date of such creating, and other stuff. The subject/title of a room, sould probably be "manual" and not "automagical".
Why I can't download it to a file? say a PDF.
Why I can't open a wave in areal fullscreen way, withouth the web MDI interface?.
Its need more control over a wave. Like... force part of it read-only, or stop more people to join.
How its now.. what If I say something sensitive, and some guy invited the wrong person? ok, you can do that with email, but here seems something that can be like more casual. It just don't trusth a wave, because It feels public, without a way to stop that. It would be "easy" to block that.
What are the limits of a bot? can a bot that inject a SWF steal my account details? Facebook seems a bit more "safer" than this. Bots are like too "misterious". Bots sould have a special way to be identified from humans, and a dedicated page with (maybe) commands. Hell... PEOPLE need a simple profile page.
LOTS OF STUFF...
I think Wave has been released too early. Its still a technological preview of a future technology, but is not usable today for what I have commented. I love to have it available, has a toy, but I have not found a real use, nor my friends seems inclined to use it.
A faster client (desktop based?) will be giganteous step.
Re:Privacy and the real-time web (Score:2, Interesting)
Now along comes wave. Google Wave is basically email on steroids, with a "wall / real time web" capability thrown in. You can be totally private or you can be totally public or any combo in between. Nice. And oh yes you also get media richness.
1. XML-based protocol? Check.
2. Obfuscated? Check.
3. Needlessly complex? Check.
4. Proprietary/commercially based? Check. (The better to "de-commoditise protocols," my dear)
5. Replaces a perfectly good, pre-existing protocol [irc.org], when there's absolutely no sane reason (other than the aforementioned commercialism, of course) to do so? Check.
6. (The icing on the cake; this one ALWAYS shows up) Uses the brainless, meaningless, totally subjective, rage-inducing, corporate-suit-spawned "richness," argument in order to sell it to people who don't have the necessary intelligence to be able to see through this crap? Check.
Go ahead, call me a troll, mod me down, accuse me of beating up Santa Claus at Christmas, etc. I'm saying stuff you won't want to hear. If there's one thing that is a truly unforgiveable sin around here, it's voicing unpopular opinions.
Re:Kinda sounds like (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:More like forums, really (Score:1, Interesting)
I have used MapTool to RP with friends that have moved away. It works great. If any of you are looking for a solution and haven't tried it, I highly recommend it. The one thing that would be nice with Wave is the persistence factor. It would be convenient to keep game information and materials in one place were everyone can access the same versions.
Re:Kinda sounds like (Score:4, Interesting)
It's threaded IRC, with search, but without any admin controls (once a person is there it's impossible to silence or kick them, and indeed impossible for them to leave [f/x: hums the tune to hotel california]).
It's fairly limited right now - I bet part of the reason that these RP events use multiple waves is because you have to - once you go over about 350 posts the wave slows down to the point of unusability and you have to start a new one.
Wave is so beta it's difficult to know what it will be when it's finished (at the moment stuff breaks regularly.. which is OK because it's most populated by geeks who are used to stuff breaking). What I would say is don't believe the hype otherwise you'll be disappointed.
Re:Kinda sounds like (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, a backhoe does nothing that a shovel couldn't... It's just a lot better at some things (moving lots of dirt). I use wave on a regular basis for project collaboration. One of the best things about wave is that you don't have to respond in a linear fashion. So, this is a conversation that could happen in IRC:
Sally: When I [description of what she did] I get the error message [some random error message]
Sally: Also, if I [description of what she did] the program [description of how the program fails]
Jack: Well, on that first issue, what happens if you [some thing to try]
Jack: And for that second issue.....
With wave, jack can respond directly to each of sally's messages (or even a particular part of a message) so Sally knows exactly what Jack is talking about without Jack having to clarify. As Jack finish up things from his to-do list, he just deletes the threads from the wave, as they are always accessible via Replay (which lets you see all previous states of the wave), keeping the wave nice and clean. And if Sally isn't online when jack deletes something, it will be obvious to her what Jack deleted (it's marked with strikeout, and is removed after the next time she views the wave) when she comes back online so she knows what he's finished.
Not to mention that there are gadgets and robots and waves are embeddable (though the apis are in early stages at the moment).
Does IRC do all that?