« Ethics of the Flu Vaccine Shortage: What Would Network Science Do? |
Main
| Marc's Heresy IV: Stowe Gets Played? »
October 28, 2004
IM + Massively Multiplayer Games = Otoy?
Posted by Marc Eisenstadt
A recent piece in the New York Times Technology ('Circuits') section (free subscription required) describes some nifty activity being undertaken by Jules Urbach of Groove Alliance. The work, aside from providing a fast 3D-rendering engine for web-based media, promises to bring massively multiplayer gaming to the 'lightweight presence' world of Instant Messaging.
Mr. Urbach['s ...] invention, which he calls
Otoy, is a game engine that piggybacks on instant messaging, and thus it is something of a Holy Grail in the software world. For years, developers have been trying to figure out ways to turn instant messaging into a multipronged medium that goes beyond mere chat to integrate games, e-mail and Web browsing; in the gloaming of a guest bedroom, Mr. Urbach believes he may well have come up with the skeleton key that will open IM to an era of hyper-functionality.
If it pans out as promised, this is going to be a very interesting development in the world of Synchronous Social Software. True, you can already bring fellow IM-ers into various games, but typically small games. True, you can already engage in IM-like activities in the big blockuster MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games.. sometimes better known as MMORPGs if you include the RP=Role Playing), epitomized by Everquest and Asheron's Call: these games involve hundreds of thousands of participants, but necessarily there are a much smaller number on your personal radar screen at any moment.
The cool thing about Otoy, at least from my perspective, is that it would allow simple 'massive crowd' games (think of a Mexican wave in a big stadium), which is the direction Yanna Vogiazou and I have been heading in, with early entrants like her BumperCars and CitiTag games. We'll be talking about how these games fit together with the BuddySpace instant messaging / geolocation framework at the forthcoming ACM Symposium on Applied Computing in a 'Ubiquitous Computing' track in March 2005, and as that progresses I'll be posting related developments here on Get Real. Readers interested in big-crowd presence and gaming, whether real, virtual or mixed-reality, may also be motivated to check out this List of Urban Mobile Games (from Howard Rheingold via several intermediate sources).
In the meantime we look forward to seeing how Otoy evolves.
Comments (3)
+ TrackBacks (0) | Category: Art & Entertainment | Technology
- RELATED ENTRIES
- › Reminder -- /Message
- › /Message - A New Blog
- › The Individual Is The New Group -- Part 1
- › 1000 Tags: Tag Advertising
- › Social Ethics And Technology Design
- › Nancy Hass on In Your Facebook.com
- › Black and White and Dead All Over: Is Newsprint Dead?
- › Anonymous Trolls, Beware: You Are Breaking Federal Laws
1. Heiner Wolf on October 28, 2004 12:32 PM writes...
Interesting. I am working on a similar topic. We are working on getting the MMOGs user's ingame avatar as virtual presence avatars on the Web so that people meet each other with their virtual personality on the Web. They meet users of their own communty and others from other communities on Web pages. URL is http://www.lluna.de/
One major difference to BuddySpace is that we are working on the virtual infrastructure (the Web) where BuddySpace shows people in ther real (GEO) location. But both are about the location of the user.
Permalink to Comment2. Heiner Wolf on October 28, 2004 01:23 PM writes...
Another dimension of similarity and difference between Otoy and LLuna (www.lluna.de): Otoy builds MMOGs on IM networks (correct?). The LLuna project also builds on IM (Jabber), but has no intention yet to create an MMOG. It rather tries to get users of existing MMOGs to continue their MMOG life outside of the game on the Web. Which should work extremely well if the MMOG is already based on IM (Otoy?).
Permalink to Comment3. Marc Eisenstadt on October 28, 2004 01:57 PM writes...
Thanks for the comments and links, Heiner... very interesting stuff. Not sure whether Otoy is really 'MMOG'-centric, since it is still 'under wraps' ... and moreover my interpretation is that its infrastructure can be used for anything from simple games upwards... on the big side, I like to think of this as 'Scaleable Synchronous Social Software', but have been reluctant to use the "4S" phrase in public so far, because it's quite a mouthful! Taking MMOG outside the web into real life is definitely an exciting area, another side to the 'mixed-reality' gaming world. One of the great ones that crossed this boundary was Majestic, sadly cancelled after a few exciting months. Will follow your stuff with interest.
Permalink to Comment