The BranchOut Games Blog

Games Design

A primary focus of this blog is game design. At the level of principle, designing a great game is relatively straight forward: the game should mimic life in at least one particular sense - it should have a random element representing the uncertainies encountered in life, but at the same time the player with skill, natural ability and experience should advance further and faster than a player without those virtues in the same measure. Thus, as in life, the unskilled player can get lucky and win over the skilled, but not very often.

By this measure the classic board game of Chess (for example) is a good game design, but its not a great game. In Chess the skilled player will always beat the unskilled - which is why Computer Chess is generally so boring. In life, that inevitability just isn't forthcoming.

Design

At the other extreme, design is a vast area of human endeavour. I recently wrote an entry in my other blog about a talk given by ___ working for Electronic Arts, when she was in Melbourne for the IE-2007 conference in December

That reminded me of a great paper on the nature of design by Dr Ranulph Glanville, a philosopher I'd suggest, titled: Keeping Faith with the Design in Design Research. In it he remonstrates against those who approach research into Design as scientific research alone. He makes a very strong case for Science being a sub-branch of Design, rather than the other way around. And, as with ___, he underlines the cyclic nature of design as the process that hones a design toward an individual outcome.

Tools and Technology

While a 3D game engine is a great thing to have and behold, a great game and therefore a successful game, may use technology no more complex than cardboard and printing ink. I can remember when the immensely successful board game Trivial Pursuit was released, and it was within the era of computer games, when 2D and even 3D was possible. The Canadian inventors quickly when on to clock up $700 million in sales over a short period of time. I.e. A great game can spark a phenomena.

The under-the-bonnet technology within the DigitalFriend is appropriately revolutionary. Equally innovative is the interface to the DigitalFriend - the bit we see and deal with. It consists of the FUN interface (Friendly User Navigation) which acts like an information lens, capable of displaying nearly 600 individual sub-agents and web services, on the screen at the one time - an unlimited number in total. Compare this with conventional hierarchical tree managers, such as Microsofts Window's Explorer, or Apple Corporation's Finder, which are struggling to put more than 50 or 60 items on the screen in a related manner. The FUN interface to the DigitalFriend is an agent-oriented metaphor of electronic servants and friends, as opposed to the old desktop metaphor of Windows and Macintosh applications, which are document-centric, and office-bound in their conception and their delivery.

The DigitalFriend is a just-in-time minimalist attention grabbing technology, which monitors a large array of personalised information sources and events, filtering off the unnecessary, alerting the user when they most need to be - not too early, and not too late. The DigitalFriend product is a technology destined to transform a broadband service into one that brings quality to the lives of individuals at home and at work, were it may otherwise amount to just another layer upon the intray, the mailbox, and the message bank. Instead, the DigitalFriend turns broadband Internet into a liberating force.

The 'People' Part of 'SQL+PaWS'

We recently (September, 2007) developed a simple but effective technology that makes Web services a whole lot easier to write and deliver - particularly powerful when coming from a relational DBMS (SQL-oriented) on the server-side. Its called SQL+PaWS: for SQL and People as Web Services. While such a web service can quickly be called and used in a mashup within the DigitalFriend (see Figure 1 below, in which the URL of an example SQL+PaWS web service has been pasted into a sub-agent specification form, and an SQL statement - which retrieves all countries in which the US Dollar is used as the main currency - has also been copied across), an SQL+PaWS web service can also be created by any web page publisher, without the need for an SQL DBMS at all.

Figure 1: Pasting the URL of an SQL+PaWS web service into the DigitalFriend.

The ubiquitous web browser generally requires a human read to retrieve information from the web. In contrast, Web services were developed to be a client-side programmatic interface to the world of servers out there. However, SQL+PaWS web services, as well as being used by application programs, can also be viewed in a web browser by people, both at prototype time, or in general (see the overview in figure 2 below). In addition, it allows people to very simply author web services that are directly readable by applications and mashups (by producing HTML <table>s that conform to the SQL+PaWS convention of writing such a table. See the official link: SQL+PaWS Specification).

Figure 2: Overview of SQL and People as Web Services (SQL+PaWS)

The world is becoming increasingly wired (and wirelessed?) with sensors, but, the world's best all-round sensor (and analyst) is still the Human Being, and is unlikely to be replaced as such for a very long time yet. The use of SQL+PaWS is potentially very generic as it includes a convention that allows people to post their own data in a particular HTML format - see October blog entry and the SQL+PaWS specification. I.e. Individuals who routinely collect data, can simply post it on the Internet as a Web Service to other people and/or organizations, without the need to use an SQL database at all. Figure 2 shows that either people and/or SQL-oriented databases can be the source of an SQL+PaWS web service, and either people and/or software clients (including the growing field of mashup applications) can also be the consumers of SQL+PaWS web services.

While all of the main menu items across the top of this page, do link to appropriate pages, most of the pages linked to by items down the left and right sides, are still being built.