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The Wikiup Games Project is focused on creating a new paradigm for game content development through collaborative authorship. The links above will acquaint you further with the Wikiup collaborative authoring process. The blog below will keep you up-to-date on our latest developments. Please visit often and participate in this exciting new project! | |
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Beta version of edu-lite game
This has nothing directly to do with Wikiup. I just felt like I needed to write a game as I hadn’t done one in a long time. I just posted this: http://www.wikiupgames.com/games/higgs/ in beta form. Please post all comments/bug reports here.
I met with my friend and colleague Mike Stead last night who as usual gave me a lot to think about, including some thorny issues with Wikiup. By far the easier to get my head around (I’ll deal with the more difficult one in a later post…want to mull it first) was the issue of mitigating ‘content fragmentation’. All this means is that we get more value out of a centralised data hub with fewer differences rather than more, so any steps taken to reduce differences between games probably helps.
This brings me to “The Rule of Joe”.
Sorry for the long delay in posting something interesting, but I’m seeking to remedy this today. I’ve just posted a revised version of the Wikiup White Paper. Probably the most interesting part of the revision is the draft architecture, including a proposed API. I’ll be posting more on this API soon, but in the meantime, I welcome any thoughts you might have.
Sorry there haven’t been any updates in the past week, but this doesn’t mean that there’s been no progress. Some potentially exciting things are happening here at the Project, it’s just that I can’t discuss them at this exact time. I’ll post more ASAP. Thanks for your patience.
My friend Jon Sykes at the Glasgow Caledonian University eMotion Games Lab sent me this link to a talk at TED. Like most TED talks, this one’s intensely interesting, but that’s not the point here. Take a look at the how the video is rated; it’s essentially a bounded tagging system. Jon thinks this might be useful for Wikiup, since it’s more informative (creates a tagging cloud to generate a more qualitative rating than a star system).
Certainly folksonomic tagging has been in my head for a long while now. But honestly, I’m not sure about this for ratings, since the Wikiup system by definition needs to be able to tease out quantitatively “best” versions within certain bounds. But I like the idea that the rating system could be multi-dimensional. Any thoughts world?
Wikiup has from its inception been about doing a particular sort of good. Namely, I want to put a powerful game development tool into the hands of students, small developers, educators, etc. People shouldn’t be kept from developing a great idea for a game simply because they haven’t got loads of money. I also think that there’s potential for Wikiup as an educational tool: this extends out of work that my old firm has been doing. They theorize that students who participate in communal game authoring learn the curricular content better. I like that.
I started following Social Innovation Camp on Twitter today. Their mission is to discover and encourage online tools for positive social change. I’ve described a couple of ideas above where I think Wikiup fits that description, but I generally like to think of myself as someone interested in good (am I a positive socialist?). So I’m wondering if anyone reading this can suggest ways in which Wikiup can work towards the good. Are there other types of simulations (medical, political) we should be actively supporting? How else might a web-serviced, quantitative database be used positively?
Thanks for any and all ideas.
Mike requested some visual explanation of the contracts concept, so here it is, along with some grounding in Wikiup’s essential attitude towards data. Read more…
This is a matter of new thought for me. So new as to possibly be a point of rank idiocy, and yet it seems to solve a few of the holdout problems in the Wikiup concept. So bear with me. As always, you’ll have the opportunity to call me out at the end.
One big problem with Wikiup, obvious since the outset, has been the sheer impossibility that any single system could accommodate all variations of a game type. Three games might each need a Dragon, but each might require radically different definitions to play effectively. One game might require the Dragon to have sixty key characteristics, while another needs thirty and another only six. So even though I’ve always presumed that clients would filter data to streamline transport, the sheer number of properties threatens to deluge the system and become unmanageable. Would authors not fixate on the properties relevant to their application, leaving the rest to quietly bit-rot? Read more…
Here are a set of very rough mock-ups for the Wikiup Entity Editor (WEE). The WEE is the proposed front-end Flex-based tool for editing content.
These sketches represent the editing portion of the tool. There’s also an Entity Explorer (accessed by the “W” button in the upper left corner of each screen), but we’ll deal with that separately. Read more…