Thought for the day: if so-called Web 2.0 sites are built around user-created and managed content, and your social networking site is based around various game analogies, then the obvious extension is user-created and run games.
How do you incorporate that into a profile/community site?
One of the things that we’re looking into, for totally different reasons, is Alice. Alice was designed to be an introduction to programming for middle-school girls. I think that we could come up with a new, enhanced version to allow users to create 3D environments for their profile area. They could also, possibly, create and run their own games.
We’re working on alternate reality games for the site right now, similar to the Jamie Kane site that the BBC ran a while back. It allows us to run a game across the whole membership, utilising clues on the site, SMS, microsites and boards, etc. It should be fun, and something entirely new for social networking.
So, how do we allow users to create and run their own alternate reality games? There is the question of the day. :)
I play EVE-Online and in Second Life (not totally sure whether the latter counts as a “game” though!). In SL players/residents have created quite a few in-SL-but-not-SL games using the SL toolset, arguably fitting your quest for an alternate reality game.
That’s interesting. We’d discussed using Second Life, but instead I think are going to try Multiverse for our 3D social/learning/game environment.
I have this vision (and am entirely unsure how to accomplish it) of allowing members to create a smaller version of the ARGs that we’ll run on the site – give them a simple-ish toolset that allows them to set up the various steps of the game, determine what each one consists of (flash gamelet, mobile message, etc.), what the people playing the game have to do to complete each step and get the link to the next one, etc. That would be a linear version – non-linear would be much harder.