Wednesday, October 28, 2009
Books / Teh Internets / Nerd Nerds Find, Surf Google Wave
Posted by Paul Constant on Wed, Oct 28, 2009 at 2:34 PM
Slog reader Jesse sent me an invite to Google Wave a few weeks ago, and I feel guilty that I haven't written anything about it. (Thanks for thinking of me, Jesse!)
But here's the thing: I don't really understand what Google Wave is for, and I've watched all the videos and tested all the different features. I like the way you can watch your fellow Google Wave participants type in real time. I like the widgets you can insert into a conversation. In fact, Google Wave is a great interface for chat—I bet that ultimately Google Wave will replace Google Chat on Gmail—but it simply doesn't deserve to survive on its own. There's nothing there that I can't replicate (a little more messily) in online chat sessions. I forget that Google Wave exists for days at a time, and I use chat in Facebook and Gmail quite a few times a week. But those features are additions to the standard web browsing experience, not a destination like Google Wave is.
...when I finally got my Google Wave invite and did a bit of poking around, I wasn't the least bit surprised to quickly discover a handful of Wave-based roleplaying games already in progress, and many more in various stages of planning. In the past few days, I've watched games from the sideline and talked to some Game Masters and gamers—there seems to be an emerging consensus that Google Wave has as much RPG potential as any platform since the venerable and proverbial tabletop.
This blog has more information about it, too:
Google Wave is a hybrid medium. It is both real-time and correspondence, when you choose for it to be. Google Wave is like a chat room with email-style archival, document-style accessible, immediate editing, and even forum-style multiplicity of threads and folders for organizing your material, that every player can quickly access and organize. Play-By-Posters and Play-By-Chatters will find in Google Wave everything their mediums used to do, and everything the other one did as well....So what is the literary style of a Wave RPG? Whatever you want. This is what’s quite brilliant about it. From the most verbose freeform RPG to the most dialog-starved combat-heavy story-less RPG, you can have it here on the Wave. No problem.
I haven't played any sort of role playing game since I was in high school, so this news doesn't really affect me at all, but it's good to see that Google is doing something for the geeks.
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1
They seem to be pushing you to use your gmail contacts as a sort of Facebook type experience. I'm not sure how well it will work, but remember Google's business model; the user isn't the customer, advertisers are. The more we share about ourselves in their webspace, the more specifically targeted an audience we can become.
2
Wave RPGs are a cool idea (if you like RPGs, which I don't), but as to Wave's real usefulness, it does have potential to be used as a collaboration too. it's no good as chat (chat doesn't need to be fixed, already works), but with some improvements i could see using it to collaborate on documents and such. It needs notifications, better indication of who's edited messages, and some polish on how things are organized, but it has some potential. The problem is that people think it's supposed to be the next something (Facebook, Twitter, Email). It's not those things, it's for working together, not chatting.
3
At least half the fun I had playing RPGs years ago was just hanging out with my geek friends, joking around and stuff.
I guess you could still do that here, but it just doesn't have the feel of old tabletop RPGs.
Online role playing games and stuff like this google wave/chat/whatever trying to duplicate or replace old school RPGs are missing a lot of the point: hanging out with real, live friends.
I guess you could still do that here, but it just doesn't have the feel of old tabletop RPGs.
Online role playing games and stuff like this google wave/chat/whatever trying to duplicate or replace old school RPGs are missing a lot of the point: hanging out with real, live friends.
4
Google Wave is targeted towards users of Google Groups and e-mail for communications with more than one person. It has never been intended to act as a social networking tool, but for conversation management between groups of people. Think of project teams at work, or grad student projects. For these applications, it's perfect. Just think of all the CC:RE:RE:Re:RE: e-mails that you have to track when you want to share a conversation with groups of people. This gets rid of all that.
Seems like a lot of media has gotten the impression that this is somehow like Facebook or twitter, when that's not really the case. It's not supposed to be for everyone.
Seems like a lot of media has gotten the impression that this is somehow like Facebook or twitter, when that's not really the case. It's not supposed to be for everyone.
5
RPGs ... ah hah.
Hmm, time to create that Flower Power game where your avatar uses flower powers and the rewards are measured in hugs ....
Oh, come on, you didn't think they'd be "good" games, did you?
Hmm, time to create that Flower Power game where your avatar uses flower powers and the rewards are measured in hugs ....
Oh, come on, you didn't think they'd be "good" games, did you?
6
Seems to me that wave is basically a sort of REPLACE for all the programs it copies. It basically integrates every form of communication into one program in a live, webchat-like, form.
Basically their reasoning is, if it does it all and it's attractive and seamless, why use those other programs at all.
I see it as a great tool for groups of friends to hang out in, virtually, and be able to share information, pictures, videos, etc, all while chatting.
Basically their reasoning is, if it does it all and it's attractive and seamless, why use those other programs at all.
I see it as a great tool for groups of friends to hang out in, virtually, and be able to share information, pictures, videos, etc, all while chatting.
7
To me, the "killer app" aspect of google wave is the realtime language translation. I haven't used the beta yet so I don't know if it's up and running, but it seems like a feature that will act as a flattener for worldwide communication making international business far easier. Plus, I suppose, you could play RPG's with people anywhere, not just down the street, but around the world.
8
Does anyone have a spare Wave invite for little me?
Why does google insist on giving me Voice invites to share when all I want is a wave invite (and a pony)?
Why does google insist on giving me Voice invites to share when all I want is a wave invite (and a pony)?
9
The power of wave has little to do with it's realtime capabilities. That is just frosting. The real power is elsewhere:
1)You can loop new people into a wave that started without them, and have private side conversations.
2) Works equally well (and simultaneously) as a threaded conversation or a collaboratively edited document. threaded/collaborative
But the real kicker is still to come. In the same way that the real killer feature of the iphone is the many thousands of apps, Wave will have many interesting capabilities added to it. Those are not yet available for the most part.
If Wave as it exists were the finished product, It wouldn't be good enough, but as the germ of a more capable product, it seems very interesting.
1)You can loop new people into a wave that started without them, and have private side conversations.
2) Works equally well (and simultaneously) as a threaded conversation or a collaboratively edited document. threaded/collaborative
But the real kicker is still to come. In the same way that the real killer feature of the iphone is the many thousands of apps, Wave will have many interesting capabilities added to it. Those are not yet available for the most part.
If Wave as it exists were the finished product, It wouldn't be good enough, but as the germ of a more capable product, it seems very interesting.
11
@3: You could say that! But I'm an online role player and I've never played a real life table game. I like online play by post stuff because it's nice just to sit down and write silly stuff for fun! It's just a different kind of online hobby. Plus, I played in stuff that was very girl-centric. So a lot of my rper friends are women, which I think is very different from RPGs as a norm. Also, I manage to have a nice social life where I hang out with friends! Just not ones I role play with!
12
The secret to understanding Google Wave is to recognize its true purpose. Google Wave is not about entertainment seeking consumers. Google Wave is all about enterprise collaboration. We have been working with Google Wave for quite some time now. See http://www.dynamicalsoftware.com/news/?p… to read about our findings
14
via daringfireball, a good explanation of what google wave does well:
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-googl…
in short: it's not social, it's functional; good for corporations, and maybe even for journalists.
http://danieltenner.com/posts/0012-googl…
in short: it's not social, it's functional; good for corporations, and maybe even for journalists.
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