In a way, I think the “inputs” (paper, real dice, emails about things, visual images) and the game “space” (the campaign world) shouldn’t matter. The question is managing those inputs into the space and providing the outputs in a way that everyone enjoys.

Can I haz holodecks now?

These solutions require gaming companies who are a)web-savvy, b)tech-savvy, c)able to drop the capital on R&D to make this happen, d)able to re-design their internal processes to move content from creator to editor to layout to website effectively, and e)still produce good games. Not likely to happen. Even the 300-lb. gorilla of WotC found that integrating web 2.0 and gaming was a very big bite to chew all at once. DDI is nowhere close to where the marketers were telling us it was going to be.

This also pre-supposes that a significant fraction of the game’s market wants their games delivered this way. I still see huge pushback in forums against the PDF format. And even among people who like the convenience of buying PDF, they often will print out the book to carry with them. I think it’s going to be two years minimum before we can see real, monetizable numbers of gamers interested in computer-augmented tabletop gaming. (Though, I think there is already a core of gamers interested enough in tools to get the tabletop feel with players online that virtual tabletop software is a viable market.)

One of the big advantages of PDFs is precisely that they don’t change the underlying paradigm. Books are still the basic units (even if we are seeing some cheap PDFs that are little more than expanded magazine articles). They are still monetized the same way. They are still written, edited, and laid out the same way.

I think that it would take a brand new company to overthrow that paradigm. You would need to design your internal processes from the ground up to emphasize flexible content delivery with quick turn-around. The standard editor-writer relationship isn’t going to be enough.

You will also need to add personnel to the equation specifically to maximize the potential of your web presence. And I’m not just talking a guy who is pretty snazzy at WordPress themes and knows how to install and moderate a forum. Some of the interactions you are talking about are very easy to do half-assed, but very hard to do well. And highly skilled personnel like that aren’t likely to want to work for the peanuts you get at a game company.

Especially because of my next point. You are going to need serious full-time staff to pull this off. Most game companies today have maybe one or two full time staffers, and the rest also maintain day jobs (or also write a considerable amount for other companies). For the kind of responsive, interactive content delivery system you are describing, you need the authors to be part of the online community. It won’t be enough to drop off your 10K words and move on to the next contract. You will need to continue to support your work, more like an application than a book. That makes using freelancers awkward, and probably more expensive. It’s going to be much better for the paradigm to use a stable of dedicated writers (and other content producers) that also engage the user community as part of their job. That’s not going to be cheap (by current game company standards).

This kind of stuff always sounds so easy and obvious when you lay it out in broad strokes. But the devil is in the details. And, as I mentioned before, it would be very easy to do half-assed (as WotC demonstrated with their initial fumblings with DDI). It would be very difficult, and very expensive, to do well.

Part of it is a tactile/kinesthetic preference on my part, but I also have a hard time believing technological gadgets will ever have interfaces elegant enough to contribute unobtrusively to the flow of play. There’s always going to be problems with clicking or finger-swiping through slides too quickly or fumbling around looking for the correct file.

@admin: love the post have been thinking about a few of these points in the last few months but you articulated them much better than I could have. Thanks for the post.

Also, holy shit! Really? White text on red. White text on black. And white text on white! Come on. For someone so up on tech get with the 21st century on web design. Hell, meet us in 1995. Most people knew better than white on black by then. It burns! It burns!