Well, those of you who know me in the least are aware of my passion for video games. I have, quite literally, been a fan of console and PC gaming for as long as I can remember. My parents will vouch for the fact that, on my fifth birthday — before I could read — I was situated in front of our living room TV set with our TI-99/4A on my lap, an open code book next to me, pecking character by character until I had basic animations appearing on the screen. I vaguely remember those details, although I can remember playing games like Parsec and Hunt the Wumpus, but the passion for gaming is still there to this day.

My focus, however, has shifted from simply being a placid gamer to wanting to delve more into the inner workings of the game development process and the gaming industry in general. Choosing web development as a career path has given me more of an insight into the principles that make games work, and I greatly admire those with the knowledge and fortitude to stick with it during the grueling development process, but I still have that burning desire to be more actively involved in the industry in some way.

As nearly every gamer can tell you, the biggest drawing in the gaming industry today is online gaming. What that means, though, varies substantially from genre to genre and platform to platform. My daughter can play Mario Kart on her DS with another child she sees in McDonalds over her WiFi connection, or we can sit at home and challenge friends hundreds of miles away to a battle in Super Smash Bros. Brawl. In either case, we are taking advantage of the online play feature of the games.

However, the most highly successful games are those that take the level of interaction beyond the console proper: porting the results and status into internet resources that can be tapped by anything from forum signature images to bragging rights on official player boards. Games like Halo 3 and Gears of War, for example, allow the players to tap their records and achievements via a simple animated image that can be posted to a website. Taking online gaming a step further is the gaming style that has developed into it’s own genre: the Massively Multiplayer Online game, or MMO.

These games continue to blur the line between the in game experience and the internet experience. Games like World of Warcraft and EVE online have shown just how much of a following can be had by allowing for persistent data availability, both in game and out. As a web developer with a passion for gaming, the blurring of this line excites me to no end. I can’t wait for companies to start offering APIs to tap their user resources and the possibility of 3rd party sites selling or managing custom items that can then be used in game. The possibilities are absolutely endless. In a game where there is truly a persistent world, there could even be the possibility of having an online GUI that would allow a player to upgrade, equip and even transport a character to a certain town or village in which they wish to start their game play again when they get to their console next. All of this is extremely viable potential.

Now, this brings me to the culmination of my post: what can we, as developers do about it? I don’t have an in depth knowledge of the gaming industry or technologies. While I’m aware that some companies are delving more and more into web technologies to handle even in game interfaces (such as ActionScript 3, for instance), I have no real understanding of just how the console immersion is coupled together with the database or web servers which may be able to pull the information for display or manipulation. Whether it is simplistic SQL querying to build dynamic XML by which the web applications can retrieve the data or whether the game itself literally shares a database that is tapped directly by the web interface, I do not know. I would expect that, in either case, it would be quite simplistic to open up an API to players to build their own resource pool. For instance, releasing a simplistic JavaScript API that would then actually return a JSON encoded string or fully parsed data (similar to what Google is doing with Open Social and Google Maps) would be extremely easy to implement, and it would retain full control over the DB accessors and such for the development companies.

Obviously, I like to dream, but if there happens to be anyone well versed in the gaming industry who has an understanding of this technology or the direction in which it is headed, I would love it if you would contact me with an introduction. Furthermore, if by any slim chance, there is a development company interested in blurring the line even further, as I have mentioned, and are willing to allow an observer such as myself to participate in the development process, I would be looking for the dotted line on which to sign.