Jeremy Keith Wants to Create an Application Inspired by a Passively Multiplayer Game and Lifestreaming

I saw a post by Jeremy Keith the other day reaching out to developers for help with a project at Hackday in London. I was recently turned on to the Passively Multiplayer game a bud.com by Jerry Paffendorf. I’ve signed up, created a character and have been building it up and I’m now at level 3 although I really haven’t spent time learning what I’m doing. It does appear that your character is created based on your web surfing habits, you also accumulate inventory and you can go on (and create) quests. It all seems pretty interesting. It also turns out Jeremy is a fan as well according to his post. So much so that he’s asking for help to work on it. Here’s a snip from his site:

Inspired by Justin Hall’s idea of Passively Multiplayer Online Games and Gavin Bell’s musings on provenance, I want to treat online publishing as an ongoing way of building up a character. In Dungeons and Dragons or World of Warcraft, you acquire attributes like stamina, strength, dexterity and skill over time. Online, you publish Flickr pictures, del.icio.us links, Twitter updates and blog posts over time. All of this published material contributes to your online character and I think you should be rewarded for this behaviour.

It’s tangentially related to the idea of a lifestream which uses RSS to create a snapshot of your activity. By using APIs, I’m hoping to be able to build up a much more accurate, long-term portrait.

You can read the rest of his post here

So today he posted the result of the team and their efforts in creating a game called Hackfight. In the post he provided details on the grueling design, development, and testing process that followed. They leveraged as many API’s as possible and pretty much built a framework that could be re-purposed. They seemed to have done a pretty amazing job and I really hope they continue this.