Raw

This morning I was playing a linked data game. It was a multiplayer game, involving a big map with pieces on it (a bit like Risk), and actual printed cards (a bit like Top Trumps) which looked remarkably like Wikipedia info boxes. Then I woke up. I can't remember much about the game now, but it's pretty easy to imagine the linked open data cloud being used to fuel a game engine. There's plenty of open data around for geo-oriented things, and the Top Trumps bit is (for my sleeping self at any rate) could be a trivial mapping from dbPedia.

There are a few precedents for Web data games. A few years ago Gunnar Grimnes hooked FOAFish data up into RDFRoom, a shoot-em-up kind of thing (I've a feeling someone else made another, can't remember who and searching didn't help, "rapid deployment force" gets in the way).

I challenge anyone that's worked with structured data to watch the film about text adventure games Get Lamp and not come away inspired to do a tie-in [e.g. GET lamp HTTP/1.1] (I am old enough to have taken part in this wave of computer games first-hand, but somehow it passed me by). It seems Liam Quin has had a go with RDF "you are standing outside on a grassy hill, with only a damp towl and a bar of soap" (Liam and I are currently working on a writing project together, so this was a delightful coincidence). I found it via a related post by Leigh.

The Web does have the navigation/exploration metaphor for traversing links, something I'd like to exploit somehow around RDF Affordances. "Surfing" the Web is quite a hip idea, but I do wonder about Tim Berners-Lee's metaphor with Weaving the Web : "Wear it like a shawl, dude."

PPS. Liam adds: "At one point you can Summon the Timbl, who talks faster and faster until he vanishes in a puff of logic."

Comments to G+ please

PS. Couple more references (via Facebook) :

ultima online VS semantic web

LambdaMOO Programmer's Manual

RDF and MOO notes

...and a bit of code

‎99 IF(CLOSNG)GOTO 95
YEA=YES(81+NUMDIE*2,82+NUMDIE*2,54)
NUMDIE=NUMDIE+1
IF(NUMDIE.EQ.MAXDIE.OR..NOT.YEA)GOTO 20000
PLACE(WATER)=0
PLACE(OIL)=0
IF(TOTING(LAMP))PROP(LAMP)=0
DO 98 J=1,100
I=101-J
IF(.NOT.TOTING(I))GOTO 98
K=OLDLC2
IF(I.EQ.LAMP)K=1
CALL DROP(I,K)