Umbral Echoes Blog

Google Buzz, and before it Google Wave, seemed to have great potential. I played with both when they came out.  But my interest quickly waned, and from what I can tell I’m very much not alone in that.

Part of the reason is that I think Google jumped the gun. In marketing, you have to be careful about when you create a buzz (pun intended). And especially with products like these, they’re only useful if everyone is using them. In both of these cases, I think Google was directing the general tech populace to use products that were incomplete.

With Wave, they should have had permissions from the get-go, so that you could invite people to see, but not edit, a Wave. They have that now, which is nice, but it’s a bit late in the game — comparatively few people regularly use Wave any more. There are a lot of other things they did wrong with Wave, too: it was much buggier than I’d expect from a Google beta, slow as molasses, and too broad in scope. That last one is really what killed it, I think. People generally want a clear path for using a product; they want a sexy sports car, not a bunch of parts that they have to figure out how to best put together to build a sports car that suits their needs.

With Buzz, they went the other way. It’s too damn simple. I have lots of friends. Some I’m closer to than others. Some I want to pay more attention to than others. So maybe I’d like to be able to easily see a Buzz stream from only certain groups, instead of everybody. Maybe once I start or participate in a discussion, I’d like to select whether I get emails specifically for that discussion. (And while I’m at it, hey Facebook! How about being able to turn off receiving emails just because I thumbed-up a post that 50,000 other people feel the need to comment on?) Maybe I would like to have my Twitter posts show up in some decent timeframe, instead of the next day if I’m lucky.

Overall, I love the things Google does. Chrome is amazing, and broke the web browser mold when it came out. Gmail has been my email client of choice for years now. Their search engine revolutionized the web.

Then again, not every hit can be a home run. I like that they’re trying new things! I just think that a lot of these things have great potential, but were executed poorly. And that makes me sad.

First off, let me say that I’ve only been in one Google Wave gaming session so far, and have seen a few other sessions.  So I haven’t done very in-depth or broad testing of this stuff.  Also, Google Wave itself is evolving — it’s still in beta, so I’m not going to talk about bugs, or technical issues that I’m sure will be hammered out.

My friend and former coworker Justin Achilli is running a 3.5 D&D game via Google Wave, as an experiment in its viability for online roleplay.  He’s shared his own thoughts, and I’d like to share a few of mine from a player’s perspective.

So, from my perspective, so far I’m getting exactly what I expected.   It’s somewhat of a mix of playing via live chat (of which I have several years experience on White Wolf’s now-defunct moderated chats) and play-by-post, with most of the advantages and disadvantages therein.   I’ll list some below, and again, I’m going to refrain from putting any disadvantages down that I expect to be addressed (e.g. it’s still fairly slow and has the occasional glitch).

Advantages (compared to tabletop)

• It’s easier to schedule.  No transit time to/from; just log in and bam, you’re in game.
• When a player misses a session, the playback feature makes it easy for them to get caught up.
• It’s possible to narrate aspects of your character’s actions in more stylish detail.
• It’s easier to have secret side-conversations where necessary (no passing of notes or leaning over and whispering).
• There’s a complete record of each session, which game masters or payers can look back on (or search) if they’ve forgotten something.
• It’s possible for several people to type simultaneously without the “talking over one another” effect you get in real life.
• It allows you to multitask without being distracting to others.

Disadvantages

• Hell of a lot slower-going than tabletop for character interaction.
• Even slower than that for combat — and the more crunchy the combat, the slower it is.
• More impersonal.
• Can’t use things like mood music/lighting to set the mood (though it would be easy to use a third-party app to stream a playlist).

Overall I prefer tabletop, but I do like online mediums (including Wave) as an option if tabletop isn’t.   I think Wave offers some advantages over both chat-based and PbM/PbP play as well — it’s the best of both worlds when talking about those two options.  I also think Wave is better for more story-centric games/systems than crunchy games, but I’m sure that there will be a number of plugins (or “robots” as Wave calls them) for that sort of thing.  There are already some robots for things like dice rolling, maps, and other such things.  I’m excited to see what can and will be done.