Waay Waay Retro Mash

Microsoft has announced a game mashup tool, aimed at making simple 2D games like space shooters, tetris and the like. That sounds like fun on its own, but of course the real aim of all this is introducing new groups to complex content creation - programming. According to one of the leads in the project at Microsoft,

"So we're kind of going after a customer who is anywhere from the 8- to 14-year-old kid might be interested in playing around to somebody who's maybe a little older and is bored with the games on a site like MSN Game Zone and is actually interested in building his own."

This project is only one in a widespread move to make programming accessible. In fact, Microsoft is really a late comer in this area. Years ago, MIT was developing a simple programming language for kids in elementary school. A few years ago, Ben Fry and Casey Reas (also at MIT) launched Processing to get artists and designers in on the action. Google's got mashup tools too, and on other levels there are things like WYSIWYG web page editors and even this blogging tool I'm using.

The idea is to enable complex activities without much prior knowledge, and provide a stepping stone to more technical modes of creating with computers. The gaming platform that we're using in this studio, Unreal Tournament 3 (UT3), has a similar tool in its Unreal Editor (UE). Kismet, UE's visual programming interface, is one of the most intuitive I've seen. It shows that there's a lot of innovation in terms of rethinking programming language itself, not just what you can do with that programming language. But all of this is part of a larger move: enlivening traditional products through web 2.0

From online gaming to social networking, the best way to promote a platform's success seems to be helping users to create their own content. Conveniently enough, it also means that as a platform producer you can get away with scripting less content. Facebook, for example, has only a handful of default applications. Much of the fun of Facebook is in fact trying new apps (from games to cross-platform portals), seeing what your friends can do with them, and then moving on to the next app. I simply don't think you could get the same depth of experience if all apps had to be made by Facebook itself.



Microsoft launches Popfly [Information Week]