Just had a brainstorm for a potentially cool/useful Drupal API module.
Adding game elements to applications of all sorts is an increasingly popular thing to do (see this post about the game "Ribbon Hero" Microsoft added to their office suite http://www.officelabs.com/Lists/Posts/Post.aspx?ID=88).
It'd be very helpful to have an API to make it easy to add game elements to other modules + custom Drupal web apps. APIs for keeping track of points, slicing and dicing data (who's got the most points in this group), assigning badges, etc.
See this post for other ideas:
http://mixergy.com/amy-jo-kim/
Question though -- is this needed? I know there's already modules that do some of these things like User Badges, User Points, and Five Star.
Would it be helpful to have a Game API which abstracted out some of those modules functionality and added additional functions to simplify game-like Drupal apps?
Comments
I'm very interested in your
I'm very interested in your thoughts. As I currently work on two similar modules (http:/drupal.org/project/stats and http:/drupal.org/project/results), I think part of these modules could ease creation of a Game API.
What aspects do you see the Game API should take care of? At the moment it's hard to me to abstract a "Game" in Drupal.
Not sure about what the Game
Not sure about what the Game API would do vs. other modules -- just thought of the idea this afternoon :)
I was thinking the module would be something like Voting API -- a pure framework to make it easier to build game mechanisms into other modules or custom apps.
This is pretty speculatory on my part at the moment -- I've never written any sort of game mechanism into any of my sites so I'm not entirely sure what'd be needed...
Any thoughts from people who have written game type elements into a Drupal site? Do existing modules take care of things pretty well?
Here's a presentation I meant to include in my original post titled "Game Mechanics for Social Media":
http://www.slideshare.net/amyjokim/fun-in-functional-2009-presentation
Kyle Mathews
There seems to be a whole
There seems to be a whole group dealing with Games: http://groups.drupal.org/games and Yet another Game API.
Maybe this might help to find a concrete way.
I'll have a look on your slides later ;)