Wednesday, September 02, 2009
Thank You Stewart Butterfield
I was working on something for a website when I realized that in 2001 there was already something which was made, that did what I want. It was part of "the5k.org" competition, which was created by Stewart Butterfield in 1999.
¶ 4:18 PM 
The 5k Award was a competition where you had to make a fully functional website, all graphics, scripts, everything - in 5 kb or less. That competition changed the web forever. It really sparked the creativity of the web and took web development back to it's roots. There were tons of great entries, and my favorites were the functional ones such as a calendar where you can schedule events, and another where you would generate a different password for each website, but you would use the same password for all. Then there was the 5k furniture store, complete with pictures and descriptions.
It's been about 9 years since that competition started, and I say it's time for it to come back. Web pages have become quite complicated over the years, and I'd love to see what people can do with 5k now that we have HTML5, and more advanced web browsers.
So, Stewart - after founding Flickr, and completing gne.net - where's your three games you mentioned you'd make in this interview with Mindjack?
I'll quote the relevant part if you don't remember:
MS: If Ludicorp were forced at gunpoint to make an action shooter for the Xbox-or-something, and money were no object, what would you make?SB: After a long discussion around the office we settled on three concepts - all of which should be available sometime in 2009.
- Paleolithica! - A "shooter" (slings, spears, rocks) of Cro-magnon vs Neanderthal, set in and around the Pyrenees, Catalonia, Basque Country and the Langedouc. Advance your combat skills by developing new linguistic practices to co-ordinate with your fellow fighters. (You could also get into hand-to-hand combat and rip out each others' throats! Quest for Clans of Cave Bear Fires!!)
- Library Bookbomber! - Set in the Library of Babel, you play Borges the nearly-blind Librarian battling a non-denumerable infinity of foreign-speaking janitors while hopping from low-ceilinged hexagonal room to low-ceilinged hexagonal room. Drop books on them, throw books at them: do anything you can do prevent them from kicking you out and bringing on the cataclysmic "closing time".
- Nanoswarm! - If the budget really allowed for exploration, custom hardware would be the way to go! Imagine some kind of consumer productization of a local positioning system [like a spatially tracked ring or stylus] that gave the players gestural expression. Then, the game could involve gesturally shaping the behavior of billowing swarms of nanobots dancing in the air between combatants.
But first, we will finish GNE.
