Re: Mixing Humans and AIs in Real Time Diplomacy (Was: [dipai] Re: Controlling End of Turn)

On Tue, 27 Oct 2009 19:34:32 -0600
Mike Barnes <[email protected]> wrote:

> Your plan is very ambitious, and also very impressive
> Good luck.

Thanks. I've been meaning to explain to this group in particular what I
meant by, "There is a high probability of DPJudge 2.0 being federated
with this infrastructure."

Manus is very keen on exposing the features of the DPJudge as web
services. As that happens, I can use programmable chat rooms to access
DPjudge games on USDP, USPN and any other DPJudge to provide a real
time interface for games. That, by itself, won't affect most games as
they are currently played on DPJudges, but it will allow players
familiar with the DPJudge interface to play RT games with familiar
tools.

Also, DPJudge does not have its own social media context - just the
Yahoogroups. YGs are problematic at several levels, but those all boil
down to the fact that there is no such thing as a free lunch. The real
price of outside services is that when you allow others to own your
infrastructure then you have to expect them to use that to fulfill
their own purposes. Yahoo's purpose is to make money for their
shareholders. They do that by selling advertising and by selling your
personal data for market research, both of which mean you pay for the
service by paying more for products you buy, but you do not control the
quality or content of the services beyond your own contributions.

If DPJudge users participate in a social media context that is owned by
the hobby then the advertising and market research go away. The
replacement options are commercial services like PlayDiplomacy.com, a
non-profit user supported service like asciiking.com, or privately
owned and supported services like floc.net (where USDP currently lives)
and the DipPouch. While I have a vested interest in ASCII King, the
main point is that a service operated by the hobby will use your
privacy data differently than a service supported by the advertising.
Instead of selling your information, it will only be used to improve the
quality of service because the accountability is to the hobby community
rather than to shareholders.

PlayDiplomacy.com and webDiplomacy.net (formerly phpDiplomacy.net) both
provide local forums for their game site. That's not out of the
question for DPJudge, but a solution that involves email as well as web
is preferred. Integrating a mailing list and an archive into DPJudge
would be a heavy-duty task, but I can easily add mailing list contexts
to a chat server and even require that members of the mailing list be
registered with the DPPD, meaning that they could be automatically
removed from DPJudge mailing lists if they were no longer eligible to
play on DPJudge.

For starters,
Chris


------------------------------------