Overlooking Madison's Capitol Square, in a small, open office, four programmers are diligently working on the next great online game. The catch is they're not actually creating it. They're building the tools so that anyone, with or without experience, can create a web-based game that he or she can instantly share with anyone. The company is called Sharendipity.
Co-founders Mark Gehring, Greg Tracy, Dale Beermann, and Jeff Hoffman started work on Sharendipity in 2007. They didn't have a concept at first. "We sat around a table and brainstormed and prototyped all kinds of ideas," says Gehring. "One of the early ideas was to let kids visualize what's going on in algebra, to learn math by putting it into a 3D graphical world, to visualize equations rather than just memorize equations."
That led to the notion that they could "create a platform that would let people interested in math create that [themselves], let people interested in physics create physics educational software, let people interested in games create games," explains Gehring. "And that's what became Sharendipity."
These sorts of simple games, dubbed "casual games," are very popular now on platforms ranging from the web to cell phones to iPods and are expanding on what Solitaire and Tetris began years ago. Casual games played from within social networking sites such as Facebook have become so addictive among their fans that they now rank as a threat to office work and big video game publishers alike. Although these simple puzzle, action and strategy games thrive on players being able to quickly pick them up and play, their creation has up until now been left to professionals or, at best, dedicated hobbyists.
Sharendipity aims to empower people in the same way that YouTube lets average users make and broadcast videos. The concept is simple.
Fledgling programmers can choose from a dozen game types and then customize the graphics and sounds from samples. Or, artwork can be self-created and uploaded. The ambitious can use the tools to make a completely original game.
Take, for instance, the age-old shell game, in which an object is hidden under one of three shells. The shells are then shuffled, and the player tries to pick the correct one. This is one of the basic game templates on Sharendipity; others include Asteroids, Pursuit, Target Practice and Dodge. Templates can easily be customized graphically (instead of a shell, hide a UFO under Sarah Palin's head, for instance, or have Bucky Badger flying through the sky, or change the background so he's underwater). Tutorials are on the Sharendipity website to walk users through more functional alterations. After customizing, it's just a matter of trying the game out and clicking another button to share it with friends.
The tools and finished games on Sharendipity are available for anyone to use free now while still in beta. Eventually the company will launch a "marketplace" for in-game items, allowing creators to charge for elements that can then be used in other games. Currently Sharendipity is supported by advertising, but will share profits from ads to help encourage more users to create more games. Site users retain ownership of anything they create to put into their games.
"We aren't in the business of making games," says Greg Tracey. "We're just producing the platform that lets the community build games. The idea is that non-programmers can do that too, by reusing the small components that other people in the community contribute."
There isn't an approval process in place, making the relationship between Sharendipity and its users more collaborative than even the relatively open iPhone application store, which still requires the purchase of software and programming knowledge.
A major milestone for Sharendipity came a month ago, when it made the game player available in web browsers using Flash, software that runs much smoother for many users than the Java version that Sharendipity started with.
Sharendipity's Facebook page boasts over 500 users, but it's just a start. "We're platform-independent; the idea is that we'll eventually have an Xbox player or you could create the application from Facebook or from our website. It could run on an iPhone or an Xbox."
Sharendipity's plans for 2009 include increasing its staff and, eventually, launching the marketplace. There never will be a true final version, as the editor will be consistently enhanced and improved.
"Our business is to empower people to create things," says Gehring." "And the more places that creation gets played the better."
Sharendipity
sharendipity.com
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