New Endeavor, New Website

[benlehman]

Hey, I can finally show you all a project I've been working on since the beginning of the year. It's called likeable Games and it's a new game company focusing on social media games that you play with your extended social network over the internet.

Our first game, Matriarchy is about the Empress of a small, matriarchal society on the borders of Tang-Dynasty China and the Tibetan Empire. In the game, you have to make decisions about various crises and opportunities that arise for your kingdom in real time, with the help of both fictional advisers and your real-world friends. I'm really excited about both the company and the game, and hope you'll enjoy checking them out.

Comments

[amnesiack.livejournal.com]

Rad! Checking it out now.

[amnesiack.livejournal.com]

Looks cool. Will Matriarchy run independently or on top of an existing social network (i.e. Facebook)? When do you expect it to be available to play?

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

It will run over an existing network (facebook, twitter, buzz), probably starting with twitter. It should be available this summer.

status.net

[orgasmocerebrale.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Consider making it also work with Status.net (Identi.ca, etc.) for the small but fierce free-software-as-a-service crowd. If you managed that, I suspect you'd be the first to tackle such a market with a social network game.

-- Rafu

Re: status.net

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

Can you give me more information about how these function, what their userbases are like, etc?

Re: status.net

[orgasmocerebrale.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Very roughly, Status.net is Free & Open Source Software code which sets up something which is very much like Twitter, on anybody's server. Identi.ca is a big free Status.net server (the largest one, AFAIK), so it's very much like Twitter except with a smaller user base and radically different TOS: anything you write is automatically released under CC-by, Identi.ca reserves no other rights and disclaims any responsibility for content.
Current user-base is mostly free software people (coders, lawyers, etc. who are directly involved with free software endeavors) plus some less-technically-inclined free culture guys like me. You can review public activity at http://identi.ca/

Re: status.net

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

The problem with this is the game is proprietary, and our writing is the most important part. I'm not comfortable with cc-by.

yrs--
--Ben

Re: status.net

[orgasmocerebrale.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Oh, well… Of course, I only possess fragmentary & very rudimentary ideas about how your game is going to work, so I wouldn't be surprised if working with any free networks was unfeasible for your business model right now.
To my best knowledge, though, you don't have to subscribe to Identi.ca's CC-BY content policy if you access the Status.net via other means (such as setting up your own Status.net server) and you still get to connect to all Status.net users including Identi.ca users. It's a federated network (and the same applies to Diaspora, btw).