Bring the group back to life - Call for consensus by 24 July 2020

Dear participants of the Games Community Group,


TL;DR
-----

This is a call for consensus to:

1. Bring the Games Community Group back to life!
2. Adopt the Community Group charter at 
https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/games-cg-2020.html
3. Nominate Noël Meudec (Facebook Instant Games) and Tom Greenaway 
(Google) as co-chairs of the Games Community Group.

Please voice support or raise potential concerns, preferably in response 
to this email (but feel free to get in touch with me), by the end of 
July 24th 2020. Silence is considered consent.


Longer version
-----
W3C organized a workshop on Web games last year. The workshop report [1] 
highlighted needs and candidate technologies deemed useful to develop 
games on the web. The workshop also revealed that it would be useful to 
continue tracking and exploration of web technologies for games 
development.

Noël Meudec (Facebook Instant Games) and Tom Greenaway (Google), both in 
Cc, indicated that they would be happy to help drive this tracking and 
exploration work in a Community Group. As such I would like to propose 
that the Games Community Group comes back to life and resumes discussing 
web technologies as it did some years ago, with Noël and Tom as chairs.

Both Noël and Tom have hands-on expertise in Web games, and associated 
technical and business challenges. Tom was at the workshop where he 
organized a session on discoverability and monetization [2], leading to 
a recent proposal to extend schema.org properties for Web games [3]. 
Noël has been working with Chris Hawkins, who reported on Facebook's 
experience with Instant Games at the workshop [4]. I'll let them 
introduce themselves further :)

The Games Community Group has been around since the inception of the 
Community Group program. Many Community Groups have been created since 
then and successful ones now tend to adopt a charter to specify scope, 
process and participation rules. This makes it easier for companies to 
join and participate. I propose that this group adopts a charter as 
well, and prepared a draft charter accordingly [5]. The scope is the 
same as the scope that appears in the description of the group [6]. The 
rest is mostly boilerplate text common to most groups. Among other 
things, this text clarifies that there will not be any Essential Claims 
under the W3C Contributor License Agreement or Final Specification 
Agreement, which should help companies to join and participate.

Practically speaking, the group would document needs, track useful 
technologies and remaining gaps, and steer standardization efforts to 
address them. Goal is to use the Web Gaming Platform discussion forum 
that Noël put in place for this [7]. On top of asynchronous discussions, 
the group could organize a series of calls to invite presentations on a 
particular topic or discuss solutions live.

Is it worth it? I believe so! There have been many updates in relevant 
Web technologies since the workshop and the status update I wrote back 
in November 2019 [7] is already partially outdated given recent updates 
to WebTransport, WebGPU, Web Monetization, etc. Tracking updates and 
gathering game developers inputs on web technologies is key to ensuring 
that these technologies support the right features for games.

How does that sound? Please either express support or raise potential 
concerns, preferably in response to this email, by the end of July 24th 
2020.

Thanks,
Francois
W3C Media & Entertainment Champion


[1] https://lists.w3.org/Archives/Public/public-games/2019Mar/0001.html
[2] 
https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/report.html#discoverability
[3] https://github.com/schemaorg/schemaorg/issues/2565
[4] https://www.w3.org/2018/12/games-workshop/report.html#context
[5] https://w3c.github.io/charter-drafts/games-cg-2020.html
[6] https://www.w3.org/community/games/
|7] https://www.html5gamedevs.com/forum/40-web-gaming-platform/
[8] 
https://www.w3.org/blog/2019/11/status-update-on-web-games-technologies/

Received on Thursday, 9 July 2020 07:04:03 UTC