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

I support the effort to revive the Games Community Group.  I also work on
Chrome, with previous and current support for APIs seeing an increase in
adoption by games on the web.  E.g.:

GetGamepads has seen steady growth and a surge in recent months
https://www.chromestatus.com/metrics/feature/timeline/popularity/1916.

We'd like to improve Pointer Lock by adding an unadjustedMovement option
https://www.chromestatus.com/feature/5723553087356928.

With the deprecation of Flash we've seen a significant move of games being
implemented directly on web platform technologies, which is great not only
for the web but many web-adjacent products as well.

Looking forward to seeing more activity here.

On Thu, Jul 9, 2020 at 12:04 AM fd@w3.org <fd@w3.org> wrote:

> 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/
>
>
>