Waving Goodbye: A Google Wave Gaming Postmortem

Google Wave was always a gaming conundrum. In general, the uncertainty of how to use Wave for communication was both its greatest weakness and greatest strength. Google Wave was designed as a framework for communication without any of the preexisting bias or baggage of email, digital white-boarding, or chat clients. My personal thought was that it had the potential as a communication channel to usurp email, at least in terms of usefulness with regard to embedded material and ease of collaboration. While the open framework of Wave allowed for innovation and experimentation, it never attained a critical mass of adoption that any new technology requires to become sustainable. As a digital native, the immediate question I found myself asking was, “So how do I play games on this thing?” To answer this question I, along with several friends, decided to use Google Wave as a medium for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign.


In order to set up the campaign we used multiple waves for each encounter (travel, interrogations, and other events had their own waves), as well as persistent waves to track out of campaign chat, character profiles, and loot tracking. We also used a series of separate waves for individual encounters and an “amulet” wave that represented a psychic link between the characters who had the different parts of a shattered amulet which was a main part of the quest. We also used Google Docs to store and update character sheets and a campaign specific Google site to log general quest data, locations, history, and other flavor text. We played using 4E rules and each player started out on a separate quest with their own character and the Dungeon Master, Sherief, who works in IT support when he’s not rolling twenties. Jeff, a professional game developer (and also my brother) played a dwarven warden. I played as a dragonborn cleric. A former coworker of ours and long time friend Pat played a druid shifter and Jim an acquaintance was a shifter avenger to fill out the group.

Some of the basic strategies we used to keep things straight were influenced by the Wave medium itself. As waves are created and replied to, we determined that persistent items, such as dungeon maps worked best at the bottom of the wave, with everyone replying just above the map to maintain it’s relative position. We also discovered that because of the complex interactions between characters in D&D it helped to assign a font color to each character to keep things easy to read at a glance.

I asked the other players if they would be interested in discussing the pros and cons of Google Wave as a medium for games in general and D&D Specifically. With an eye to the impending closure of the Wave site, we also considered what changes could have made Wave more accepted and what features we would like to see become available in future communication mediums.

What do you feel was the best thing about playing D&D in Google Wave?

Jeff: The fact that I was able to play with people who are not near me in a format that is more conducive to conversations than regular email is. The potential for mapping and multiple participants interacting with in game assets simultaneously is exciting, but not yet fully realized.

Sherief: I also agree with Jeff on the first point. The ability to play with people who are scattered throughout the country/world is very nice. More than just location, is the ability to play when you have time. So it’s much easier to play with people with different schedules or in different time zones.

The idea that we could play a game in a semi-synchronous fashion, spread across the country, without having to adhere to a strict game time was very powerful. One of the nice features of Wave is that participant input is instantaneous and visible to all other members of a wave. This worked well in instances when each player was present because it allowed us to have conversations about what to do, complete with interruptions where necessary. The persistent nature of the wave itself did an excellent job of keeping a good record of the conversation so no one was left entirely in the dark if they missed a section of the adventure. Using plugins to handle mapping and dice management was also an effective way for us to emulate the D&D experience. We did have some issues with the availability of plugins and the implementation of some of the bots, but given that this was a new system and we were relying heavily on community produced content it isn’t surprising that finding the best solution required trial and error.

What is the worst part of playing D&D in Google Wave?

J: Waiting on individuals to advance the game. Each of us, I think, held up the game just because we had other things going on or didn’t realize the game had continued. The other side of this is that, once we realized that it didn’t make sense to wait for everyone to chime in on every minute detail, we moved the game along much better. But there were times when I missed some interaction I would have had fun participating in, just because I wasn’t near a computer, or forgot to check on the wave, or didn’t have any way to respond, since there is no real way to access [Wave] via mobile, that I am aware of.

Dave: Agreed, I’ve tried a couple of Android apps, but they’re pretty slow and inefficient.

S: As a dungeon master, losing out on that real time interaction is difficult. I found myself using less traps and adding less devices that may interrupt players turns. Combat already moves so slowly that it’s further slowed down in Wave format (versus face to face) and I was hesitant to slow down the action further by introducing some possible fun immediate interrupts or immediate reactions. Secondly, it is difficult to lose that face to face interaction with the players. When you are all sitting around a table it’s great to see the look on a player’s face when some plot twist or action gives them that payoff smile. You also miss that bored look on th their faces when whatever you are doing is not playing out in a way that is satisfying. As a DM, one of your major jobs is to constantly gauge your players and make sure the game is interesting. This is much harder to do remotely.

In retrospect, it does seem like the lack of integration of Google Wave with other Google services is what did the most damage to the product as a service. It may be in part because of the larger resource footprint of Wave, or a conscious decision to not put any rules into place regarding how to use Wave, but it seems that fairly ubiquitous features like notification would work out of the gate. In fact, it didn’t take long for the community to develop notification bots that could be assigned to waves, however the functionality of bots was hit or miss making that an imperfect solution. As we used Wave, some new features were introduced however and it is currently possible to get notifications of unread waves every day. It is also interesting that despite the real time interaction, the loss of face to face interaction reduced the spontaneity of the entire experience and challenged the dungeon master to compensate in creative ways.

Are there any features you would have liked to see added to Wave to improve its functionality with respect to D&D or gaming in general?

J: Better addons for maps/dice. I am sure this would have arrived as more people developed for it. Some sort of notification system other than having wave open in your browser all the time as well would also be good. If I could hook this up to my phone the same way gmail does it would be ideal. Even better would be a wave app that lets me have all the Wave functionality on my phone, with push notifications for when changes occur. Just being able to respond to waves with my phone would be awesome, since the mobile web interface is sort of terrible (last i checked.)

D: I agree that a non-browser based access system would be excellent. I really want to be able to check waves on the go, but the only apps for it I’ve tried have been terrible.

S: I agree that one major downside is the lack of a really good mapping application. It would be nice to see someone develop an “all in one” dice roller-map-battle application. One other improvement I would have liked to see Google make to Wave is how Wave utilizes PC resources. Whenever a Wave tends to get long it becomes very cumbersome to navigate, which degrades the gaming experience.

Interestingly, the main area we saw for improvement was in the availability of addons and improvement of general Wave functionality. Each of these issues could be corrected either by Google releasing updates to the system, or by the community working together to develop standards and tools for each use of Wave to make it easier to deal with. In the end it seemed like a conscious decision on the part of the Wave team to let the product find its own uses and not push a specific use or define the offering. Unfortunately, without some direction or faster response to community desires, less elegant solutions became the norm and did more to hurt the product than to help.

What was your favorite moment in the campaign in general and how was that moment helped or hindered by using Wave as a medium?

J: All of the fights worked surprisingly well. Once we naturally came to a format to post our attacks and stuff it made it really easy for me to parse what was happening, who’s turn it was, and what the battle situation was. This sort of outpaces regular D&D, in my opinion, since the current battle situation is represented by miniatures, but keeping track of everything’s HP in your head isn’t really practical, nor is asking the DM all the time. Having everything obviously shown and easily accessible is awesome.

S: It’s hard to pick just one. From a DM’s perspective one of the hardest things in table top gaming is to split the party. If people split up you have some people playing while others are sitting around bored. Wave made it very easy for everyone to side quest or explore individually and then all meet back up at the end and go back to adventuring. I think some of the solo waves had some really great moments in them that would never have happened while sitting at a table.

D: I agree, I really liked the communication via the mystical amulet mechanic. It was cool to literally have a dedicated wave for the amulet based “psychic” communication.

It was surprising how well the simple framework of Wave adapted to the extensive note keeping required for playing D&D. The ability to limit visibility of certain story lines was a very cool mechanic. We used a separate wave to represent a shattered amulet that let us communicate psychically when we weren’t together as a group. In these instances we’d each have our own waves covering our local events, while simultaneously other players were in other waves carrying out their part of the game. The “Amulet” wave represented the amulet link and was a place where we could coordinate actions while not together in the game. The other added bonus of the Wave format was that we could easily play catch up with each other after groups were separated by simply stating that we told the tale of our time without the group and then share the link to the solo wave. This allowed everyone to stay in character while not wasting a lot of time rehashing what happened.  

How would you feel about playing other non-digital games in Google Wave? Do you have any ideas about what specific games would thrive in this environment?

J: In general, turn based analog games are too boring for me to play a turn per day or whatever. I am not invested enough in things like Scrabble or Carcassonne to want to have an ongoing, multi-day gameplay experience. Pen and Paper RPGs are about the only thing I can think of that I think I would enjoy/be committed to in this format. This may be because I already think of this type of game as a committed, multi-session experience, and splitting it up further into more sessions (posts) is not that much of a stretch from what the regular game experience is for me anyway. If you guys have any other ideas of games that would be fun in this format I would love to hear them, maybe I am missing some obvious candidates.

S: I would take the opposite stance that Jeff does. I am a huge fan of turn based games and would like to see some other traditional board games in Wave. I would love to see Wave as a platform for some lengthy board games (i.e., Axis & Allies, Risk). Heck, even Chess would be alright.

D: I think longer format games could be good. Specifically, a game like Risk 2210, which is faster than the original, would probably translate pretty well to a Wave.

The varied responses here really cover the whole spectrum of games (from a time investment perspective). The ability to split a game up into multiple persistent sessions is something that can work well for massive games, but it seems that when using Wave would extend the gaming sessions significantly, it’s usefulness drops. It may be that while Wave is suited more toward hardcore, lengthy gaming, it’s just not appropriate for casual games.

What is your take on Buzz vs. Wave? How do you think each fits into the current online communication landscape and how would you feel about gaming on each platform

J: Right off hand:
Buzz doesn’t have the ability to edit/comment on each other’s comments in a way that is understandable. The fact that it is a buzz followed by a series of comments means for something like D&D it would become unwieldy pretty fast (even moreso than in Wave). The Buzz interface and notification system is pretty bad, to be honest, but the fact that it has a notification system is the one advantage that it has over Wave.

Specific problems with Buzz: It isn’t clear what I am looking at when I get a new buzz. It isn’t clear what list (RSS vs. Buzz followers) will receive things I share via Google Reader or Google Buzz. Buzz sort of arbitrarily cuts off the comment the buzzer added to the link they are sharing. There is basically no differentiation between the user comment and the content of the link that buzz is previewing for you.

These are all just implementation issues. In my opinion, Buzz solves the problem Twitter is trying (and failing) to solve. Buzz is used to share things of consequence, and provides a place to comment on those things, rather than sharing inconsequential crap and stringing the discussion out across multiple accounts that are not inherently connected to each other. i.e., you don’t need to have a program to aggregate your buzz account for you. It is all just handled in the Buzz interface (even if the interface is not the best). Basically, Buzz is a good idea, but the implementation is very rough. For something like D&D, Wave is a much more coherent solution, in my opinion. It solves a lot of the problems of sustained online interaction between a group, while Buzz solves the problems of sharing information found and getting opinions on it from your friends without having the intention of ongoing discussions on the topics buzzed.

D: I never really caught the Buzz bug. I think Plurk has been filling that gap for me nicely, and has only the people I care to talk to, not my whole address book (without having to mess with blocking, etc).

J: Yeah, i removed most of the chaff from my Buzz list, but the way they added it when it first went online was sort of… fucked up. Adding everyone automatically from your address book and automatically buzzing to everyone on your buzz list and on your RSS follower list is sort of dumb. Actually, come to think of it, I like the way the RSS following thing works much better, though i don’t like that it isn’t easy to just add a link from something to your rss feed, or else, I haven’t looked hard enough to realize how to do it.

S: I dislike Buzz and really just click it to get rid of the numerical notification of how many buzzes I have. It think that Buzz has some potential but would love to see it integrate with other Social Media instead of just being “Here is where all my Google stuff is”. Even if it was integrated into some of the popular IM clients such as Trillian or Digsby I could start to see a real use for it and it could become accessible and still relevant. I could see Buzz being useful for alerting you to new Wave activity, but utilizing Buzz itself for any type of gaming doesn’t seem realistic.

The Buzz vs. Wave debate seems kind of silly on its surface because the two formats are so different. Google’s more robust promotion of Buzz, along with specific instructions of how to use it seem to have increased it’s adoption in a much more significant way than that of Wave. It will be interesting to see if Buzz can truly take on Twitter or Facebook in terms of microblogging or if it too will fade like Wave. 

Overall, what is you opinion of using Google Wave for D&D? Would you keep playing in this medium and why?

J: My opinion is positive. I wouldn’t replace any in person games I am currently playing with waves, though augmenting them with Wave might be interesting… depending on the hardware you have available. Though really, if you are using it in person then notepad would serve the same purpose, essentially. I would definitely keep playing in this medium in addition to in person games if i am able.

Ironically, it was after the interview (which was being conducted in Google Wave) was started that Google announced the cancellation of the Wave service. Seizing the opportunity to expand our discussion I decided that it would be a good idea to see how the end of Wave colored our earlier opinions of it.

Knowing that Google Wave has been given an end of life date, how do you feel about it’s place in the world of communication online?

J: It is sort of disappointing to me. I think Wave has potential as a replacement for email, but cannot effectively be picked up because people are unwilling to use it.

I think if Google had been more about promoting it it may have done better. Possibly integrating it into their Gmail client in some way would have helped their cause. I think it would have to be presented as something you can just turn on in your Gmail account, that allows you to have wave functionality with people who are using wave and regular email functionality with those who don’t.

Simultaneous editing and threaded comments the way wave does them are definitely the way communication should be done on the Internet in the future, in my opinion. The discussions make more sense and people who are added to the discussion late can easily get caught up without having to parse a large number of emails containing information which is irrelevant or outdated.

What aspects of Google Wave would you like to see implemented into other Google or non Google projects? Live typing on Xbox Live? Any thing specific you would like to see?

J: Live typing already exists to some extent in Google Docs, I believe, though I think it should be integrated in a more user-friendly way than it is in Wave. I.e., not always on or set up so that it is easy to change or turn it off on an individual basis. I think some people get self-conscious when typing, so making it more obvious that it is live typing and how to turn it off is necessary.

Other than that, the discussion paradigm used in wave is a much better solution to Internet communication, rather than replies in the style of email or a message board thread. I would like to see this implemented for message boards as well as email communication.

Message threads on boards become unwieldy after more than one page of replies and the information on the first page is most likely outdated or irrelevant to the discussion currently taking place in the thread. Using the wave paradigm would probably solve most of these issues, once people got used to how to use it efficiently, though it may require more concentration on board moderation.Gmail sort of tries to do this, by displaying email replies as though they are threaded, but the fact that they aren’t just sort of makes it confusing and prone to recipient errors

D: The Apple mail client also does a pretty good job of threading messages based on topic, but occasionally it does get confused. I’d like to see more robust threaded email with embedded, web-based attachments become more popular. Having the choice weather or not to display attachments is still something I would want.

It’s notable that the public response to the cancellation of Wave have been so polarized. There are those who found a use for it, and loved it; and those who didn’t use it and hated it. A lot of the commentary also has an interesting undercurrent of backlash against Google. Because Wave is the first service that they’ve decided to stop supporting it seems like lots of people are taking this as an opportunity to point out a weakness in the formerly impenetrable armor of the Internet giant. It will be interesting to see how Google handles both the decommissioning of the service and the reaction to their new found fallibility. While there has already been promise of tools to migrate data out of Wave and continued availability of most of the code behind it, I have a feeling that the more significant issue will be that people can no longer assume that Google is always right. This was never a safe assumption, but outside of the IT profession, people took it for granted that Google was always the next big thing. In this case they may be right, but the “next” in question may be farther off than we imagine. It wouldn’t surprise me if, in several years time, a Wave-like service is put out there again, on an Internet more capable of handling the overhead it requires and successfully supplants email as a more regular form of communication.