Hey KMO,

I'm kinda behind with the podcasts, so I just listened to this episode today. I want to go back and listen again, take it all in. Interesting subject indeed.

Like you, when I was younger I played a good share of D&D and other table-top role-playing games. (Honestly, the only reason why I stopped was because of conflicting schedules and an inability to find quality players... eventually it all just fell to the wayside...) I also played World of Warcraft when it first came out. At first, the friends I played with were friends in real-life, most of whom at one point (or still are) avid RPGers.

Our intension with the game was to focus on the RP aspect of it, and it worked... for a while. We formed a Guild and characters that had rich back-stories, had role-playing events, role-playing based quests... the Warcraft mythology and the vast expanse of world to explore in WoW, coupled with a bit of imagination left for a myriad of experiences... it was quite amazing. Then the game got... really really popular, and all the people who just wanted to raid and loot and get the best gear kinda took over. Even on the designated role-playing servers, it was difficult to get through a RP session without some sort of heckling and interference from other players. In a sense, it was like being 15 all over again.

But we tried, and it was fun. The potential is indeed there.... as you said, it's all how people use the technology.

Regarding the discussion of augmented reality hardware, it's much more likely that we'll see something like AR on cell phones first: some way of finding where you are (GPS or wireless signal triangulation) + real-time camera + some way of finding where you're facing (digital compass and tilt sensor or image matching and tracking against a panoramic image database) + geotagged info database + screen = stuff like this. Existing technology, the sort of hardware quite a few people are already buying and carrying around. I'm a bit of a cell-phone luddite (don't want to spend much money on service, so no smart-phone for me yet), but that sort of thing excites me. I wish I could point my phone at the bus stop and see when the next bus arrives, or point it at the streetscape and see all the relevant restaurant reviews on Yelp. If AR takes off, I'd expect some of the weirder hybrid-reality stuff to build on the existing userbase for those sorts of "more practical" AR applications.

I'm almost done with catching up on the archives, so I'll try to write something up when I'm finished.