Monologue

The Open Web and The Broken TVs

On Monday, I spoke at Mozilla Labs and Six To Start’s Game On London event at Bar Music Hall in Shoreditch. It was a very fun night and the first time I’d spoken in front of so many people. All the talks were about the Open Web (HTML, CSS & JS) games and I was chosen due to my involvement with the Picklive team.

My talk was about Flash and native applications involvement with Open Web gaming and why I thought these things would never go away.

I started off with a quote from Karl Pilkington about his uncle who had two TVs, one that the sound didn’t work and one that the picture didn’t work, but as long as they were doing the same thing, it didn’t matter. To me, this is similar to how websites work today. We have to use fallbacks and plug-ins to achieve all the functionality that we want from our sites. So would that mean that Flash is the saviour of the Open Web as we have to rely on it for so much functionality?

We’ll have to admit that Flash is always going to be better at some things by its very nature. It’s plug-in based so isn’t dependent on browser releases, it’s cross-browser and cross-platform so less problems with compatibility and it’s direction is only decided by one company so it can make changes without arduous disagreements. So, should we make Flash games instead of Open Web games instead?

Just like Javascript, Flash’s scripting language Actionscript is a functional, prototypal programming language and is just another dialect of ECMAScript, so it’s perfect for the kind of event based interactions that you would get in games.

But there is good news.

The difference between Flash and Javascript is getting smaller and smaller. This is thanks to massive pushes from all the browser vendors and as browsers update with a faster pace and auto-update, there’s quicker deprecation of older browsers. For example, Chrome now updates every six weeks or so. We can now do things like push notifications, 3D graphics, geolocation and multi-threaded Javascript that we couldn’t a couple of years ago. Eventually, we’ll get less of our websites reliant on plug-ins and non-Open Web code.

The great thing about front-end development is that all code is free to read, thanks to Tim Berners-Lee, View Source and tools like Firebug. For me, pulling things apart and seeing how they work is a lot more fun than following documentation and tutorials.

Coding isn’t easy, especially browser based coding. We not only have to test our work in different browsers, but different versions of different browsers and different versions of different browsers on different operating systems. Also, making games requires a different approach to coding over normal website development, so being able to see how other coders work not only makes our lives easier but also the next generation of front-end developers lives easier too.

Javascript is getting popular now. We’re no longer the uncool kids with the weird language that people dislike. This is in thanks to libraries like jQuery, helping designers to understand Javascript by using native CSS selectors as functions, and also thanks to server-side Javascript like node.js helping back-end developers get into Javascript.

And of course, there’s a price. The big advantage for the Open Web is that anyone can do it - for free. It doesn’t matter who you are, where you are, how much bandwidth you have or how much money you have. Anyone can code in any text editor and test in any browser.

But what about native applications like iPhone apps? Of course, being native means that they are more powerful. However, if you want to make your application cross-platform and accessible to more people, this would mean more code bases and possibly more developers. And why commit yourself to the approval processes of the App Store? What if you need to deploy a critical update?

My housemate Thomas was surprised when I told him that I could build a game that works not only in browsers, but on the iPad and on mobiles, and isn’t an app or isn’t in Flash. But Thomas doesn’t really care about how I build games. He doesn’t care about Websockets or WebGL. Or even CSS transitions.

However, if I told Thomas “you know that game you play at work on Internet Explorer? You can play that on your phone in the pub. Then on your iPad the next morning when you’re hungover. Then on Chrome at the weekend, and you’d be where you left off each time.” The portability of the Open Web is a brilliant reason to make games using Open Web technologies.

There’s no reason why an Open Web game couldn’t become as big as Angry Birds and Farmville very soon, and with the help of WebGL, as big as Minecraft or Quake over the next couple of years and I really believe that an Open Web game will get big in the next year and make someone a lot of money.

Thanks to Six to Start and Mozilla for inviting me and to Anna, Tobias Kunisch, James Sui and Lawrence Brown for their help on the presentation.