Hello everyone,

although there were some proposals [1] and even some implementations
[2], there is still no official and standardized way to play games over
XMPP.
In my opinion this is one big hindrance for a large-scale adoption of
Jabber. A fast growing pool of interoperable and fascinating games would
drive many users to create and use Jabber accounts.

In order to solve this problem, I want to propose a XEP for Game
Support. I intentionally left the Multi-User Gaming (MUG) part out for
now, because it is the most complicated and controversial one. It would
be best to make one step after the other.
The other reason why I left out MUG is because a colleague and me are
already developing a game plugin for Pidgin based on this ProtoXEP and
we concentrate on One-to-One gaming, since MUG will need server support.
We do have a concrete plan for MUG, but do not want to drift the
discussion away from One-to-One gaming which now has top priority.

You can find the XEP to provide Game Support and a simple XEP defining
Tic Tac Toe at these locations:
http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~tgrote/xep/game-support.html
http://www.cs.uni-potsdam.de/~tgrote/xep/tictactoe.html

Since I know that there are at least some people on this list who would
also like to see standardized Jabber gaming becoming a reality, the
purpose of this email is not only to get a discussion about One-to-One
gaming going, but also to get help in improving the XEP and in writing
the missing part about MUG. Everybody interested in participating is
most welcome.
If you do have something to criticize about One-to-One gaming, it would
be best, if you explain your critique *and* provide a reformulation of
the concerning paragraphs and/or examples.

Thank you and Kind Regards,
Torsten Grote

-- 
[1] http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/gamesessions.html
    http://www.xmpp.org/extensions/inbox/chess.html
[2] http://tkabber.jabber.ru/tkabber-plugins
    http://dev.hyperstruct.net/xmpp4moz/wiki/RemoteApplicationChessboard

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