Web design blog

cHTeMeLe is a board game about HTML @ geek.com

cHTeMeLe is a board game about writing HTML5 code. In cHTeMeLe, players endorse their favorite web browser (Firefox, Safari, Chrome, Opera, or IE) and then score points by correctly laying out HTML tags, while also trying to bug or crash their opponents’ code. From the article: ‘Despite cHTeMeLe’s technical theme, its developers claim you don’t need any web programming experience to play. The game takes web design standards and boils them down into game rules that even children can learn. To help less technical players keep everything straight, the tag cards use syntax highlighting that different parts of code have unique colors — just like an Integrated Developer Environment. No one is going to completely pick up HTML5 purely by playing cHTeMeLe, but it does have some educational value for understanding basic tags and how they fit together.

[Via Slashdot]

“The bad news is that cHTeMeLe is only in French for the time being, so many English speakers will have to wait for a translation of the rule book — which, of course, is called ReadMe_fr. Fortunately, the developers have followed in Cards Against Humanity’s footsteps by licensing the game under Creative Commons and making it available for download and printing. So once cHTeMeLe supports other languages, it should be easy to make your own copy.”

Browsers are important because they are a kind of public square, a place that everyone shares and nobody owns.

It is the nature of browsers to deliver information in a reasonably similar way on very different machines (desktop PC, desktop Mac, iPhone, iPad, Android, Blackberry, etc.)

This has enormous implications for game design:

At the Game Developers Conference last week, Electronic Arts and now Digital Chocolate (Millionaire City) founder Trip Hawkins worried that evolutions in the multiplatform space would pose major challenges for developers trying to earn money in emerging spaces.

… The explosion of browsers onto mobile devices and the rise of cloud-based gaming can take much of the credit for why Hawkins, who was also Apple’s director of marketing prior to founding EA, believes that it’ll end up the game industry’s most central platform.

“The browser has taken over 2 billion PCs–it’s going to be taking over a billion tablets over the next few years, billions of mobile devices,” he says.

And it’ll even enter new areas: “It will end up in my opinion very strong on the television. The browser is the platform of the future,” Hawkins adds.

— Leigh Alexander @ Gamasutra

Via SlashDot.

See also FarmVille Now Worth More Than EA —

• Farmville is a browser-based game that has made its parent company, Zynga, very rich very quickly
• Electronic Arts (EA) is the world’s largest developer and bricks-and-mortar distributor of computer games