Open Gaming

One of the things that's always bothered me about video games is that they're usually very restrictive. You have to have X platform, Y controller, give money to Z publisher. Personally, I look at the Xbox 360 and PC (in particular,) and say "why can't they play games together." I bought Team Fortress 2 for my PC, and can't play with people on XBox live. I know a solid bit of that is because Microsoft (and Sony, and Nintendo) want to make more money, but as the consumer, I feel shafted.

I had an idea the other day, along lines similar to this: make a game that everyone can play. Publish the game state data as an xml feed. Allow platform developers to make their own interfaces to the game, and have them send responses back to a server, which can be either dedicated, or one of the participants of the game. You'd have to worry about people cheating, but it my mind most of the actual processing would be on the server side. That way, even thin clients or browser-based interfaces would be able to play in the same game as a $4,000 PC, running a DirectX10-based interface with HDR and all the bells and whistles.

I don't know, this may just be a pipe dream, but I think that at the very least it's an interesting concept.