Web 2.0 - Where is the interactive entertainment or games “killer application”?

When I look at all the nowadays famous and successful Web 2.0 applications, something quite astonishing comes to my thoughts: while many of those applications are meant to be used by people during their leisure time, none of the successful ones deals by its nature with something that comes close to „interactive entertainment“ or even „games“. Yes of course, watching videos on youtube.com is most of the time entertaining and even somehow interactive (since the user can decide, what video to watch or can leave a comment – if you really want to call this already „interactive“). On the other side, sites like secondlife.com are not generally called first to be Web 2.0 sites, since they lack some important characteristics, that seems to be generally necessary to receive the merit of being considered as Web 2.0. So I ask myself, why are so few people try to connect the rich experiences that exists in the field of the computer game industry with possibilities of Web 2.0? Or am I just missing some interesting development? (If so, please comment to this post!)

To start thinking about it deeper, I have to talk (very shortly!) about, what the characteristics of a Web 2.0 application are for me today. There are three main points:

1. It’s content is constantly developed/maintained/pushed forward by a community of people. Examples are Wikipedia, digg.com or again youtube.com

2. It runs within a common browser without exotic software add-ons (this one is obvious: The whole thing is called „Web 2.0“ - not „Special Software 2.0“ or something like this)

3. The interaction of a critical mass of users created something, that not otherwise could exist or be created – either because the development cost would be too high or the whole concept is the networked inter operation of real people (Examples are del.icio.us and flickr.com)

Saying this, many of the huge and successful Massive Multiplayer Online (Roleplaying) Games are near those characteristics of Web 2.0. They exist, because many people live a „second life“ online as some Fantasy Hero or Villain. By spending their time in those worlds, they are the same time it’s content. Some games even allow the players to create worlds or parts on their own. So point 1) and 3) seems to be clearly fulfilled.

But as the infrastructure of the Internet and it’s protocols and servers is used, for several technical and business issues the great and successful ones among those titles are not running in a common browser – they come as (mostly) commercial software, which has to be installed on a computer. Titles to notice here are for instance World of Warcraft or LOTR online.

One interesting thing in this market are the games like ogame, which are called browser games. They fulfill point 2.) as well as the other ones, because they are played in a conventional browser. From my personal researches they gained over the last year massively in momentum, especially among younger male players – which is quite interesting, since those browser games offer a visual entertainment of nearly zero. But the audience of younger males, which owns and knows mostly the modern 3D graphics PCs and consoles nevertheless uses and plays those games, although that are visually as hot as the front page of google.com. Time will tell, if that is just a short episode or a trend. It may be, that content and real user/gamer interaction is experiencing a revival among the gamers, it may also be that it is just kind of trendy to have something like ascii art on your screen instead of full fledged 3D graphics.

So where is the professional Web 2.0 concept that will be somehow the next big thing in interactive entertainment? By researching this I came along some interesting experiments like wednus DRPG or dutchpipe. The first one is the attempt to program a game with dhtml/javascript framework, the latter is a server experiment for a persistent online world (which is what you need for something like a real multiplayer game like WoW). But if you really want do those things, openlaszlo has everything you need. So if technology exists, and nobody is using it for interactive entertainment in Web 2.0, there seems to be no market. Or simply no business idea?

On the other side they exists an active community of enthusiasts that develop and read interactive fiction (which is more a classical single player game approach). But there is nothing I found, that combines those proven markets (the interactive entertainment industry is performing mainly well, so it’s no niche business) with the hype and the possibilities of Web 2.0.

Did I missed something? Please let me know!