Harry's game

Harry is a student in his final year of college. He has dreamt up, but not yet implemented, a vast on-line trading game which could make his fortune and perhaps even cover his college fees. People will interact with each other and with pre-programmed robots; they will buy and sell resources within the game, and boost themselves with top-ups of real money. And they may even win real money, too. It will be played on home PCs, on games consoles, palm-tops and mobile phones. They will play it from the USA to Japan, Sweden to South Africa. It will start off small, but it will sweep the world. And it will all be one single all-pervasive game. (See Figure .)

Harry has the development skills to build the core application, but beyond this it will involve:

• Basic resources. Disk space, CPU time, bandwidth, memory, IP addresses.
• A central database. For the players' basic information.
• An application front-end. In many varieties, for PCs, games consoles, and more.
• Mobile comms front-end. He'll need to gateway into cell phones. And whatever the next technology is.
• Third party services. Mailing, chat facilities and other services will be needed sooner or later.

That will do for starters. Now Harry needs a technology base.