Whirled: coming soon..

Daniel James. Indescribably cool bloke: 100% elf-pirate. He wears a tricorn. He also runs Three Rings, a company doing some really interesting things at the moment.

Generally - I'm being broad - the games industry has been a pretty "closed" industry. Phil Harrison's nod to web 2.0 is the high-profile start of a big change, I think, but generally the games industry is (has been) mostly chaps doing mostly console games, for mostly very big budgets. Raph Koster referenced mainly web properties in his rant yesterday on the MMO panel.

This year's GDC is strong on the alternative fu: indie games are Large. Casual games are Large. Serious Games are grabbing more and more attention.. and this web thing, MySpace is being mentioned a lot. The chaps  with consoles are raising an eyebrow, perhaps, as this alternaindustry grows at a startling rate, bridging the whitespace between both the games and web industries.

It's the playful web.

Anyway. This brings me back to Daniel: he's just about to announce his new project, Whirled:

Whirled is Three Rings' third project, a web-based social world for chat, games and player-created content.

Screenshots and more details will be announced in an hour, so I'll be back with more in a bit. Whirled is, by the way, the curious "meta soy" that I was wondering about previously...