Why has there not been a single "20-percent time" project at Google resulting in anything even vaguely beneficial to gamers?
Google is now The Big Dog in IT, if the price on Nasdaq is any indication. IT is inexorably tied with gaming. Ordinary office workers kill time with fantasy football or style blogs; IT guys always killed it with Quake.
It was called "Google's experiment with gaming" when it launched an abortive Second Life clone and shut it down a few weeks later. Not only was that a horrendous misnomer - that nonsense wasn't a game in the slightest - but the press sounded as if they permanently shut a door on Google's entry into an ever-growing market. Google stuck its toes in the water, the water was filled with piranhas, Google will never go near the water again. In truth, the Goog ignored the possibilities entirely, and its lack of gaming projects has left them excluded from a marketing sector.
If I had been a Google employee in the last 10 years, I would've done some stuff that gamers have wanted ever since I was just sinking my teeth into Quake III a decade ago. Stuff like:
Stats and Web integration across games
Quake III was barely on store shelves, and a stats company had emerged to track in-game performance and relay that back out to a bracket website. Basically, it automated pro gaming tournaments, gave fans the scores and numbers they wanted, and was viewable to both tournament attendees and fans spread around the world. Modern pro tournament organizers are still doing a lot of this stuff by hand, and that's shameful given the technology that was needed to give birth to pro gaming. It's just a tee-tiny baby step to bring this stuff back.
And thankfully, someone is bringing it back. Bungie integrated basic online stats lookups in Halo 2, and really unleashed its potential with Halo 3. Players are getting a kick out of following their numbers (like accuracy, favorite weapons, best-performing maps, most likely areas to die) as much as simple stuff like Achievements. A few strategy-game makers are following suit, and Blizzard is sure to make a big feature out of it in StarCraft II. Valve also keeps detailed stats on its games for balancing and anti-cheating purposes, but its keeps all its data to itself.
Now imagine that this fun stuff wasn't limited to one AAA game every three years. Had Google thought to offer its quantitative expertise to gaming, gamers might have taken advantage by forming clans around the best-performing players, or speeding up the balance-tweaking cycle. It might have even given rise to some cool products, like Fantasy StarCraft for Korean fans. At the very least, Google would have had its name slapped on every game that had decided to open up to a sort of Google Games API.
Shareable video recordings of games
10 years ago, there were "demos," which were the term for saved replays of games. Entire matches were recorded and then could be replayed from any number of perspectives. This never really went away in PC strategy games, but they were once a standard-issue in FPS games, disappeared, and then reappeared as "replays" a couple years ago in Halo 3. These are distinct from the highlight videos you see on YouTube because "demos" or replays use game-specific data to be replayed inside the game itself. Instead of a 30-minute match weighing 500MB of compressed video, it's a 2MB game-readable data file. That's great if you own the game, but not so great if you usually play at your friend's house or just want to show off a quick move to a friend.
As soon as the cloud took shape, the computing horsepower at Google should have tied game replays and YouTube together. Upload a 2MB demo, and in 5 minutes you have a YouTube link to your amazing come-from-behind victory for all to see. Now, Bungie is experimenting with selling this service with Halo 3 replays - but why sell a service specific to one game when Google could sell YouTube video overlay ads that are actually decently targeted to viewers for once?
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Hopefully those two examples show just how much impact Google could have on gaming, depending on what resources the company put to use. Whatever happened to using 20 percent time to innovate (Maps, Docs, Voice) instead of trying to replicate social networking services (the Second Life knockoff, Latitude, Wave, the list will probably go on)?
C'mon, Google. Ask around. There has to be a gamer or two in that GooglePlex of yours somewhere. Let 'em make a contribution - it could be really valuable.