Well, Querki as it stands *now* is extremely general-purpose -- I'm using it for a couple dozen different use cases personally so far.
But yeah, LARP-writing is where it started. A dozen years or so ago, I tried writing a LARP using a wiki -- I liked the ability to easily edit in the browser, but quickly got frustrated by how unmaintainable the result was. When you build a LARP in a wiki, you inevitably wind up with a lot of tricky duplicate data: one-way links and other sorts of duplications that lead you down a rathole of messiness. So I took one of the early wiki codebases (UseModWiki), hacked it to include a formal concept of "properties" and a primitive query language, and wound up with ProWiki, a semi-structured wiki that I then used for several games.
By 2007, though, I was clear that ProWiki was at best a primitive prototype -- crude, suspiciously fragile and very hard to use. So I started designing Querki as its successor. And in 2012 I realized just *how* powerful Querki could be, came up with a business plan, and started working on it full-time.
It says something that, even amongst all the different use cases I've put Querki to, LARP-writing and management is still, by far, the most *complex* problem to date. There's a lot involved in doing it right. (Heck, the casting questionnaire for A Respectful Calm is the most complex data structure yet existing in Querki...)
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Date: 2016-01-13 01:28 pm (UTC)But yeah, LARP-writing is where it started. A dozen years or so ago, I tried writing a LARP using a wiki -- I liked the ability to easily edit in the browser, but quickly got frustrated by how unmaintainable the result was. When you build a LARP in a wiki, you inevitably wind up with a lot of tricky duplicate data: one-way links and other sorts of duplications that lead you down a rathole of messiness. So I took one of the early wiki codebases (UseModWiki), hacked it to include a formal concept of "properties" and a primitive query language, and wound up with ProWiki, a semi-structured wiki that I then used for several games.
By 2007, though, I was clear that ProWiki was at best a primitive prototype -- crude, suspiciously fragile and very hard to use. So I started designing Querki as its successor. And in 2012 I realized just *how* powerful Querki could be, came up with a business plan, and started working on it full-time.
It says something that, even amongst all the different use cases I've put Querki to, LARP-writing and management is still, by far, the most *complex* problem to date. There's a lot involved in doing it right. (Heck, the casting questionnaire for A Respectful Calm is the most complex data structure yet existing in Querki...)