Last week at PAX I demonstrated a new free program coming from Stardock called Ready to Play.

During my demo I start with “I am sure I’m the only person who has ever encountered a mean person on the Internet…”

Of course, most people have run into people on-line who are obnoxious or griefers and such.  Ready to Play is designed to alleviate that issue by letting people create gaming profiles of themselves.

Here’s how it works:

Users enter in data like how old they are, how competitive they are, what they value in gaming the most, and a bunch of other data.  Then, it will take that data and generate a list of “recommended” friends, these are people who have similar gaming profiles.

For example, I, as a father of 3, 38 years old with a very scarce amount of free time have very different priorities when it comes to playing online than a 15 year old.  Nothing wrong with 15 year old gamers at all. But if I want to get a quick game of say Demigod or L4D or Rise of Legends in, then my best case of getting a fun game going is to find people to play with who have similar gaming expectations in mind.

Once you’ve set up your profile you see a screen like this:

Read to Play also supports traditional “Friends” lists and indeed you can use your existing Impulse Friends with this seamlessly (Demigod’s built in Friends handling is going to be updated to make use of Ready to Play for v1.2).  But in addition, you will also have the Recommended Friends too.  Now, you can always block those people if you run into someone who you don’t like.

 

But when you’re ready to play, you pick the game you want to play from the list then pick who you want to broadcast to (by default, it’ll be everyone who has the game that is on your list).

Users who have Ready to Play running and are opted in to be broadcast to will get a small dialog in the bottom corner that looks like this. If they choose join they go here.

 

This pre-game chat window lets players set up what map they want to play, what password they want to use to get into the game, etc.

The results have been particularly spectacular internally when played with games whose persistent online communities have diminished over time.

Ready to Play supports any PC game. It will automatically pick up games on Impulse and soon from Games Explorer, Steam, and elsewhere.

If you want to sign up for the beta go to www.stardock.com/products/readytoplay