Game Gardens was created by the scurvy developers at Three Rings Design to foster experimentation in online game development. This was something we wanted to do for a number of reasons:

• Though Java and Flash have done a great deal to enable the development of simple single player games, multiplayer games tend to require an always-operating server, at least for match-making and frequently for running the server-side of a game. While there are free web hosting sites, there are no free game hosting sites (that we know of).
  
  
• Making any multiplayer game requires a bunch of work that has little or nothing to do with the game design but stands in the way of someone getting their idea turned into code. Being firm believers in (and users of) open source, we realized that the toolkit we'd written to save ourselves that trouble is exactly the sort of thing that makes a perfect open source project and we jumped at the chance to share it with the community.
  
  
• With these obstacles lessened, we feel that many more ideas will make their way into code, and with an audience to appreciate and give feedback on those ideas, they may even evolve into really fun games. At a time when everyone in the industry is lamenting a lack of originality and wishing developers and publishers would take more risks, we are hoping to plant the seeds (pardon the pun) of innovation in this small way and do what we can to smooth the path for new game ideas to be born and grow.

We'll get down off our soapbox now, but please, take a look around, play some of the games, and then dig on in and make your own! Please post to the forums or email gardens@threerings.net if you have questions.