gamerDNA.com | The Blog

Following up our last post: "How To: GamerDNA on Twitter and Facebook", we’d like to give a run down on how you can use GamerDNA to automatically keep track of all your gaming on Xbox Live, Steam and Xfire.  Not only that, but once you enter in all your information from your gaming networks, you can automatically have your gaming updates sent out to Twitter and Facebook!  It really is a beautiful thing.

Are you on GamerDNA?  Make sure you sign up today, it’s super easy!

The process of plugging in your gaming accounts to GamerDNA is quite simple and can be done with just a handful of clicks of the mouse.  Here’s the walkthrough:

1. Head on over to Manage your GamerDNA

In the top navigation for GamerDNA we have some quick profile options in the far right hand side.  There you will see your Home, Profile, and Manage icons.  If you mouse-over the Manage icon you get a variety of quick options, or you can just click on the Manage icon to go to your GamerDNA management page.

2. Add your AKA’s!

The GamerDNA Management page is basically the hub of your gamerDNA…this is the place that you can go to edit everything about your GamerDNA profile and experience.  Every setting that you would need to change or addition that you would want to make to your profile, can all be made from this page.

At GamerDNA we call the names that you have on your gaming networks your "AKAs", or your Also Known As names.  To add them to your profile, scroll down to the middle of the page and click on the "Manage AKAs" button.

Now all you have to do is add your gaming names from the different networks that you game on.  GamerDNA currently integrates automatically with Xbox Live, Steam and Xfire - so once you add those names, we can automatically update your profile and let all your friends know what you’re playing.

You can add other network names to your profile so that other gamers can see them, and we even have privacy settings so that you can make sure you’re comfortable with who does or doesn’t see your gamer names.

After you’ve added your Xbox Live, Steam, and/or Xfire names - Give GamerDNA a day or two to start picking up all your information and run it through our system.  After that 24-48 hours setup time, we start pulling your gaming information every day and update your profile. This means you can let all your friends know what games you’re playing, what achievements you got, and what days you played - without even updating your profile!

When you’re all setup, make sure you head on over and Edit your Broadcast Settings so that all your friends can see what games you are playing these days.  GamerDNA is the best way to automatically update Facebook and Twitter with all your latest Xbox Live, Steam, and Xfire gaming!

If you have any questions on how anything works, please let us know on our Get Satisfaction page.  We’re here to help!

Have fun!

Sam Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Hello GamerDNA Nation!

It’s been a busy month here at GamerDNA, with lots of work going on behind the scenes…and as a result, we now have plenty of stuff to talk about!

Last week was E3, the annual Video Game Industry trade show for all the game publishers/developers to show off their cool stuff to the press and retailers (like Best Buy and Wal-Mart).  The show has become a huge press spectacle over the years, and this year was no exception.  Exclusive game announcements and trailers, even The Beatles made an appearance at this year’s E3.

The "Harmonix House Band", featuring Harmonix’s CEO Alex Rigopulos on drums, playing The Beatles: Rock Band

This newsletter is jam packed with details on the latest GamerDNA updates, the latest GamerDNA News, and much more.  We hope you enjoy it!

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With the recent announcement of Tweet My Gaming, it’s time to create a bit of a How-To on integrating your GamerDNA with Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed, or Tumblr.  With GamerDNA, you can easily update your status on all of these social networks that you’re already on, showing all your friends the games that you have played or your latest activity on GamerDNA.

To start off, you will have to be a member of GamerDNA, so if you haven’t done that already, head on over and register right now! 

After you’ve registered and setup your GamerDNA account, make sure you head on over and add all your network ID’s to your gamerDNA. GamerDNA can automatically broadcast your Xbox Live, Steam and Xfire gaming, so all you have to do is add your username on those networks to your GamerDNA.  For the platforms that we don’t tie in to, like Playstation 3 and Nintendo Wii, you can manually add activities to your GamerDNA and have those broadcast as well.

To setup your Facebook and Twitter account (or other networks), head on over to your Broadcast Settings in your Manage your GamerDNA section of GamerDNA.  Here you can configure all your settings so that you can broadcast your gaming activity to your friends.

Facebook:

Setting up Facebook is quick and easy, since GamerDNA has implemented Facebook Connect to quickly connect GamerDNA to Facebook.  After a few clicks and a couple settings toggled, you should be good to go!

Here is an example of what your Facebook updates will look like:

Twitter:

Setting up Twitter is also quick and easy.  With GamerDNA you can automatically Tweet your Gaming!

Here is what a GamerDNA Tweet will look like:

If you’re a user of Tumblr and FriendFeed, we work with those networks as well.  Head on over to your Broadcast Settings section and you’ll be all set! 

That’s about it!  If you have any questions on how to setup your Social Network accounts with GamerDNA, please let us know by contacting support.

Have fun!

Sam "QforQ‘ Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

This week’s featured GamerDNA Play Now game is Bloons Tower Defense 3, a fantastic tower defense game on Kongregate.

The game is similar to many other tower defense games, in that you have to defend your base against the onslaught of enemies…except in this game you have to defend yourself from a barrage of deadly balloons, using Monkeys that have been trained to throw darts at fast speeds.  As you build up more cash, you can hold off the onslaught of balloons by creating Missile Launchers, Saw Blade Shooters, Catapults, and a Super Monkey which can throw darts at insane speeds.

Bloons Tower Defense 3 starts out by giving you 75 lives, which you need to hold out with at least one life left for all 50 rounds to beat each track.  The game has a variety of different tracks, with different strategies that can be used on each one.  After you beat each track you can receive a medal, which is saved to your account and shows up when you view the track listing.

The game is one of our favorite Kongregate games on GamerDNA, and we encourage everyone to check it out!  All you have to do is go to the Bloons Tower Defense 3 game page on GamerDNA, the press the Play Now button!

Have fun!

The annual game industry show, known as E3, has come and gone and wow..there are a TON of games to be excited about this year.  As a gamer I was blown away by the announcements and offerings that the publishers brought to Los Angeles last week…and as the Community Manager of GamerDNA, I was also excited to make an announcement of our own.

The show officially kicked off with the Microsoft Press Conference, which featured over 10 games (which most were exclusive), and some huge celebrities like Paul and Ringo Starr from The Beatles, as well as Steven Spielberg.  As a huge music fan, it was pretty awesome to see the first world reveal of The Beatles: Rock Band…as well as see the two remaining members of The Beatles.  My favorite part of the conference was actually the opening of the show, which featured Harmonix’s amazing opening cinematic for The Beatles: Rock Band.

The "Harmonix House Band", featuring Harmonix’s CEO Alex Rigopulos on drums, playing The Beatles: Rock Band

Some of the other highlights from the conference were the game play footage shown from Alan Wake, Splinter Cell Conviction, Halo: ODST, and Modern Warfare 2.

The next day, Tuesday, both Sony and Nintendo had their conferences.  Unfortunately I wasn’t able to make these…but I’ve got to say I’m pretty excited about Uncharted 2 and God of War III.  Judging from the lines to play God of War III, I think most everyone is excited about it as well.  The game looks beautiful on the PS3, with tons of gore and a lot of action.  Spring of 2010 can’t come fast enough.

There were a lot of games to check out at E3, and we’d like to hear what you are most excited about.  Let us know, "What game are you most excited about from E3 2009?" by posting a comment to QforQ’s game post!

Besides all the excitement of E3 around the game announcements and getting a chance to play the games, GamerDNA was at the trade show to make an announcement of our own.  Last week we announced the launch of TweetMyGaming, a site that tracks all of the gaming conversations on Twitter in real-time, and surfaces the most popular games that are being talked about right now.

On the website you can watch all the game related tweets from Twitter stream in to the site in real-time, see what the top games are on Twitter, or take a look at a particular game’s page on TweetMyGaming and see what people are saying about that game.

Last week I had the pleasure of doing interviews with MTV Multiplayer and Current TV throughout the week about TweetMyGaming, as the site is a great way to see how people are reacting to game announcements and press, in real-time.  You can check out my segments with MTV Multiplayer below:

MTV Multiplayer - TweetMyGaming Day 1 Wrap-Up

MTV Multiplayer - TweetMyGaming Day 2 Wrap-Up

MTV Multiplayer - TweetMyGaming Day 3 Wrap-Up

We created the site as a mash-up between the Twitter API, and the newly launched GamerDNA API, called Helix.  The GamerDNA Helix API is in beta right now, and we’ll be adding more and more to it as time goes by.  Right now, even in it’s beta state, it is quite powerful and gives you access to a large amount of data and features from GamerDNA. To find out more information about the Helix API, please check out our documentation here.

Well that’s a wrap for this year’s E3 for GamerDNA.  We’re very excited about TweetMyGaming.com, if you guys have any feedback on it please let us know by posting a comment below!

Thanks!

Sam "QforQ" Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Hi Everyone,

We are hard at work on a major (and somewhat total) site revamp right now that will be landing in a few months… but we did want to squeak out a small update with some bug fixes and a new tracking gadget on your member home page.

Your gamerDNA Track List

This tracking widget allows you to pick up to 20 friends and get updates about what they are playing right now, or have played recently. It gives you a quick one-shot look at what everyone has done recently.

By clicking the "edit" link next to the track list, you can select which friends you want to actively track. Their status and game play history will then update on this gadget every 5 minutes.

You can also click "View All Friends" and get status updates for everyone on the widget (20 per page) if you are curious what your extended network is doing.

This is a small first step towards a completely revamped member homepage that not only delivers real-time content about the games you like, but also updates around the your friends and people that you might find interesting.

GamerDNA Helix

We continue to move forward with great progress on our API called gamerDNA Helix. If you are a developer, skilled in the ways of XML APIs… check out our beta documentation. We are interestedin any feedback that you have to offer about how our API evolves. We have some pretty cool things in store that will empower you to create a variety of deeply integrated applications.

View the beta documentation here:
http://docs.google.com/View?id=dcrj8bnk_25chkxgwhp

Please note, that this documentation is subject to change. Any API discussion/questions can be submitted in the API Forum.

The full list of updates in this release after the jump!

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Hey guys!

It’s that time of the year again…where every game company in the world and 50,000 fans and business folk swarm Los Angeles for 2009’s E3 EXPO!  This year is shaping up to be pretty exciting, with rumored huge announcements from several companies, including the big three: Microsoft, Sony, and Nintendo.

The place and the time that a lot of those announcements happen is the Keynotes, which each of the big three hold next week.  We’d like you to join the GamerDNA development team in our Chat Room, to watch those keynotes live and share your instant reactions to what is being announced and shown off!

If you join us, you could win GamerDNA T-Shirts, we will be giving out several during each keynote!

You can join the GamerDNA Chat Room by clicking here, or by clicking on the Chat link at the bottom of every GamerDNA page.

Here are the Keynote times:

Monday June 1st:  Microsoft  -  1:30pm EDT (10:30am PDT)

Tuesday June 2nd:  Nintendo - 12pm EDT  (9am PDT)

Tuesday June 2nd:  Sony - 2pm EDT  (11am PDT)

To watch the live video streams, you can watch it live on TV on G4TV.  You can also watch live streams on G4TV.com (which will have TONS of live video all week), or you can watch it live on GameTrailers.com.

 In the mean time, let us know what your E3 Predictions are and what you’re most excited about, by leaving a comment on QforQ’s Game Post!

Update June 3 2009 10:00pm ET

Hey everyone! ChangeAgent here… Thanks for participating in the chats. It was alot of fun watching all of the keynote presentations. We did a few T-shirt drawings for everyone that was there. The winners were:

• YannieBoy
• Wink
• Crystalia
• WayneMSmith
• Retodon8
• brianchilders
• MrVista360
• andyg8180
• bob101910

If you were a T-shirt winner, QforQ will contact you next week for size and mailing information (when he is back from E3)

Last week we ran a contest around our new NOW page and our Facebook/Twitter integration…and now it’s time to announce the winners!

The two winners of a $20 Amazon Gift Card are…. ForteV4 and Celestian!

We’ll be doing more contests and announcements over the coming weeks, so I encourage everyone to stay tuned to our blog to keep up with what is going on at GamerDNA.  In the mean while, make sure you check out the GamerDNA NOW page and our new Facebook integration!

ForteV4 won our GamerDNA NOW contest, congrats ForteV4!

And that leaves us with Celestian, who won our Broadcast contest!

Congrats to the both of you!

Hello everyone!

Sorry for the late patch notes this week, things have been pretty busy on our end as we’re working very hard on some of the next additions to GamerDNA.  I’ll also be filling in for Trapper this week and I’m excited to get in on the Release Notes action this time around!

The update that we gave GamerDNA this week was pretty light, with most of the work going on behind the scenes in preperation for larger updates that will come out in the coming weeks.  This week we added in a couple community features that have been requested, as well as a change to how we can take in feedback from our community and give you guys the best support possible.

Account Settings page - Helping you change your password and email settings!

This week we took some time to clean up our Account Settings page.  Before the process of changing your email and password wasn’t that easy and our community let us know that, so this week we made it much easier to change those settings.  You can get access to this page by clicking on the "Manage" button up in the top right corner of your screen, when browsing the site.

Member Search - Now supports User-name and AKA search

In the past few weeks we received a lot of feedback from our community about our Member Search, especially about having the ability to search by a person’s AKA.  As of this week, you are now able to search by GamerDNA user-name, or by searching by a Public AKA that they have put in their profile.  This means that you can search by their AKA’s on sites like Twitter, or by their names on places like Xbox Live and Steam!

 G4TV Videos - GamerDNA now brings in videos from G4TV!

GamerDNA has added G4TV as one of our latest Video Partners, which means we are now automatically bringing in fresh videos from G4TV.com and from your favorite shows like X-Play.  These videos are added to a game’s Game Page, and can be shared with your friends or commented on.  For example, you can check out the new F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin Armored Front DLC Trailer on GamerDNA right now!

 Lastly, we launched our new Feedback and Support website at Get Satisfaction!

Now if you click on our Feedback or our Support links at the bottom of the page at GamerDNA, you will be taken to a page with widgets that will help you find an answer to your question, report a problem, or give us feedback and praise!

This new site makes it a lot easier for us to support our community and easily see what our community wants to have added to GamerDNA.  We use and monitor this site every day, and we encourage everyone to get involved and share your feedback with us!  Please check out our GamerDNA Get Satisfaction page today!

And that about wraps it up for us this week.  Please stay tuned to GamerDNA over the coming weeks, we’ve got some exciting things in store for the coming month(s) and we can’t wait to show you and get your feedback!

Thanks and have a great weekend!

Sam "QforQ" Houston

GamerDNA Community Manager

Over the past couple weeks we’ve launched two new features:  The GamerDNA NOW page and our Facebook integration.  What better way to celebrate their launch…than a contest that starts right NOW!

Starting today and through to this Friday, you can be entered to win one of two $20 Amazon Gift Certificates, and all you have to do is use GamerDNA!

To enter, all you have to do is create a Game Post, a Game Activity, or upload an Image to your GamerDNA between today and 12:00am EDT Saturday May 23rd.  As a secondary requirement, you also need to comment another community member’s content that they’ve put up on GamerDNA.  What’s the best way to find all this interesting stuff to comment on at gamerDNA?  The GamerDNA NOW page ofcourse!  The GamerDNA NOW page is a live stream of activity on GamerDNA, showing all game posts, manually entered activities, images that are uploaded, and comments made.  You can even comment on cool stuff that you find, right from the NOW page!

You can also enter to win by adding your Facebook and/or Twitter account to your GamerDNA and have at least one update sent out to those sites, between today and 12:00am EDT Saturday May 23rd.  You can connect your Facebook and Twitter account to your gamerDNA on this page here.  All community members that have added their Facebook/Twitter account prior to this contest are automatically entered, as long as they have at least one GamerDNA Twitter/Facebook update sent between Monday-Friday this week!

A winner will be chosen for each contest, so you have two chances to win!

RULES:

NOW Page contest:

-Post a comment on a Game Post, Activity, or Image  (Best way to do this is through the NOW page!)
-Create a Game post, or upload an image, or Manually update/create a Game Activity with what you did when you played the game
-You must complete these requirements between 12:00am EST May 18th and 12:00am EST May 23rd.
-Anyone found spamming will be immediately disqualified
-Winner will be chosen at random and announced on May 25th on the GamerDNA Blog
-Must be at least 18+ to be eligible
-Each Community Member that meets these requirements receives one entry in the contest

GamerDNA Broadcast Contest:

-Must have a Twitter account or a Facebook account setup for Broadcast on gamerDNA
-At least one Facebook or Twitter update must be sent from GamerDNA
-All members who previously completed this requirement before the contest are eligible
-You must complete these requirements between 12:00am EST May 18th and 12:00am EST May 23rd.
-Must be at least 18+ to be eligible
-Each Community Member that meets these requirements receives one entry in the contest
 

And that’s it!  We wish everyone luck and we’re looking forward to seeing all the community activity this week!

SeaFight is a free Online Pirate Game where you can sail the seven seas, build your own pirate ship with a crew, then take your boat out and fight other players online - all within your web browser.  This a fun little browser game where you can create guilds with other players, build up your ship with the best armor and weapons, and collect as much gold as you possibly can.  Once you feel like you’re good to go, you can set sail and take on other players or NPCs in sea battles for experience and treasure.

Here is FattyChub’s first boat, "The Fatty"

After you feel like you’re ready to take on the big dogs, you can even compete against all the other players to see who can get the most points and rise up on the SeaFight "Hall of Fame".  Not only that…you can compete against other players to win up to $10,000 dollars.

Looks like a battle is about to go down!

If you’d like to check out SeaFight, make sure you check out our "Play Now" option on the SeaFight gamerDNA game page.  Once you’re in the game, make sure you let us know what you think by posting a game activity post or event screenshots!

When you compare groups of MMO consumers, grouped by game title, it’s easy to be overwhelmed by World of Warcraft’s market dominance. Indeed, many developers have learned the wrong lessons from Blizzard’s success, and copied/are copying WOW features – without copying WOW’s reasoning, methodology, or execution. The result are products that feel derivative and incomplete, with features that the consumers identify as being less than organically developed. Furthermore, WOW’s market reach is so extensive that the most influential players in a social network sense will identify a borrowed feature as being WOW’s (even if WOW itself borrowed the feature), and cost the new product credibility as innovators.

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Hi Everyone,

We have a new build up. A few cool things to know about… a new NOW page in the top navigation and Facebook support!

The NOW Page - Showing you what games people are talking about.

As was discussed previously, we are shifting gamerDNA to deliver better gaming content and conversations. The NOW page introduces you to this concept with a real-time feed of activity within the site. We are currently working on new versions of your member home and member profile that take this even further in a contextual way… so consider this your appetizer.

Facebook status updates now supported

You can now connect your gamerDNA profile to facebook and deliver daily gaming updates along with hourly gamerDNA activity updates. Set it up now!

Here is the full list:

General Site Changes/Enhancements

• Built out the NOW page with a real-time feed of game conversation and game trends based on the attention of our users. When you view an item, it pauses the updating of the feed, so be sure to click PLAY again when you are done reading.
• Facebook added as a supported social media system. You can now authenticate with Facebook and stream all of your media updates to your facebook status feed.
• Deployed a new HELIX data service Game:GetInfo. Documentation to follow for all your XML devs out there.
• Deployed a new HELIX data service Member:GetInfo service. Documentation to follow shortly.
• Created a set of helix samples in PHP with heavily commented code to help new users get started.
• Corrected the layout of the error pages in the site.
• The game activity graphs on the homepage now properly reflect the same range used for the stats that are displayed. They were showing a week earlier.
• Fixed an issue in the rails bridge where the MOTD settings and drop downs now work consistently through out the site.
• Corrected an issue where non-escaped HTML was breaking some content.
• Fixed a small grammar issue in the FPS quiz.
• Corrected box art on a few titles.

Profile Changes/Enhancements

• Added an "Edit your profile" link on the public profile page with a message to make it easier to find until we complete the profile redesign.
• Added network icons to the DNA home page to emphasize the various networks we support.
• Corrected an issue where duplicate user accounts was causing email rules to not behave correctly.

Guild Hosting Changes/Enhancements

• Corrected a variety of theme issues in guilds related to new navigation. There are some IE8 issues that we are still working on.
• Fixed a bug that was blocking guilds from upgrading from a GuildWire-GuildAd to a fully hosted Guild.

Have any feedback on this new update?  Let us know what you think by posting in the forums!

Hello gamerDNA!

Another month has gone by, which means it’s time for another gamerDNA Newsletter! This time around we’ll be switching up the name to "gamerDNA Community Newsletter"..as we think Community is a lot better than "Member". After all, this is a newsletter for the community, right?

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Hi Everyone,

Nothing really major went in this build… we were taking a pass at a lot of backend performance issues and tweaking some sub-systems that drive large areas of the site… as well as tackling some residual bugs (cross browser compatibility and such) from the recent homepage and nav changes.

Next week we are planning some new features. The NOW page… that was discussed by our Creative Directory in the blog recently… and some additional enhancements to our social media feeds.

Here is the full list:

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Editor’s Note: This is a guest post from Sean Duhame, Creative Director at gamerDNA and known as Alphadoque in the gamerDNA community.

We’ve done a lot of work at gamerDNA since its launch almost a year ago. We’ve added a ton of product features, over 60, some massive… and some not so massive. We added these features alongside an already fully developed Web site, gamerDNA’s former incarnation GuildCafe.com.  The site simply… grew!

We’ve also learned a lot in this past year. Much of that learning has come from the feedback of our members and visitors, not only by direct contact but also by site usage data we check to measure how much you really care about a feature or particular part of the site. We talk a lot about this feedback in the halls, lunch room, board table, desks and chat clients at gamerDNA. All this feedback, wide and varied, lead us to ask ourselves one simple question. The teams answers to this one question were simply all over the place. It was a sober moment… but most moments worth-while are. Oh… the question? We’ll get there

If there’s one thing I can say about this crew is that when a question is posed there’s no length to which we won’t go to answer it. For example, I’ll never forget Trapper and Antares drawing graphs on the white board to support their ideas concerning ethical utilitarianism (yes, I am serious). So when we couldn’t get to the bottom of "the question" many long discussions ensued. Let me just say this, there’s a lot of passion at this company!

For guidance we turned to what we’ve learned about gamerDNA.com since its launch again relying on our members and visitors to show us the light. When we juxtaposed that knowledge against the site (as it was only a few days ago) we realized gamerDNA.com just wasn’t playing to its strengths. It wasn’t telling its story. It was over-complicated and tried to be too many things and needed to be simplified. There’s still a bit of that going on but we feel we’ve moved in a direction, first with the site navigation and the (logged-out) home page, that helps solve those problems.

John Maeda’s "Laws of Simplicity" state, "The simplest way to achieve simplicity is through thoughtful reduction." Reduction is a difficult  process when it comes to the things you love but we’ve done our best to be pragmatic and give meaning to the reduction we’ve chosen. There’s no greater example of this reduction than our new site navigation. We realize it’s an enormous change for our members and visitors. We appreciate that change can be a less than fun process but it’s our belief that these choices will make for a much more valuable, fun and usable experience.

SITE NAVIGATION BREAK-DOWN

"NOW" (currently missing)

I wanted to first share our "NOW" location so I can give you the entire picture. It hasn’t launched yet (slated for delivery Tuesday, May 5th) but please feel free to take a look at the screenshot to get an idea of what it will offer. This page supports a few things we learned from our members - that real-time feeds around games, game content and conversation as well as the ability to have a broad view into the activity of the community is very desirable amongst our members. We’ve put a lot of focus on the real-time nature of this page as well as the conversational aspect of the system. We’re very excited to launch this and we’ll be looking into how well it’s received by our members and visitors.

GAMES & PLAYERS

I’ve bundled these together because simply put, there is no gamerDNA without the two. It’s why we’re here and we’re pretty sure it’s why you’re here too.

The Games and Players navigation have consistent use patterns. Top level links will bring you to powerful directories for each. Future vision for Games and Players are a landing page for each that bubble up high-level, interesting, timely content.

Within the drop-down menu we track your last 5 visited locations for each, both Games and Players, and add them to the menu. We did this because we learned that members often go back to the same game and member pages within lengthy blocks of time. There are numerous use-cases that support this choice. We really believe you’ll find this pretty useful.

As Web users we find the type-ahead function to be unbelievably useful. Quick, easy, helpful. If you have a game or player in mind, typing in the first few letters for either will deliver you the closest matches in less than a second. Again, we found a lot of use cases that this feature supported. We all find we’re using it a lot already.

What a simple question. Like I said, we all came up with different answers. We’re now doing our best to rally around one. Development continues but we want to deliver improvements as they come because in the face of a little confusion we feel you deserve the enhancements as they’re completed. Changes our coming fast and we’re pretty sure you’ll be happy with what’s to come.

Lastly, some of our members have wondered quite a bit as to why our forums section was moved outside of our main site navigation and into the footer. Let it be said, we adore our members who use the gamerDNA.com forums. This was a very difficult decision, one we spoke of at length. Please read Community manager Sam Houston’s post  for more on this choice.

Respectfully,

Sean Duhame

Creative Director, gamerDNA

At gamerDNA we’re quite simply trying to build a community for gamers.  A place for gamers to easily share what they’re playing with their friends, share cool screenshots, a place to join in and find interesting conversations about games, and even a place to discover new games that you’ve never heard of before.  To reflect this desire to bring you better and better content, we’ve made some changes to the site recently (and more are coming in the near future) to help make all these things easier to do and make them happen more often.

In this article I’d like to focus on how you can use gamerDNA as a platform to Start a Conversation about gaming.  There are many ways to do it, both manually and automatic, and we will detail them here.

1.  Creating a Game Post or Game Activity

The first page you see when you go gamerDNA.com when logged in is a page we call your Member Home.  Your  Member Home is a way to see what all your friends on gamerDNA are playing and what they are talking about, and easily jump in conversations with them.

Here you see what my friends have played recently and the Game Posts that they’ve made, as well as a way that I can add a Game Post or Game Activity myself.

With the "Your Games" drop down (or the Other button), you can easily add a game activity to your gamerDNA.  This enables you to quickly tell everyone at gamerDNA what game you played, when you played it, how the game made you feel, as well as tell everyone what you did in the game via the text box.

Game Activity posts are also automatically created when you add your Xbox Live, Xfire, or Steam information to your profile.  Please go here to add that information to your profile.

If you would like to create a Game Post, which is similar to a blog post and enables you to write at length about any game, you can click the "Create a Post" button.

This will open up the Game Post screen here:

Here you can put in the title of your post, then all the text of your post.  In the post you can share links with your friends, news, write about what you did last night in a game, ask questions of your friends, etc…it’s all up to you!  Below that, you can attach the post to a Game or many Games so that your post shows up on various game pages on gamerDNA, as well as shows your friends what games you’re talking about.  And finally, you can tell everyone how the game made you feel and then nudge all your friends to check out what you posted.

We have also updated the site navigation to make it easy to add a Gameplay event or Game Post at any time on the site.  All you have to do is mouse-over the DNA symbol in the top right corner of your screen and you will see several options drop down (Shown Above).

2.  Nudge all your friends!

Whenever you create any content on gamerDNA, whether it be a game activity/game post or a screenshot..or even when you see someone’s stuff and you think it’s cool…you can always "nudge" your friends to make sure they check it out!

The nudge system allows you to quickly send out emails to all your friends that will tell them to check out what you’re looking at.  This is a great way to get everyone to check out what you just made, or invite everyone over to check out something cool that you found from another community member!

3.  Comment on other community member’s stuff!

Almost everything on gamerDNA is able to be commented on and we actively encourage you to do so!  If you found something cool that a friend did, or maybe you want to chime in on someone’s tale of their epic gaming session last night..you should do it!

All of the comments that are made on things always notify the author of the content via email notification, as well as anyone else who has commented before you.  This is a great way to keep up on the conversations that you have joined at gamerDNA.

Everything that is shown on your Member Home can be commented on right from the page, all you have to do is click on the Comment button.  This opens up a little box where you can type in whatever you want to say, then just click ADD COMMENT to send the comment.

When you’re looking at your member home you will also be able to see some comments from others on your friend’s activities.  This is a great way to keep up on conversations that are happening on the site.

You can also comment on the individual pages for each post/image, as well as see the entire conversation.  Here is a great example of a conversation that is being had in our community around a Game Post.

4.  Find conversations!

gamerDNA is a very active community and people are talking about things all the time, all you have to do is find a conversation to jump in to!  You can do this by going to your Member Homepage, going to your friends’ profiles and checking out their activities on their Game Calendar, or by going to a Game Page (you can view our Game Directory here)

We’ll be adding more and more features to gamerDNA over the coming months, all things that we think will help you keep up with what your friends and the community is doing, and have conversations with other gamers.  Everyone on the gamerDNA Staff is very excited to see how our community jumps in and uses these new features and systems!

We also have a blog post up here, by our Creative Director Sean Duhame which helps explain our new site navigation and even gives you a sneak peek at a new page called the NOW page..a new feature which should help you find even more cool things happening on the site, in real-time!

Sincerely,

Sam Houston

gamerDNA Community Manager

Hi Everyone!

This is a pretty big release for gamerDNA… not neccessarily because of what it is in it, but because of the shift in philosophy it represents for the next few months.

You will see the site start to reflect a greater desire to use your gamerDNA to bring you better content. This includes connecting you with people similar to you, allowing you to find and engage in more gaming discussions, and discover new games that you might not know about. The first step in this journey is repositioning the main areas of the site that we want to focus on… these are Games and Players. You will see these featured prominently in our new navigation:

Both the games and players lists will track your most recent views and keep them their for easier access… the GAMES and MEMBERS drop down will also remember your last choice… making it easy to find and jump to various people or games in the site.

There is also a new logged in navigation that gives you faster access to your member home page (with all of your friend activity), your public profile, and your DNA. Click any of these icons to go there.

In addition to clicking the icons, if you hover over HOME, any guilds you belong to on the site will appear, and hovering over DNA gives you quick access to add content to the site.

As many existing members will recognize, there are far fewer links in the nav… but they are all still available as a footer at the bottom of every page:

We also tweaked the DNA home page to clarify the various sections available:

You will now see sections for Broadcast settings (Twitter, Tumblr, FriendFeed) and Quizzes… as they were previously in another spot on the site.

Specifically for broadcasting, we have made some enhancements there as well:

Broadcasts are broken up into Daily and Hourly summaries. Your daily summary is all of your game play activity. this includes automatic data pulled from your networks, but also manual game play you put in to your calendar. There are also hourly site activity summaries for various things you do on gamerDNA.com.

Lastly, we have a new homepage that is showcasing the type of activity we are getting from the community. We will be using this data to bring more interesting content to all users as we roll out some new sections:

Check out the full list of stuff!

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That time of the week again!

We are working on some pretty big changes to the site… changes that will roll out in the next few months. So the over all volume of the weekly builds will be a bit smaller, and focus on bug fixes and small enhancements that we can roll out independently. In the end though, we are driving towards a pretty massive revamp by the end of July. More news on that as it happens, as it will impact almost every area of the site.

In the meatime, some fun features this week:

Nudge your friends!

When you are creating content, or you see interesting content on our site, you can now nudge your friends to view/contribute to it. Nudging brings up a check box to select your friends… they will all receive an email prompt to view the content.

Play games and have them tracked!

If you play games through gamerDNA, your game pay is now tracked and added to your activity. If you close the window (by hitting the X to close) the game play activity will be generated instantly. If you close the tab or window by using your browser, it will take up to 60 seconds for your game session to expire and the activity to appear in your feed.

Looking for games to pay?

Want to try out the new play tracking? You can view them in the Directory.

Here are some recent ones people have played:

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Hi everyone,

Another small build this week with a few enhancements:

You can now browse/view/edit all of your activity from the mini-calendar on your member homepage.

Pictures and videos on game pages have their own filters

We imported over 14,000 images from our friends at Crispy Gamer to populate screen shots and game content.

Check out the full list of changes.

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