gamerDNA.com | The Blog

Jon Radoff (CEO, captain of this crazy ship) will be in Los Angeles June 10th demoing our new site (right before our open beta!) at the OnHollywood conference. If you are going to be there, check it out:

Socializing Online Entertainment Demo Competition
More online entertainment sites are socializing their content, this debate uncovers what is working and what is not. You be the judge on which one works the best.

Kara Swisher, Co-Producer, D: All Things Digital
Drew Curtis, Founder & CEO, Fark
Jon Radoff, CEO, GamerDNA
Rooly Eliezerov, President & Co-Founder, Gigya
Abdul Khan, Co-Founder, I Beat You

Read more about the event.

Some pretty heavy hitters in there! Time to go crank on more code!

Our very own Director of Community Sanya Weathers has been selected in Beckett’s Massive Online Gamer magazine as one of the top 20 most influential people in MMOs.

World of Warcraft’s Rob Pardo, GuildCafe.com’s [GamerDNA!] community mastermind, Sanya Weathers, and Richard Garriott himself are listed as three of the twenty names in the feature, The Top 20 Most Influential People in the MMO Industry.

Beckett’s Massive Online Gamer highlights the most talented people in massively multiplayer video games and gives details on how they’ve influenced the future of the industry in this latest issue that hits newsstands May 28, 2008.

Read more

If you see a copy of Beckett’s on the news stand, pick it up and give it a read! Congrats Sanya!

It was only a matter of time (being that I come from 360voice) that we would start importing Xbox Live activity into your gaming profile. We also changed around the automatic entries a bit… and will continue to evolve them. Here is one of mine:

It has many of the same elements that we explained before, but a few little tweaks…

1. We are now calling out the primary changing metric in HUGE text for all to see… for Xbox it is gamer score, for XFire it is time.
2. Underneath that we are doing the roll-up of stats so it is easy to see what contributes to that over all metric.
3. The auto-narrative comes from the gamerDNA bot for all content…so that it is clear where it is coming from.
4. The gamerDNA bot talks addresses you directly in the entry. That way we can ask questions and you can feel compelled to respond.
5. The embellishment that you can add to any entry appears underneath, properly called out and referencing the above comment.
6. If you are logged in and you view your profile, there is a call-to-action to add an embellishment to your item. This link launches the DNA panel.

A few things you will see in the short term:

1. We will be separating out your manual stories and the automatic generated activity. On your profile it will be easy to see which is which and flip back and forth. This will prevent the activity from taking over fun manual stories that you put in your profile.
2. We are still playing with the terminology of the actual content… experiences is morphing into “stories” and “activity” to properly explain what they are. You will see this reflected in other areas of the beta site as well.

Keep the feed back coming!

Here’s what we accomplished last week, and pushed live yesterday afternoon:

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No, really: http://www.360voice.com/tag/RantingTweety

I could easily use the editing features to explain that I set up the blog more than a week before I actually purchased an Xbox. But I’m way too entertained by the despair of my console.

In other news… boy howdy, I SUCK at console controllers. At one point, my better half attempted to explain how to properly use the controller. This is somewhat like trying to teach my beagle how to build model rockets by speaking to her in Cambodian. Anyway, it hit me that I was getting a taste of how my mate feels when I try to explain MMO mechanics.

We at GamerDNA are all about building bridges between consoles and PCs, and I will get started with my bridge building just as soon as I learn to use my thumbs for something besides hitting the space bar.

In the states, we are celebrating Memorial Day today… so if you were looking forward to our weekly build, packed with new features and functionality, you will have to wait until tomorrow! Tuesday is our Monday this week.

If you are looking for a good post about Memorial Day, I think our own Director of Community, Sanya made a great post on her personal blog. Go check it out:

There are a lot of people in the military who play MMOs. Life in the service for most people consists of being on a base very far from home, but not far from industrialization. I know many people for whom a new post is just a new place to plug in a computer. All that changes is the time zone.

Read more

We are rolling out some new features in the GamerDNA beta… some of this is technology based on what we did at 360voice, but ultimately much broader in scope. The idea is that being in a gaming community is about sharing stories… however not everyone is a “blogger”… For those of you out there skilled with the written word, possibly channeling the greatest poetic bards of ancient times, telling stories comes easy. For others, they need a bit of a prompt… something to remind them about what happened a few days ago… or perhaps something basic that will allow their friends to start the conversation and ask for more details.

This is what auto-blogging is… it is there to get you started with the basic information.

For some people this is enough, for others, they have a lot more to say. Our auto-blogging engine is meant to allow for this.

Currently all auto-entries dump into your Gaming experiences. This may change in the future, but for now that is where they live. The first auto-entry is running off of Xfire data. If you are a member of GuildCafe/GamerDNA and you put your XFire username in the AKA section of your profile, and if it is set to friends only or public, you will get an auto-entry each day. Xfire is just the start… there are many other platform and game specific feeds which will get this treatment, giving you an effortless way to capture and share your gaming with your friends.

Let’s take a look at a well executed entry, by one of our own on the team, QforQ:

This auto-entry has three distinct sections:

1. The title, which contains some basic information
2. The auto-entry
3. The embellishment.

The Title

The title contains simple information about the date of the entry, who it is for, but also has space for your current mood and any game or guild you want to associate this entry with. When the entry is first generated, the mood is neutral and no game or guild is specified. When you edit the entry to put in an embellishment, you can change these values. You don’t have to embellish… but you certainly can to fill out the details!

The auto-entry (the bot)

There are two pieces to this… the first is a narrative. Narratives are fun because it allows for conversational statements that are easy to share with others. Our philosophy is that each narrative should begin with a celebration of gaming… the fact that you played games at all is a great thing! We are all gamers… we love games… so why not state it in a fun way? If you see something you enjoy, send it to a friend! If you have suggestions for other sayings, email them in! We plan to increase the narrative as we find more interesting milestones to commemorate… like the day you crossed 100 days of play in World of Warcraft… or the first day you played a new title!

The second piece is a stat roll-up which will tell you some things that you might not have known, or things that are hard for you to know about yourself if you aren’t tracking your gaming every day. Over time, this section will grow as well to deliver more information about your gaming trends.

The embellishment

This is where you add your flavor! The narrative can only tell you what happened… it can’t convey the details of it… so get creative! Remember, filling this out creates a timeless, findable, linkable moment in your gaming. Share it with your friends! Subscribe to the RSS feeds of their experiences so you can follow along with what they are doing just as they can follow you!

As always we are open to comments… and we plan to expand this into many other areas. We hope you are intrigued and will help us refine it going forward!

As I mentioned yesterday, my job includes welcoming new guild/clan leaders. I’ve noticed, however, an uptick in people using our site to form groups that aren’t about a game. It makes sense to me - gamers usually find that if we enjoy playing together, we enjoy other things together. Still, it’s interesting seeing “guild” pages crop up that are for gamers of a certain religion to meet and chat with each other, or pages for “local” gaming clubs. Or, as Trapper put it yesterday (while we were discussing possible plans to help people in the same city to connect), “Meatspace.”

If you start up such a group, let me know. Right now, our search and matchmaking features and plans revolve around a common game being the main point, and I’d like to hear from non-game leaders so we can include your particular feedback.

Part of my job, and every day I thank the powers that be in the universe that someone pays me for this, is to be the first in line to welcome new guildmasters and clan leaders. I’m not psychic - I get a report of all the people who have made pages to support their group in a particular week. We’re not just being friendly, although this bunch is more fun at a barbecue than a s’more buffet. We need to know what brought people here, and what minor annoyances they’re finding that might prevent them from staying.

The information we harvest leads directly to changes that we patch in every week, and informs the course of our future designs. Sometimes the changes are minor - adding a quicklink to your PMs in the new design, or improving the load time of a page by a second. At this stage in our development, the changes are often much bigger. For example, we hear our guild leaders saying that inviting non-GamerDNA members to join a guild is too complicated. Many people say that in order to make the process effortless, you have to convince people to join our site and then accept the guild invitation. That’s a pain in the brain, and we’re talking through the redesign now.

You won’t see results from that until the summer, as our first priority is getting the redesigned website up and running under our DNA brand. I’ll post on that later, but I gotta get back to the feedback! If you’ve got any thoughts on specific areas of the invitation/join process, we’d love to hear them. You can either email me at sweathers AT gamerdna DOT com, or comment on this post.

I am sending out an official welcome to everyone watching this blog. We are going to ramp up creating some content here, shifting from a strict “company” blog to one that carries more information about our product development, our company development, our passions, and our excitement.

As you may or may not know, we have been doing a ton of work behind the scenes to redesign the site from Guildcafe.com to GamerDNA.com. This involves not only a new design, but significant new features that focus on making the site personal, effortless, and instantly rewarding. If you want to see some of the work, you can access the open beta by:

1. Register for GuildCafe.com
2. Once you confirm your registration, click the Beta button in the top navigation.
3. This will load up the open beta of GamerDNA.com.
4. Explore!

Make sure you check out the GamerDNA Panel which gives you access to all of the items that make up who you are as a gamer. This can include the games you play, the characters you have from various MMOs…. upload screen shots too so we can put a face with the name!

Also make sure you fill out your AKAs for Xbox Live, XFire, and other gaming services as we are building out auto-capture technologies that will capture your gaming history without you having to do anything! How is that for effortless?

GamerDNA is a new company. We are just getting started. We have a great team, a great existing community from GuildCafe.com, and it will be fun evolving this into something truly unique and exciting. Follow along at home by watching this blog!

I wrote a survey for GamerDNA members to tell us why you didn’t fill out a profile, as part of our ongoing quest to make this site’s technology as fun, effortless, and personal as humanly possible. (Humanly AND technologically possible is the way we roll, baby. The man in the machine is a philosophical conundrum that… oh, who am I kidding, the fact is I had a total crush on Brent Spiner while ST:TNG was running, and I’ve been mildly obsessed with human/technology intersections ever since.)

Ahem. Sorry, I digress a lot. So, anyway, at the end of the survey I put in a text field that said, paraphrased, “Tell us why you didn’t give us your DNA. If you did give us your DNA, you can skip this or use this space to compose a haiku.”

Um. I was kidding, when I said that, but I should know by now to never tease a gamer. We got dozens of haiku.

I won’t post them all today, but look for them here over the next few days.

Here’s one:

Profiles are like life
Changing as the games progress
Fill it out again.