gamerDNA.com | The Blog

(Note: You may have already seen this article on other sites. This is my clever way of telling you that we’re exploring partnerships with awesome news sites, where they publish our ideas and data as exclusive news, and then we post a few days later. You’ll always be able to find the material here, but probably not on Fridays anymore. But, hey, you’re reading the blog every day, right? Right?! *looks hopeful*)

What a freaking year. The weather outside is frightful for newcomers to the MMO genre, with a Blizzard that’s been going on for so long that no one remembers what swimsuit weather is like. WAR broke out. Expansion packs rained down like meteors, but left no craters in the marketplace. And yet, good news abounds if you know how to read the signs. Come along with us as we look over the second half of 2008.

Read More

We managed to sneak out a build right before Christmas… our last of the year. (Next one is Jan 5th). The coolest feature in it was the new custom member headers that come with a matching dynamic signature. Here is what it looks like:

Customize your header now!

In other news, our gamer quizzes have now been turned into widgets! Check it out at:

Rockband.com Zine (right column)

If you have already taken the music quiz (and are logged in to gamerDNA), it will remember that… if you haven’t taken the music quiz…. what are you waiting for?

Check out the rest of the release changes below.

Read More

When a calendar year draws to its close, there is a law on the internet that says “Thou shalt do a year a review column.” There’s another law that says “Thou shalt kill time until the holiday sales numbers are released, because there’s nothing to talk about until then.” But we’re not supposed to admit to that one.

So, what kind of year have we had at GamerDNA? Thanks to you, a pretty awesome year, that’s what.

Read More

In my best Fallout 3, Three Dog impersonation voice: "Hello Children!"

This week’s release notes are pretty large because we ended up holding things over from last week. We are in the process of building out a gamer identity system using OpenID for our Alliance members. This requires our site to be up 100% of the time… which means it can’t go down… even for upgrades! So, we tested that by doing a full build last Monday without a site outage… so I bet you didn’t even notice!

Our biggest recent feature is a new Music Quiz. It helps you showcase what type of music gamer you are, whether you play Guitar Hero or Rock Band. Your results come with a custom sig:

Check out the rest of the release notes.

Read More

GAMERDNA LAUNCHES GAME DISCOVERY ENGINE;
PROVIDES PLATFORM FOR BUILDING GAMER IDENTITY

Engine Helps gamerDNA.com Visitors Discover New Games to Play,
Extend Their Game Experiences, and Better Enjoy Games

CAMBRIDGE, MA – December 15, 2008 – GamerDNA.com, an online community and social platform for video game identity and discovery, today announced the launch of the gamerDNA Discovery Engine.  Powered by passionate feedback from gamerDNA members, the new Discovery Engine allows gamers to identify new video games to play based on their individual interests and preferences.

 “The process of discovering games - and expressing what you like about them - is fun,” said Jon Radoff, CEO of gamerDNA, Inc. “Our goal is to improve the experience of how people learn about new games. To do this, we’ve tossed out the one-size-fits-all mentality and, instead, have made game discovery an individualized experience by listening to what people are saying about games and why they are playing them.”

The new gamerDNA Discovery Engine allows gamers to identify traits and preferences that they like about a particular game and receive individualized game recommendations based on those qualities. Members engage with a proprietary trait-based system inside the gamerDNA Discovery Engine to denote what specific aspects of a game they find enjoyable. Members can select from a list of traits or recommend their own trait, such as “Social,” “Competitive,” or “Humorous,” in five categories including Setting, Tone, Hero Archetype, Enemy Archetype, and Game Features. After entering these traits, the gamerDNA Discovery Engine references similar traits selected by others in the community and the popularity of those traits, to recommend games for the individual.

GamerDNA.com is a game community that allows people to build and express their unique gaming identity while discovering new games, extending their game experiences, and better enjoying games from wherever they choose to play. Members develop a unique gamer identity – their “gamerDNA” – that records gameplay history from the places they play (such as Xbox® Live or Xfire) and allows them to share these experiences via popular social media sites and applications like Twitter. In addition, as the largest proprietary database of gameplay patterns in the world, gamerDNA applies the collective intelligence of the gamerDNA community to help members discover new games and to help game developers design better games.

For more information or to sign up for a free account (no software download required), visit www.gamerdna.com.
 

Now that the trait system is getting more of a workout, we here at GamerDNA decided the resulting data pile deserved a column of its own. Remember, you too can participate in this experiment by following the directions in last week’s column.

This week’s column is hard to pin down, thematically, so just chant to yourself “not all who wander are lost,” and come with me.

Read More

Every year gamers come together and decide to give back during the holiday season through the Child’s Play Charity.  For the past five years gamers have raised millions of dollars for children all over the world that find themselves in Children’s Hospitals for the holidays.  Through the help of thousands of donations of video games, consoles, accessories, etc, these children have a brighter holiday season.

This year gamerDNA.com and Child’s Play Charity have teamed up to help bring some cheer to children across the world.  You can help out too, all you have to do is join one of your favorite communities on the web by taking a fun quiz and sharing your virtual badge!

How to get involved:

1. Pick your community that you would like to represent from the list below
2. Take the gamerDNA Decades of Influence Quiz from the community page
3. Get your virtual badge and post it all over the web on your blog, your favorite forums, your Myspace page, etc

Communities(Click their Name/Link):

ZAM Network

SixApart Media

IMVU

Piczo

AskMen

GameDaily

Elitist Jerks

Gaming Angels

Pirates of the Burning Sea

SFX-360

Married Gamers

Strategy Wiki

GameOn!

By taking the quiz you’re representing your community in a contest to raise money for charity. After you take the quiz you’re given a badge which you’re encouraged to share on your blog page, on other social networks and forums, etc.  The community with the most badge views at the end of the month wins!  The winning community gets to choose a Children’s Hospital that gamerDNA will give six Nintendo DSs and games to!

So please, help out the kids this year and have some fun by telling the world what kind of gamer you are!

During 2008 gamerDNA has grown quite a bit..infact it’s hard to believe what all has happened in the past year.  We’ve changed our name, brought in 360Voice.com, expanded on the website a huge amount, the team has grown, etc.  Because of all that progress that we’ve made, we’d like to make the celebration for those accomplishments much bigger by entering ourselves into the Crunchies, an annual award ceremony for startups like us.

More information on Crunchies:

The 2008 Crunchies is TechCrunch’s second annual competition and award ceremony to recognize and celebrate the most compelling startups, internet and technology innovations of the year.

To do this we need your help.  Below we’ve added badges to the page which enables you to vote for gamerDNA in three separate categories:  Best Time Sink, Best Overall and Best Startup of 2008.

To help, all you need to do is click on the badge once, press the submit button the Crunchies website, and you’ve done your part!

Thank you everyone for your support, we thank everyone in the community for supporting gamerDNA this year!

I have to confess that after years of working professionally with elves and the people who love them, I have a serious thing for zombies, lasers, and rocket ships. Sometimes your mind just needs a palate cleanser, you know? And furthermore, every time I see a multiplayer title with a sci-fi or post-apocalyptic setting, I shake my metaphorical pom poms for it. See, the massively multiplayer industry won’t stop making WoW clones until something besides fantasy hits a home run. Could be Star Wars, could be Starcraft, could be one of the billion things in development, but until it happens, I will turn an encouraging word to any multiplayer title with either robots or the undead.

Read More

Update:  3:27pm EST   The issue is now fixed.  Thank you for your patience!

Read More

That’s right guys, it’s time to announce the winners of the gamerDNA/Razer World of Warcraft contest! If you need a refresher on what was being offered, check out the blog post here.

Without further ado, I’d like to announce the winners of the 2nd place prize, one of five Razer DeathAdder™ desktop mice:

• Trogdor7899
• santoboi
• Kadance
• Doxxie
• Dantuckey

And finally, the moment you’ve all been waiting for….the winner of the grand prize, a complete Razer desktop set, featuring:

1. A Razer DeathAdder™ mouse, with an 1800dpi sensor for precise control
2. A Razer Lycosa™ keyboard, with fully programmable keys for macro creation
3. A Razer Destructor™ mousepad, optimized for gaming grade mice
4. A Razer Piranha™, with pristine sound quality and comfort for the long hours in voice chat

HomelessDragon!!!

Congratulations to all the winners - if you didn’t win, I’m sorry, it was just the luck of the draw - don’t worry, though, we’ll be hold many more contests on gamerDNA, and there’s a pretty good chance that you WoW players will be part of it!

And to you winners - I’ve already contacted you via PM, so check your inboxes!!!

We have a few cool things going in this week. Here are the highlights:

• We are launching a Child’s Play charity this week. You can donate to this awesome charity, take the Decades of Influence Quiz, and showcase the signatures for your community of choice. The community with the most signature displays wins! Best part, if you already are using the signature image, it will auto-change over to the Child’s Play version at your request so you can start competing instantly! We will post more about this in a separate entry.
• We are now tracking achievements for World of Warcraft. The last 5 achievements earned will cycle through on your signatures! We get the last 5 achievements earned each day.
• The WoW signatures now have the loot colored appropriately.

Here are some examples of the signatures with achievements:

Check out the rest of the build items below.

Read More