Behind the Scenes
It’s alive! GamerDNA.com is back up!
Welcome back to gamerDNA.com!
We first want to thank everyone for their patience over the last few days that the site has been down, we really appreciate it! This was a big update for us, so we needed the time to make sure everything worked, fix various bugs that came up, etc.
That all said, you can check out the brand new gamerDNA.com right now! There is a TON of stuff in this update, with the most obvious being the new color scheme and design, new Member Homepages, and new Profiles. There are many new features within these pages, other changes and updates that are big and small…so expect a flow of blog posts explaining it all in the coming days and weeks.
In the mean time, we encourage you to check out the new gamerDNA.com and let us know what you think! Use our Feedback page to let us know about any bugs, your thoughts, your praise, etc – We want to hear from you!
Thanks!
Sam Houston and the rest of the GamerDNA Team
GamerDNA.com downtime August 24th-26th
Hello!
Next week we will be taking GamerDNA.com down for an extended period of time while we update the site. This downtime will start at 8pm EST on Monday August 24th, last through all of Tuesday, and will come back up in the morning on Wednesday August 26th.
To see what time it is at the GamerDNA offices right now, please check out the Boston page at TimeAndDate.com.
Tales of a Summer Internship at gamerDNA
Editor’s Note: This blog post is written by Adam Krebs, gamerDNA’s Summer Intern who helped out with all of our data input goodness. We salute Adam as he sails off to college and we wish him luck!
As GamerDNA’s summer data intern, I had the all-important job of keeping the game data up-to-date and the traits on topic while the guys on the product team built the cool new features of the site. I had a lot of fun and learned a great deal, and got to help out with this website we all know and love. My first day happened to coincide with the opening day of E3 and the launch of TweetMyGaming. In fact, one of my first assignments was to live-add the games to GamerDNA and TMG as they were announced. It was especially cool to watch the tweets fly by showing how excited people were about Metroid: Other M just moments after it was demoed on stage.
GamerDNA Townhall #1
Earlier this month we asked our community to submit questions for us to answer about GamerDNA.com. We received quite a few questions, and all of the answers are contained in the video below!
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We apologize both for the length (48 mins!) of the video and the blurriness. Since this is our new video we had some learning to do about what the best way is to do this! Future videos should be much better quality.
Thank you all for your questions, we really appreciate it! We plan to do this more in the future, and we continue to take your questions, feedback, ideas and praise on our Feedback page: http://www.GamerDNA.com/feedback
Thanks!
Sam Houston
GamerDNA Community Manager
gamerDNA Site Navigation: Redux
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
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.
MEMBER NAVIGATION
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
February 11th Release Notes
Hi everyone!
This was a pretty massive build this week for a few reasons. We ended up pushing it to Wednesday to give us a little more time to tweak it out. I will break down the major new features. For screen shots, look after the jump.
- A new Game Activity list that takes the latest action from all your friends, and rolls it up into an easy to consume list. Each game played for each friend will only appear once per day. You can add comments and add your own game play activity right from your member-home page.
- A mini-game activity calendar is on your member homepage. Use it to quickly add game play to days that you played. Try and make the calendar as green as possible to show how active of a gamer you are.
- A game activity calendar is now prominently displayed on every person’s profile page to help you learn how much a person plays, easily browse what they play and find conversations. Look at the icons in the calendar… if it is a controller, it is game play… if it is a quote, it is a blog entry… if you see a "+" in a speech bubble, there are comments there.
- You will now receive emails when other people comment on any activity, blog or image that you have commented on. To stop receiving email updates, unsubscribe from the item or tweak your settings in the preferences section.
All existing experiences in the system are currently being converted over to the new system. This will take a few days… also Twitter updates will be impacted during the conversion. We hope to have those back on soon.
We hope these changes make it easier to see what your friends are up to and also engage in conversation with them about gaming. More fun things to come in this area as well. We are also publishing a member newsletter shortly which will go into these changes in more depth. Look for that soon.
All changes:
November 24th Release Notes
Hi everyone. Sorry for the delay in the notes. With the database craziness and everything yesterday I didn’t have a chance to really iron these out. So here we go… all the changes from Monday.
This was mainly an infrastructure week. We moved a lot around on the back end, both in our main environment that you all use and in our development environment. But we did get some pretty cool new features and tweaks in. Check them out.
November 17th Release Notes
This latest release was a pretty big one for us. It introduced another major system that will lay the foundation for gamerDNA as we move into 2009. I have mentioned it in the past, but this new system allows us to start getting at the "WHY" behind what you like as a gamer. All games are not created equal. Just because you and I play the same games and like the same games, does not mean that we like them for the same reasons… and when it comes to your gaming identity, this is an important nuance that we as gamers want to recognize.
Read on for the full release notes. We will be producing some more blog posts and materials through the week that call out many of these new features and give you specific help in using them.
