September 3rd, 2007
A bit more on bridging the dichotomous worlds of games and social networks, this time via the Aggro Me blog. What I find interesting is the author’s direct & practical suggestions of integrating various phenomena:
“1. Feeds
* Official News (obvious)
* Dev Tracker (preferably with different categories for Technical, Design, etc.)
* Community News Aggregator (one feed which aggregates all the community blogs and fan-sites)
* Server status
* List of friends/guildmates with online/oflline status and current zone information
* News specific to my Guild, both player generated (i.e. guild news postings) and automatic (guild status points)
* Ranking of Guilds on my server
* Ranking of Wizards on my server
* Ranking of Gnomes on my server2. Let Your Users Do the Work
“…supporting the people who contribute to your community with blogs, podcasts and fan-sites….You could also make it easy for your players to capture screenshots or gameplay video and automatically upload them to a Flickr group or YouTube. Alternatively, a game could have it’s own screenshot or video sharing page, with rankings for the most popular or most commented on media. Similar pages could be set up which allow players to post stories or artwork and let others comment and vote on them….Every game should have a Wiki with user contribution.
3. Get Social
“….what I am envisioning is a Facebook-esque page for each player. This page could have all of their character information updated automatically along with whatever personal data the player chooses to enter. There should also be room for a player’s journal or blog, favorite screenshots and in-game videos and some fun widgets (some of which could be created by the company and some by users).And of course, there’s the social aspect. A player should be connected to his friends from the game, guild, and people known in real life. Each of these “classes” of people could have different permission settings when it comes to viewing that user’s page.
The great thing is that MMO’s already have so many ready-made social groups. In addition to player-made groups like guilds or a friends list, each player is part of server, a class, a race, a level range. These groups are the perfect foundation for creating a social network.
Players should be able to send and receive messages or media between individual players and to send out group messages to all of their friends or guild. Friends should also be able to comment on the aforementioned screenshots or journal postings on the page.”
4. And Back Again
“….Players could be awarded titles or house items for having, say, one of the top ten most popular screenshots in a given week. Badges could be given for having a great page in the social network or for other ways of participating in the community. This would tie everything back together and encourage people to utilize the community features. And likewise, the community features would encourage people to keep playing the game.“
This entry was posted on Monday, September 3rd, 2007 at 12:43 pm and is filed under Blog. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
