Millionsofgames, part two

October 3rd, 2005, By Duncan Gough

The (reasons behind the) technology behind Millionsofgames.com.

I’m well aware that social bookmarking is the old new thing, just as blogging started out as something not far removed from a personal linklog, a website like MOG is, in essence, no different to a forum. Users register, post links and comments and the site grows or falters on the quality and quantity of those links.

For us, MOG was about putting a friendly face on social bookmarking and, just as importantly, the other users. del.icio.us, being the undisputed front-runner, doesn’t need to beautify the users. Clearly, del.icio.us is all about unadulterated HTML stepping aside to put the links in absolute focus. My other personal favourite, not least because of the frequently hilarious podcasts, is digg.com. Following the recent redesign, digg.com now has a clean interface that draws some of the focus back onto the users and away from the link. Whilst del.icio.us can guarantee a decent community spirit because it ‘came first’ and has a huge amount of mindshare, digg.com is doing well in promoting the safe community spirit by taking some of the focus away from the links by highlighting the users and the bookmarks equally.

When it came to the design of Millionsofgames, where we couldn’t rely on an audience of bookmarklet savvy users like the tech-news oriented sites can, we had to make everything simpler. The design is colourful, we agreed on a bunch of popular tags and created checkboxes for them. We split the idea of tags in two, creating ‘key categories’ and ‘key words’, where the key categories are iconified checkboxes and the key words are classic, free form tags. We also removed the need to separate your tags with a space or a comma since there’s no intuitiveness about that. MOG key words are newline terminated. The code makes the URL friendly behind the scenes and users will still understand the link between the URL in their browser and the key word they created.

Besides this approach to tags and key words, we’ve also tried to present the meta data that MOG generates in a clearer way. At 3rdsense, we’re huge fans of stats that show you how well you’ve done on every game, over every time period as well as amalgamations of those stats to get an idea of how you’ve performed in comparison to our other users. When done right, stats can foster a healthily competitive atmosphere. Where MOG is concerned, we have stats for the users, games and websites. Having said that, we’ve held back from presenting too many stats which I think can be overwhelming. MOG just focuses on the main user stats like ranking and followers and the main game stats like rating and ‘Who else mogged this game’.

One improvement we have made over the stats on Playaholics and Chickstop is the Popularity score. Each game on the site is given a score based on its’ average ranking, the number of times it has been played, the number of people who have MOGGED the game as well as a few other key factors. This is all weighted so that a game has to be consistently popular for it to reach a top spot in the Popular list, which should give us a genuinely good idea of what games people are playing and MOGGING on the site. I’m really pleased with this feature since it even takes into account the data we get from unregsitered users, which is something I’ve been keen to incorporate on our sites for some time. Lots of people play our games who don’t have accounts so it’s nice to be able to make something from their usage patterns too.

Ideally, with all this data we’ve given each game and each MOGGER some pertintent stats to help other MOGGERS rate them on volume and quality of MOGS as well as other MOGGERS reaction to their mogs.

As I wrote in Millions of games, part one, there was a point in the development of the site where I realised that we could add a huge social element to what was essentially just a links site. In doing so I also realised that we had a number of blog-like options open to us, which is why MOG now has a plain links interace, a calendar interface as well as a social, community interface. This is another example of how we’ve been able to create many views on the same set of data, something I’ve been keen to do for a long time (even back to my SelfTrade.co.uk days).

There are plenty of blogs that I use just to get links to other blogs and news items purely because I’ve read the blog before, I’ve placed trust in the writer and the last few times I visited, I read some interesting articles. If that sounds familiar in the context of the sites who have inspired MOG, that should be no surprise. del.icio.us has made a great feature out these ‘trusted links’. People visit del.icio.us to find links to more interesting news. Once you’ve been a few times, you’ll begin to see how some topics interest you more than others and also how some users provides just the right links. For me, the key del.icio.us feature was the ability to subscribe to the topics and users I was inteseted in reading more about and have that automatically fill up my del.icio.us inbox with news. As I’ve said, it’s a great feature that is just so simple. It’s a great way to provide compelling content that is customisable for every user. The fact that I can browse other people’s inboxes just makes the whole process of discovery, not just about articles but also about users, frankly, fun.

Our calendar interface is influenced by the nice, RESTful archives that most blogs use. We haven’t made a big feature of it yet, but once we have more users and more games then I think that the daily, weekly, monthly and yearly archives will be a nice way to gauge the trends of casual gaming with MOG.

Finally, the community interface is another del.icio.us inspiration. Being able to view member home pages is something we’ve toyed with on Playaholics. Writing MOG from scratch is was easy to add them in from the start. Being able to view what other users are up to is something we’ve encouraged from the start, for all the reasons I’ve outlined before.

All of these interfaces are designed to make MOG the ideal place to find the best and newest games, on a daily basis. We’re taking a peek at the wider world of casual gaming by creating the best folksonomy of games so that we can ’see’ how gamers think about the games they like to play. If you’re a games developer, as I am, then I’m sure that you can imagine just how valuable that data is. Even though we might not hit a million games soon, we’ll hit a million tags before long and that, arguably, is more valuable.

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