Suttree.com: Casual Games, Social Software by Duncan Gough

Time does indeed fly like an arrow. (Fruit flies do indeed like a banana, but that’s incidental). Just over a year ago Millions Of Games launched. It was a long process that culminated in the first Web 2.0 network of casual games, online games, flash games, shockwave games, ajax games, passive games and browser based games.

Like any bookmarking network, the value of the system can be found easily depending on who you are. For game developers, Million of games provides and easy and free way to get some publicity for your game. Every single game featured on the website gets its own page, and appears in each of the relevant listings. For example, a game tagged as sports will appear in the lastest, alphabetical and popular ’sports’ games lists. So, for game developers, the exchange is clear - add your game to the website and gain some reciprocal traffic and search engine indexing in return. It’s a simple offer and one that a number of developers have embraced.

For users, for anyone looking to find a game, it’s a simple search-and-go website that makes finding games the simplest thing possible. There are close to 10,000 games to choose from, all tagged and rated by the community, so if you hit the website via Google, or know about the website and are using it find the latest games, the simplicity makes it ‘just work’. Whilst the website oddly turns away users by directing them to games within the space of one or two clicks, it works instead by building trust with users - registered or not - in that people remember where they discovered the latest and greatest content, and, being creatures of habit, tend to repeat the same process in the hope of experiencing the same thing over and over again. In other words, provided Millions of Games directs you to a game that you thing is fun, you’ll most likely come back to the site as that’s where you found the last fun game you played. And, for even those people who don’t return, nothing is wasted. Clicks on Millions of Games are all tracked and used to created a ranking of each game submitted to the site using some unobtrusive Ajax. It’s a very sustainable website - nothing is wasted :)

Millions of Games has received some great reveiws in that time, too. Search Engine Watch like its approach to tagging whilst close to 1,000 people have added it to del.icio.us. And, to top it all off, it also marks the year mark since I was last seen on Slashdot.