The Ideas behind Millionsofgames.com

MOG is a cross between del.icio.us and Google. It’s original intention was to become the largest directory of community bookmarked casual games. Once we had more than a hundred games in the directory though, we soon added another target. MOG also has to aim to be the Google of games. Should we succeed with the first objective, we’re going to need to succeed with the second otherwise MoG will have become the worst place to find a game.

Originally, then, MOG was a links site. It was del.icio.us clone. A dumping ground for all the games links we came across. It started out with with a link I found to a strange and simple game. Nanaca Crash. Even today I still play that game. It’s everything an online game should be - funny and fun. Simple but with complexity on show once you get beyond the basics. It’s addicitve and thowaway. When I posted the link to our internal mailing list, we recognised it as a game 3RD sense would have been proud of.

I lost the link and found it again. I should have IM’d a copy to Suttreebot, the AIM bot that runs the links section of this website, but I didn’t. Link sites are so easy to manage that I started to think about setting up WordPress of Moveable Type on a comany server but links sites, to me, had always been a pain. When Playaholics grew in popularity we’d seen a large amount of traffic coming from links sites that hotlinked directly to our games or framed our site in their own. It’s not a massive problem any more but at the time it was a real thorn. Playaholics showcases a lot of developer talent and it felt unprofessional to find their games being linked to from any number of other webiste. Thankfully, after much discussion with Flo at Neodelight, he created SecureMedia and we were able to work together to crack the problem. That experience though, taught me just how much traffic a basic links site can pull in. Walla.co.il and Addictinggames.com were both capable of sending droves of players to our sites.

So, althought I disliked most games links sites, it was beginning to make sense given that at 3RD sense we come across hundreds of new games a week. Links sites, after all, are just simple CRUD stlye web apps. We could have one up and running in no time. I started working on the basics over a weekend and soon began to realise that a links site solved another problem. Playaholics and Chickstop are both free-to-play sites but we have a weekly competition that is promoted on the site and in the games. Although you can play for free and never have to give us your personal details I had the distinct feeling that people stayed away from our sites bacause, in the thirty seconds they used up in order to evaluate our site, they saw the word competition and made their minds up. A links site, where each new game on Playaholics and Chickstop is automatically posted, would negate that hurdle. Coming from a links site, it doesn’t matter so much that the game talks about competitions and prizes since the act of being referred from a free website seems to encourage the user to focus on the game and nothing else.

“I’m here for the game. I’ve invested my trust in the links site so I don’t have to evaluate your site. When I’m done playing, I’ll go back to the links site and find another game.”

It’s a very, very powerful referral.

Over the weekend I created the basic framework for Mog. At 3RD sense our codebases evolve from project to project. I took the best parts from a few generations of the code that ultimately runs Playaholics and Chickstop and I had a links site running in no time. In need of a break, I did what I was doing every day to avoid writing code and I checked my inbox over at del.icio.us to find some new links and see what my friends had been up to.

“Oh”, I thought.

“That would be the coolest way of finding new games and seeing what my friends are playing.”

I went back to my code, knocked up some basic member homepages and tweaked the del.icio.us bookmarklet to work with MOG. Then I added in a basic tagging system and sent the link around the company. I know that del.ico.us is a service that needs explaining to people who haven’t used it before and I know that I can’t expect the bulk the casual gamers to have used del.icou.us, so I was worried that turning MOG into a tagging site wouldn’t work. But, and this was inline with the feedback the first version of MOG got, the social aspects of tagging and publicly viewable member home pages were exactly the kind of things we like to put in our own sites. We don’t believe that casual games are a solitary experience and we’ve always focused on stats and competitions to create some healthy rivalry. MOG as a tagging site opened us up to a huge amount of links and a much richer set of data.

- Who likes what games?
- Where do those games come from?
- What games does this person like?
- Where does s/he get those games from?
- What was the best game last week? Last month? And last year?

MOG as a tagging site became a rich and interconnected database of information. Indeed, it’s very design is the result of a number of questions we realised we could ask of it:

- What are the latest puzzle games on the site?
- Where can I see a list of all the arcade games duncan Mogged?
- Can I see that list in alphabetical order?
- Can I see a list of all the games ranked by popularity?

Soon it didn’t feel like we were competiting with addictinggames.com and thegameslist.com, we were aiming to present a casual games face to del.icio.us and digg.com. Happily, the conversion of MOG from a links site to a tagging site was well received. After all, we still had a links site to provide another view of the games on Playaholics and Chickstop. We also had the bare bones of a real web 2.0 application with some user friendly improvements. MOG soon grew to become part blog (with a calendar interface and RESTful date based archives), part tagdb (with a normalised database of tags slightly hidden behind our use of key categories and key words) and part link dump (we might not hit a million games in the near future but we’ll have a millions tags before long and that’s going to be just as useful in finding the right game quickly).

In short, and this is something I’ve been keen on since I was introduced to it at UpMyStreet, MOG has many views on the same data. We have, in essence, a database of games that is being added to daily. We’re aiming to add as many possible views on that data as we can reasonably think of. The addition of user stats via tags and clicks just gives an extra dimension to the data we can use. For casual gaming, I think MOG is a fantastic tool and one that I’m very proud of. As a folksonomy of games, I think that our keywords and key categories will give us a real sense of how people view games and how they like to think about playing them.

Most importantly of all, this isn’t just a links site where we at 3RD sense can harvest the best games with the least amount of work for use on our sites. MOG is really about being a part of the casual gaming community and I can, as a games developer as well as a games player, see a real value in the data that will appear there. I’m very proud that MOG just won’t be about pullling in traffic to boost our own egos. I’m happy enough just basking in any reflected glory that MOG might bring, and at the moment, I don’t even need shades.

Since Colin Cardwell got back from taking part in Alternative Business: Marketing Models session at the first Casual Games conference, MoG has been teetering between alpha and beta. As of now, we’re somewhere between beta and rc.1.0.

So, if you want to know where to find the best and newest games, we’re harnessing our knowledge of casual games and taking a peek at the wider world of everyone elses’ view on casual games. Head over to MoG, if you can’t find a game on there, then MOG IT and you’ll be helping us all out.

UPDATE: MOG even got a mention on Slashdot too.