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Communify Me! 80 Ways to Add Community Features to Games

Name:	Joshua Dallman
Date Posted:	Dec 14, 2007
Rating:	Not Rated
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Blog post

Video games continue their trajectory towards increased complexity. We've watched the jump from 2D sprites, to rendered 3D objects, to next-gen shaders and high polygon models. We've seen games go from multiplayer on the same machine, to multiplayer over a modem, to entire server farms hosting persistent games millions of users strong. In the rush to improve the most surface aspect of games - the graphics - other important aspects like building community have been ignored. Community is the latest trend and buzzword to be sure, but an ironic one in that the community features we're seeing now could have been present in games long ago (and many were, but were ahead of their time). In the same way that 3D graphics don't merely escalate 2D graphics but add a dimension to them, adding community to games doesn't merely escalate a multiplayer game but adds a new dimension to them. This blog post is not a theoretical one however, and will help give you ways to "communify" your game, offering you both practical tips and high-concept ideas. Though we ourselves have built a game community via The Great Games Experiment, and are now building a game portal with community features via InstantAction, these tips can be used by any developer for any platform. Use these tips to add the extra dimension of community to your game!

Read the full blog post with all 80 ways to add community features to your game at http://www.makeitbigingames.com/

Recent Blog Posts

List:	03/28/08 - Download Shelled Online to Review 12/14/07 - Communify Me! 80 Ways to Add Community Features to Games 11/18/07 - Red Thumb Games "Shelled 2" Update 09/22/07 - How to Focus your Game and Give Players More of What They Want 09/05/07 - How To Pitch Your Game 07/09/07 - GGE & TLD's: BFF! 06/16/07 - some Red Thumb Games projects 05/25/07 - GG Game Store Turns 50 Games Strong

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Deozaan (Dec 14, 2007 at 06:16 GMT)

I'm having a problem with the MakeItBigInGames blog. When I click on an article to view the comments, it seems to redirect to itself in an infinite loop, thus never loading the page.

It does this in Firefox and IE, and a friend of mine tried it in Maxthon with the same results.

Also, it might be useful for your RSS feed and the sake of readability if you used "snips" to hide the really long blog entries from the main page with a "Click to read the rest" or something, much like what you did here and linked to the page.
Edited on Dec 14, 2007 06:17 GMT

Oliver Rendelmann - DerR (Dec 14, 2007 at 08:27 GMT)

Same here! :) I wanted to comment on the previous post there but it didn't work. I thought it was turned off.

Deozaan (Dec 14, 2007 at 18:28 GMT)

Yeah, it seems lots of people are having this problem. I asked on a forum about the error message I was getting in Firefox and everyone who responded is having the same problem with all browsers:

www.donationcoder.com/Forums/bb/index.php?topic=11328

Joshua Dallman (Dec 14, 2007 at 19:09 GMT)

The makeitbigingames blog is broken due to a Wordpress version upgrade but you can still read the article and I enabled commenting in this post so you can post any comments here.

Novack (Dec 15, 2007 at 22:36 GMT)

The two last articles of the blog were fantastic.

Today I wanna re-read some parts of "Five Realistic Steps To Starting A Game Development Company", but its not there (?)

Deozaan (Dec 15, 2007 at 23:16 GMT)

Novack: I noticed this too. I saw that it was dated Dec 10, 2007 but I swear I had seen it somewhere before! I did a google search and found that one is actually about 1.5 years old. (June 2006)

See the GG entry here: www.garagegames.com/blogs/3/10688

I tried going back to June 2006 in the blog, but it seems everything is broken except the main page. :-(
Edited on Dec 15, 2007 23:16 GMT

Deozaan (Dec 15, 2007 at 23:34 GMT)

Good news! I added Make It Big In Games to my RSS reader and Five Realistic Steps is showing up:

My Google Reader Shared Items

Novack (Dec 16, 2007 at 00:26 GMT)

lol - Deo, 80% of the times we talk, we are about to mention the same thing.

I use Google Reader as well, and I finally could read it from there (in fact Im suscribed to the blog, so I always had it there). Thanks for sharing anyway!

Deozaan (Dec 16, 2007 at 08:32 GMT)

Okay so I finally got around to reading the entire long entry.

Great article but I have to say I disagree with quite a few of your Multiplayer suggestions. It is my opinion that interaction with other people should never be forced. Some people like doing stuff with strangers online, I think most people don't. And if online games were made to allow people to play alone or just one or two friends they know from real life, I think that would be much more popular.

Yeah I know you'll probably mention World of Warcraft and the 11 milllion subscribers and the 60 man raids etc. and honestly I don't have a well thought out response to that. I just think that if people didn't have to, they wouldn't want to most of the time.

Joshua Dallman (Dec 17, 2007 at 21:27 GMT)

The article wasn't written for multiplayer or community features that you SHOULD implement, only features that you COULD implement. It's to give you a starting point for thinking about what a "community building feature" means. Whether something should be forced or optional is entirely up to you and the game's design.

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