OKC + Raptr = Booyah!!!

Before there were services on the internet where single male gamers could purchase online escorts to game with, I  too had the notion that it might be possible to fuse powerful forces like online classifieds and gamer networks. Of course, I was thinking something more like OK Cupid meets Battle.Net, but I suppose I was being a bit optimistic. At any rate, this post is part of a new copy left series I'm doing because I'm tired of the ways people talk about IP in relation to games (among other things). I'm giving away ideas!!!

Ideas, possibly good for something.

More on both topics after the jump.

The idea is simple really, just combine the power of user generated survey questions and quiz's with a gamer network. Umm, you might need some kind of clever algorithms to mange the data as well, but hey the devil is always in the details, right?

At any rate, I'm pretty sure this whole gamer matching idea sourced from the concept I had in putting my dissertation proposal together of user generated surveys as a research tool. Rich had to reign me in and remind me that you can' break ground on topic, methods, and theory in a single dissertation. So I'd tabled it, but I figure I'm past due to blog about it at this point anyway. Just to clarify, this post is about the gamer service, not the research tool. I'll elaborate on how the research tool would work at a later date.

Regardless, I owe a debt to the folks at OKC on this one for sure. Using my own rubric, this is a subversion of their design for the purpose of matching gamers instead of partners. Just for background, I'd used other online dating services previously but OKC was unique in that I accidentally stumbled across it by way of lolcat quiz. I think that fact alone may have served as inspiration for this idea of a hybrid web service. Alternatively, it might be the fact that there's something strangely satisfying about answering survey and quiz questions, almost like grinding for mats, or even levels . . .

Anyway, a service like this could be used by individual gamers, guilds or tribes looking to find players (and visa versa), pairs of players looking for larger groups, and for that matter players looking for a place  to talk about games in an organized way. A good set of default tags for questions would be really helpful in getting this sort of thing to work right, although it might be possible to simply crib an existing theory or other classification system of player behavior to organize data and match players. In addition, I'm guessing that creating data architecture for storing and retrieving different kinds of questions would be a less than trivial matter. Also, while I'm making a wish list, I'd like a modular and modable ui for player navigation. That's it, an idea stem (plus a couple of little branches).

So here's the deal, if you read this and decide to make it just give me some credit (attribution below). If you already came up with this idea independently, while bully for you. I hope you've had as much fun thinking about it as I have. You see (and here comes the heavy part), I often come across two dominant attitudes about ideas on the internet. Industry side (and I'm talking games here), designers denigrate ideas on a regular basis. "Everyone has them." "Yours are not unique." You hear this kind of stuff all the time, and I think that while there's some truth to this, that there are people (myself included) who are generative thinkers and useful to have around on a design team even if we're not programmers.

Then of course, there are the aspirants whining about how they need to protect their precious ideas and don't want to have them stolen. They're missing the part about how ideas are ubiquitous, and the individual thinker is just a channel. If they are ideas people, they should focus on honing their minds to move agilely between different concepts, articulate the things they've come up with to a variety of audiences, and listen to and utilize critique effectively (in addition to handing it out). Alright, enough preaching from atop, errr beneath this wall of text. Off to come up with more ideas.


Concept for a user generated content based gamer networking service by Moses Wolfenstein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License.

Based on a work right here at moseswolfenstein.com

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