To honor our rockin’ new orange GGE t-shirts, We’ve gone ahead and released our first GGE application on the new Facebook platform.

This app is true gamer bling, with quick and easy integration of our Gamelist Central into your Facebook profile

If you don’t have a Facebook profile yet, I strongly suggest you fire one up

Head here to add the GGE Gamelist application to your profile.

If you don’t have a GGE account yet, then I just died a little bit inside, but head here to get started

There’s plenty of cool stuff coming down the pipe so don’t miss the party!!!

–Sean

With all these awesome features flying around Great Games Experiment these days, it’s becoming much easier to really define your Gamer Identity both on and off the site.

Last week, we made friendships and relationships become just a little more important to everybody by introducing the “My Feed” portion of your dashboard. To me, nothing is cooler than logging in first thing in the morning and seeing all the ratings, comments, kudos, reviews that my friends have posted while I was sleeping and regenerating for another day of coding and fun in the “GGE Pit”. I even added the RSS feed of “My Feed” to my Google Reader. This way I’m sure not to miss a beat of all the activity in my internal network here on Great Games Experiment. Of course, Jacob’s awesome RSS creation skills have made that feed convenient & easy to use with well placed links to all the recent activity in your feed. Click that “subscribe” button of your “My Feed” to add it to your favorite RSS reader.

This morning, things got really spicy here in the GGE kitchen when we added a couple of new Flash components to the site.

We now have new and improved Screenshot Modules for profiles. All of the old screenshot modules have been upgraded to utilize the new Flash animation. The introduction of Flash for these modules will help solve some cross browser compatibility issues and generally provide a better experience when viewing images for a game / user / group.

Also, we’re working hard to make it easier for you to define your Gamer Identity on GGE and take it wherever you please across the web. A major step in this process is the creation of a Gamelist Widget (for showing off your gamelists of course). Go create a gamelist, and when you get to the publishing phase, be sure to publish it out as a Widget and snag the embed code available. Go paste this code on your blogs or wherever you’d like. It’s an awesome way to show off the games you are playing right now, your favorite games, or games you can’t wait to come out!

Also, don’t forget to share and show off your Gamer Identity with your badges!

Because we have become a society of search, I decided that this day would be a nice one [albeit a cloudy one here in Eugene] to give the search a little love. Previously, when you searched on Great Games Experiment, you would receive the results for your query as a mish-mash of all types. For instance, if I searched for “Mario”.. I would get a master list of Games, Users, and Groups that made sense for my keyword. However, now you get to land on a page that gives you an overview of your search results.

Two choices here make sense for me. I can view all of the games tagged “Mario” by users who submitted mario games. Or, I can view all game search results. I’m going to go ahead and view all of the game results.

Voila! I have found my game. Now if you don’t mind, I’m going to go reminisce about my late youth and playing Dr. Mario.

You may now notice that when you click “Play Now” for any given game, that you are taken to a view that looks different than before.

The new “Play Now” view, gives you a much more comprehensive look at the game you are playing.

Rate the game right while you’re playing it! Also included are quick links to the game related pages.

Notice the inclusion of our new Recommendation Engine. This provides to you a list of a few related games others enjoyed based on our calculations. Stay tuned for improvements!

We are pleased to take down the old front page that we were utilizing for our closed beta period and toss up the new, feature-packed front page. First impressions are important, and for those coming to Great Games Experiment for the first time, we wanted them to realize that there’s a whole bunch going on inside!

Here’s the awesome design, with thanks to Nate Feyma for his awesome art! Be sure to give him kudos!

The new front page contains the following features:

• The most popular “Play Now” games! — These are games that have a playable flash file attached to the game submission
• Top Games — A frequently updating list of the top games as judged by our formulas
• Top Developers and Gamers — Awesome contributors to the community are rewarded with an appearance on the front page!
• Newest Reviews — See the latest game reviews easily
• Featured Gamelist — A regularly updated feature showing off a lucky community member and a gamelist of their choice!
• Blog Overview — View the latest blog posts with ease, a great way to keep in touch with the developers of the site

Enjoy and let us know what you think!

So I’ve been quiet for a little while… this is mainly because I’ve been working on revitalizing and amping up a major piece of the Great Games Experiment — the games! There are two main pieces to this puzzle– tagging and gamelists.

Much like how you can tag your personal network (friends) on GGE, you can do the same with games that you’ve played. The functionality is quite similar and will take you a long way with GGE features both current and on the way. Right now, this is awesome for the use of quickly creating a gamelist. You may recognize the concept of the gamelist as what was formerly the “Gamelist Module”. These modules were slick additions for your profile, which you, in the past, used to crank out a quick and dirty list of games. Well, the concept remains, but the interface has drastically changed.

Read more about Steppin’ It Up with Game Tagging and Gamelists!

For you the user, a large part of your experience on GreatGamesExperiment.com consists of building and customizing a profile page that best fits and describes you, your game, or your group. After all, half the fun of a social networking site is defining how you would like yourself to be presented to the audience at hand. We all know how boring straight up black text on a white background can be, so I want to present the toolbox that we have made available (and are currently expanding) to you, the user.

While developing GreatGamesExperiment.com, one thing the team has needed to focus on is security for you — the user. With the design and continual enhancement of profile creation tools, we are continually shooting to provide you with an equal balance of a comprehensive toolbox and safe experience for site users. Safety and security concerns arise when the community is allowed to insert their own code to embed items that are hosted off-site on a third party server. Through this juxtaposition of freedom and safety for users in our world [wide web] of user created content, we need to constantly be sensitive to the wants of the community, as well as the protection of individuals visiting and taking part in the experiment.

This is where GGE Code and The Widget Whitelist come in.

Read more about GGE Code and The Widget Whitelist

Marek Bronstring has recently posted an interview on his blog with GarageGames co-founder Jeff Tunnell. This interview covers the current status of the Great Games Experiment as well as future goals of the site/community. Excellent read!

Read Jeff Tunnell on the Great Games Experiment here

A winner from our original Great Games Contest, Gryphon, got in touch with me today through the GreatGamesExperiment.com contact form with some questions about the new Great Games Badges. We have migrated these Great Games badges to an image format in order to remedy compatibility issues with sites on which you may choose to display them. Sites such as MySpace, popular forums, etc do not allow the use of iframes on their sites so obviously linked images are a great way around this.

I wanted to show off something really cool that Gryphon has done with the forums on his site, Allied Tribal Forces. He has integrated the badges into his user profiles so that they can provide their GreatGamesExperiment.com user names and automatically have his system display their Great Games Badge!

Very awesome work on his part!

I challenge everybody to show me other cool ways they are using their badges on either their site or elsewhere! If you have done something cool with your Great Games badge, send me a message through my profile on GreatGamesExperiment.com and let me know what’s up! If it’s innovative enough you may even see me blog about it in days to come =)

Kudos to Gryphon!

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