Steppin’ It Up with Game Tagging and Gamelists!
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.
My Games Played
As you surf around the Great Games Experiment and find old favorites and discover new gems, be sure to click the “I’ve played this game” trigger on the sidebar of those game profiles. Every game that you mark as played gets added to a pool of games you hold inside the Great Games Experiment system.
Once you’ve decided it’s time to get down and dirty with some tagging fun, head over to the “My Played Games” section of “My Account”. From here you can quickly spin up some user-defined categories using tags. Now that you’ve tagged a bunch of games, what do you do with them? Well, it’s pretty simple actually. Time to take your tags to the press with “Gamelist Central”.
Gamelist Central
By utilizing Gamelist Central, you can quickly spin up gamelists for use on the Great Games Experiment and beyond. You can share these lists through modules on your profile or syndicate it with an XML file.
Click the “create a New Gamelist” button and, low and behold, you’re on your way to sharing your gamer identity with the world. Toss in your title and description for your gamelist. In this case I’m going to make a list of my favorite games. So now that I have those set, I’m ready to choose my games. Well luckily, I’m ready to rock because I’ve already tagged a few games as “favorite”. So I just select that tag from the “Use Your Played Game Tags” and my gamelist is almost done! Feel free to do a little drag ‘n’ dropping to get them ordered the way you want. Did you mis-tag a game? No problem, just go ahead and click that trash can and it’ll be removed from your list.
Now, navigate to the next step — “Add Captions” and throw in any descriptive words you want. After filling out the captions with the “edit in place” AJAX functionality, I’m ready to publish. Next.
The publishing is where this thing really shines. Sure it’s fun to play around and make gamelists but I want to share my favorites with my buddies around the net. Since a lot of them are frequent GGE visitors, I’ll go ahead and click the “Module for my user profile” option. This will create a module for me that I can activate later when I’m editing my profile. Also, I’m going to use the power of XML to syndicate my gamelist. Now this is the true power of the gamelist. I can take this XML file with me anywhere on the Internet and show the world my gamer identity. Publish. And done.
XML? huh? What do I do with that? Well, now that I have the location of my XML file, it’s time to head over to my blog. It just so happens I run my blog on the WordPress Blog Platform, just like many other bloggers. WordPress has an awesome plug-in system, that allows me to easily add-on to my blog. There’s this great little plugin for WordPress called WordPress Widgets. This plug-in gives easy editing capabilities to your blog’s sidebar, and it just so happens that I invested a little time writing a Great Games Gamelist Plugin for the “Sidebar Widgets” to help get your gamelist out there.
Installing the Great Games Gamelist Plugin
- Make sure you have WordPress Widgets installed on your blog. If you don’t, go ahead and head here for official instructions on how to install WordPress widgets. Note** The download link is on the left side of that page.
- After verifiying that you have WordPress Widgets installed, download the Great Games Gamelist Plugin for WordPress.
- Unzip the file and copy it to your /wp-content/plugins/widgets directory with all of your other widgets.
- Log into your WordPress Dashboard and head to the “Plugins” menu. Find the plug-in entitled “Great Games Gamelist” and select “activate”
- Navigate to Presentation -> Sidebar Widgets and drag the “Great Games Gamelist” onto your sidebar layout.
- Click the edit icon for the gamelist widget and toss in the link to your gamelist XML file
- Save changes.
- Visit your blog to see your Great Games Gamelist!
And that’s only the beginning. Because XML is a great format for moving information around between sites, there’s a plethora of technologies that support its use. Go wild and get crazy. Spin up your own widgets and creative uses for these gamelists. Share this awesome game community that is the Great Games Experiment.