What you see there is my badge for the Great Games Experiment, the social networking community centered around video games. It was created by Jeff Tunnell of GarageGames fame as a platform to get game players and game developers together, solving at least part of the problem of finding an audience for your games.
Since joining, I have submitted a number of entries for the games section and have created one group. Jay Barnson of Rampant Coyote has done such a great job of submitting RPGs that he was given the title of admin of the RPG tag.
Maybe I’ll get the “Obscure games that people didn’t play when they were new” tag admin rights. B-)
In an interview with Jeff, he comments on the benefits for indie members of the site:
Having indie games presented side by side with commercial games should get more recognition for the indies.
Er, why are indie games not considered commercial? In fact, when I am entering information for new game entries, I always find the publisher section weird. The choices are “none”, “indie”, or “commercial”, and if you pick commercial, you get to input the name of the publisher. Why do indie publishers have to be anonymous? Why are indies considered different from commercial in the first place?
Anyway, I’ve found the Great Games Experiment to be a great way to interact with game developers and players. It’s still new, but it is much more relevant than MySpace. And much more stable.
3 replies on “Great Games Experiment: Social Networking for Game Players and Developers”
Yeah — I noticed that too, though I tried not to let it bug me.
I usually differentiate by saying “indie” versus “mainstream,” but that’s really a differentiation of distribution methods, not audiences. The “mainstream” publishers are starting to really pay attention to the non-mainstream audience now, ESPECIALLY with the success of casual games on XBox Live Arcade.
Wait, what’s considered “mainstream” again? Real mainstream that reaches to all sorts of people, or what hard-core gamers called mainstream before?
Hey I would entry my companies own name as publisher… if you develop and distribute your game then, you are essentially the “publisher” of your game. Many companies publish their own games… the biggest one being EA. Why not you?