Open Profiles
This is something I never understood why someone hasn’t done yet (to my knowledge). Part of gaming is showing off how l33t(3l33t,leet,elite 3|_337, etc) you are to your friends. So why don’t games have badges or little banners that players can put on their blogs, in their forum posts?
You first give players a way to show off to their friends their character/account details and second, you get free advertising. Make the images links back to the game and presto; You players get a nifty badge, and you get link backs.
You can also do similar things for alliances/faction/groups in the game. Opening just info even just a little would let the players build apps I’m sure to read this data and track their friends/enemies. I’ve played games (most notable, Earth 2025) where players take raw HTML and use it to keep track of alliance members.
May be interesting. Thoughts?
edit:
RangerSheck has written a nice article on making an igoogle gadget badge. check it @ : http://rangersheck.com/2008/7/24/an-igoogle-gadget-for-your-game
Ethan said,
July 8, 2008 at 11:35 am
Bloody brilliant.
Seriously. It’s like when companies make t-shirts and give them away. It creates a sense of pride in the player.
Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant.
Ranger Sheck said,
July 8, 2008 at 6:47 pm
Yeah, I agree, it’s a good idea. It’s been on my Aethora to-do list for a long time (unfortunately, so are a lot of other things). I love the “achievements” in Valve/Steam games and the badges on Kongregate – and the effect that those things have on me: they make me want to keep playing
Darkrat said,
July 11, 2008 at 7:46 pm
the “showing profile” idea is something I’ve already seen on some BGs
Stray said,
July 15, 2008 at 2:13 pm
Nowhere Else and Beyond has had this for quite some time now.
You can see examples of this mostly on their forums http://www.nodalideas.com/rpg/usebb/index.php
I’m in the midsts of making my own player banners, so it was neat to come across this post at the same time..
bardicknowledge said,
July 15, 2008 at 2:27 pm
Ya, this wasn’t an orginal idea. I know of many other areas online doing it, but I haven’t personally seen it in a web game.
@Darkrat, you have any links? I’m looking for some new games so I may check out those ya’ve seen.
@Stray, I never heard of that game. I will check it out later today ^^
Darkrat said,
July 15, 2008 at 10:27 pm
check my URL for “Pseudoquest” – a nice ajax powered RPG. They even have Xfire detection
Michael Sinclair said,
July 17, 2008 at 12:43 pm
The problem with existing banners is that they are a single image, and in order to display enough data they have to be fairly sizable. This is fine for one or two games, but when you start having people that play even more than a few games, they’ll have to pick and choose their favorites.
That said, it would be great if there was a secure way to have AJAX-enabled banners/flags that would show a nice tooltip upon mousing over it. Again though, security is the issue there.
Goodie said,
July 20, 2008 at 9:55 am
I’ve toyed with the idea of using XML, and HTTP auth, for creating a almost API for users to play around with and connect to.
Seemed to work rather well from my limited testing that i managed to do.
-Goodie
Luke said,
July 21, 2008 at 1:09 pm
I’ve seen this done before – although, unfortunately, I can’t seem to remember where.
You used a URL like this to link to your badge: http://game.com/badge/playername. That URL would then be rewritten to a script that generated your badge, and output it using the proper mimetype.
Darkrat said,
July 21, 2008 at 5:33 pm
Xfire has such a thing. They can send you your data as XML data, and you can output it how you want. That way I once made a custom Xfire banner script
Ranger Sheck said,
July 24, 2008 at 11:16 am
I just finished an article on how to make an iGoogle gadget that pulls data from your browser-based game that’s pretty relevant to this discussion. Check the link under my name.
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