weave it into a more experiential site which keeps track of everything you’ve done over time and lists it in terms of statistics and the memories of what you’ve done with the game.
Games are a very personal medium. They are a lot like film and music, where the experience itself is something you walk away with. We think that’s what really appeals to millions of gamers out there.
X: So, what types of content do you expect players will want to leave at GamerDNA? Are you talking about personal profiles, or blogs, or diaries of a sort?
JR: That’s a way to think of it. Certainly, [making] profiles and keeping track of the history of games you’ve played is a part of what we’ve already been doing [with GuildCafe]. We’re going to expand that eventually so that goes across all the types of games you’ve played, embracing console games and single-player experiences as well as the multiplayer games. [We’ll have] blogs and diaries keeping track of game play experiences; somewhere where game players will be able to jot down the things they’ve done.
But beyond that manual process, a big part of what we’re creating is the ability to take in a lot of information from different sources—Xbox Live or any of the systems for which information is available. We want to aggregate that information and give users the tools to automatically generate a lot of these blogs and diaries. We think that will become the spark.
The hardest part with any user-contributed site is making people sit down and write a bunch of stuff. We want to avoid that, by making the whole initial experience of recording game play really fun and automatic. Then, if they want to customize further they can do that.
X: I didn’t realize that there are Web-accessible data feeds for these games.
JR: In the case of World of Warcraft, it is generally available—they have something called the Armory that has spawned a whole ecosystem of websites build around the World of Warcraft data feed. That has existed for a while. Microsoft has created the Xbox Community Developers Program and a relatively limited number of companies are allowed to gain access to the Xbox feed. We are one of those companies. So, you tell us what your character is in World of Warcraft, or what your gamer tag is within Xbox Live. Once we know that about you, we will monitor the data feeds that come out of those games and we automatically generate narratives around your game play experiences. We will make entries in an “autoblog” or journal system. As you level up or you unlock achievements or use different games, we will write entries in the autoblog describing that and create cool charts.
X: One of my favorite games over the past year has been Bioshock for the Xbox 360. So if I were a GamerDNA member, I’d be able to go there and blog about my experiences on various levels, or cool things I’d discovered in the game?
JR: Yes, and we would add a couple of other aspects as well. We would automatically generate more of a narrative around what you had just done within Bioshock. You played for a while, you unlocked these two achievements, you did a bunch of things you hadn’t done before. That’s one aspect. The other is that once we acquire all this data in our system, there are other things you can do with it. You can challenge other people; if you love Bioshock you can be racing somebody to the end. We’re building lots of “meta-game” components on top of this that encourage competitions and challenges and other fun stuff. We want to be extending the whole entertainment experience of the game.
X: What about multimedia content, like screen shots—can you extract that kind of information directly from the games or the data feeds?
JR: That’s the next step. We’re not there yet, but certainly screen shots and videos are a big part of what gamers want to be able to record. We have a facility now where you can upload your screen shots and game images. That exists—but that process also needs to be automated a lot more.
X: You’ve been talking so far about PC games like World of Warcraft and the Xbox. What about the big user communities around the Sony PlayStation 2, the PlayStation 3, and the Nintendo Wii?
JR: We will definitely include the PlayStation and the Wii but it’s not our top priority right now. The Xbox 360 is the second-largest-selling console in the world, but it’s the largest in the Americas. And it’s really the fact that they’ve got this rich set of data feeds already as part of the Xbox Live service that makes this compelling. On PlayStation and
