You may not have heard of the Great Games Experiment. Until now, it’s been something of a private enterprise, admission by invitation only.
Essentially, it’s designed as a social networking site for gamers and game developers of all kinds. As of last Friday (March 2nd), GGE was put into open beta, and now anyone can join.
Coyote is a member and in charge of the RPG section. One thing he’s looking to do there is create the ultimate list of RPGs, from the most obscure to the most famous.
Go on over and take a look. It costs nothing to join, of course. Who knows? This thing may work out.
Great Games Expermient Open Beta
P.S. Ya know, if you think of “games” as singular, the domain takes on a whole new meaning. I wonder if they thought of that? ;)
Heh – I know of at least one firewall that has blocked access to the site because of the name. Woops!
There’s game geeks for you.
And thanks for the mention, Scorpia :) The thing that I’m excited about (assuming it all takes off) is that it’s a great chance for some lesser-known games to be discovered by a large community of gamers. Either old gems that were underrated and long forgotten, or newer games that don’t enjoy a big marketing budget.
And hopefully, with a closer relationship between developers and consumers (gamers), there’ll be a tighter feedback loop. Granted, 95%+ of the devs on the site are indies rather than mainstream, but I’m all for cutting the communication barriers there.
We’ll see if it takes off. In the meantime, feel free to message me with any suggestions, concerns, or questions. My profile (feel free to add me to your friends list!) is:
Rampant Coyote at Great Games Experiment
Also – I’m going to be trying to feature a different indie RPG every single month. It’ll be another chance for a lesser-known RPG to get a tiny bit of publicity. I can’t play ’em all, so I could use some help with recommendations. My only criteria is that it has to be indie (not backed by a major publisher), it has to be an RPG (we’ve had plenty of arguments over what THAT means here… *grin*), and it needs to be currently available for sale or as a legitimate, legal free download.
I didn’t know you were in charge of the RPG section Coyote. Way cool. I have my hobby game up there along with a bad pic of myself and my daughter riding the train at the Columbus zoo. I need to update my game project with what I’ve been up to.
I really dig what GarageGames has done with the site.
I’m also very glad they haven’t tried to monetize it right off the bat. Right now it’s still beta, and I think they are trying to let it evolve for a while to see how the community WANTS to use the site.
I’ve been quite thrilled by seeing how many retro games have made the list. I mean, sure… since indie developers were recruited to start the community, I expected a large contingent of indie games to make it onto the list. And mainstream games & the most popular games of the last decade were a given. But there are a lot of obscure and retro titles up there, and I think it’s cool that they COULD foster some amount of discussion.
I think right now the biggest trick is actually bringing the people together to form real conversations about games. Unless you bookmark a game, there’s no way of knowing if / when people are talking about it.
I can’t seem to get an email with my password, even after re-requesting it. I think it’s because I’m on AOL, and I’ve had problems with some sites before (yet not others… weird). And it’s not in my spam folder.
Anyway, someone there may want to look into this. It’s really annoying for me to try to sign up for a site then email several times for my validation/password and never get it. I always stop trying after four attempts.
The site itself looks great, though, and I hope to have time to explore it further later on when I’m not rushing.
I reread that and noticed it sounds a little snotty! Oops!
I do realize it’s AOL’s fault and not the website’s. AOL and I have a love/hate relationship going on.
Klara, why not get a freebie at Yahoo? The mail may get through there for you.
Or gmail – all the cool kids are doing it… ;)
But like I said… I have one friend who had to modify his firewall because it filtered out everything because it had the word between GREATGAME and PERIMENT. Might be what is happening with AOL.
Incidentally… I also run the RPG FANS group… dunno if the link in the group has brought any new traffic this way, but I try.
I just hate having to check umpteen different email addresses. I always forget about the ones I have elsewhere and then Yahoo closes them. :)
But I may have to since AOL seems so picky (I have already tried editing my spam filters and for some sites it just doesn’t seem to work).
One thing that I’ve done is set up mail forwarding on gmail — I have a rampantgames gmail account that goes directly to my jayb address. It’s been a handy alternative a couple of times when the rampantgames.com email has gone down.
You can do that with Gmail? Yay! Or maybe you can with Yahoo, too. It’s been a while since I looked into those sorts of options. I’ll check it out. Thanks!