Monday, December 04, 2006

Rupture --adding community-aspect to gaming

Besides Playstation party games (EyeToy, Buzz), Massive Multiplayer Online Games provide the most social experiences in (digital) gaming at the moment. Many MMOGs are about joining a guild and climbing up the ranks of players. Even though it is about playing together, many players consider it 'hard to communicate with other players, organize game playing together and learn about other gamers' identities, online and offline' (from BusinessWeek).

'Rupture taps into the game to automatically pull together character names, profiles, and resources, and publish them on a personalized site. It will also pull together stats to create individual and guild rankings and provide a place for guilds to organize their playing.' The Rupture beta-testing period is about to start -- so all you Wowers, put your guild together to enroll for beta-testing.

I am still not totally aware of all the features of Rupture but it reminds me of Dark Portal by Dynamoid. 'Dark Portal is a picture community, made for WoW-players, by WoW-players, to post their screenshots and real life pictures and interact through comments'. It is a sister portal for IRC-galleria which is the most used world wide web service in the Nordic according to TNS Metrix. Dynamoid or TNS Metrix also claim that it is the most active social media community in the world -- which is really-really hard to believe because there exist such services as MySpace, Habbo and Second Life. Anyhow -- it is good to be self-confident ;) And EVERYONE of the 400 000 registered users of the service spend approx. 18 HOURS per month at the IRC-galleria. That is quite a lot time for uploading /browsing photos and adding virtual 'stickers' and comments. Could these type of horizontal linkages be a new start for cross media services? Surely SMS-TV games and tv-formats like Big Brother exist but that cannot be the whole truth of cross media.

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