The PlayHaven Blog

Archive for June, 2009

Traditional Media is Dead as We Know It

Friday, June 26th, 2009

The birth of the Web sparked the most significant information evolution in the past century. The Web didn’t just change the way we consume media, but also the way we create it. It’s opened new channels of creativity and self-expression for authors who traditionally sat on the receiving end. Why is this so significant? The growth of user-generated content (UGC) has surpassed all expectations and truly enabled the concept of, “Wisdom of the Crowd”. Most importantly, UGC has taken center stage in our daily lives.

User-generated content is a very broad topic. UGC, as a term, encompasses everything from Wikipedia (crowd-sourced encyclopedia) to Facebook (user-generated information exchange and social graph). But I want to focus this blog post on a topic that’s very close to my heart – user-written game reviews. I often read editorial reviews from various traditional media sources. From gaming giants like IGN to GameSpot, and from old school magazines like PC Gamer. But I start to realize I am slowly migrating away from editorial reviews completely. I can’t help but ask myself why? The issue of editorials vs. user-written content has been an ongoing debate since the beginning of the new media revolution. Which one is higher quality? Which one is more accurate? And most importantly, which one is more relevant? If user-written reviews are here to stay, or even become the mainstream, what is their future?

Maybe I am a bit biased – since PlayHaven is a site powered by its great community – but I believe user-written reviews will eventually replace editorial reviews in the future. The power of user-written reviews is not the content presented by one individual, but the value harvested from a massive collection of knowledge and opinions. It is arguable that a review written by an amateur journalist may never reach the quality of a professionally-written editorial, since by definition, a professional writer is afforded a lifetime of training and expertise that a typical John Doe isn’t. However, the quality lacking in UGC reviews are made up in quantity. User-centric review sites such as Yelp, Amazon, MenuPages, NewEgg, and IMDB have outgrown their editorial counterparts by harvesting the wisdom of the crowd. The knowledge and expertise that is lacked by one individual is often supplemented by another person. As an aggregation, the knowledge and opinions from a group of people well exceeds the breadth of expertise that can be offered by any single individual.

Another significant disadvantage of the editorial review is “relevancy”. When reading an editorial review, readers must take a leap of faith when deciding to trust the editor’s opinion. What’s important to the editor could be drastically different from what matters to the reader. When it comes to game reviews and myself, I rarely care about the depth of the storyline, but I care deeply about fun-factor and replay-value. More often than not, this level of personal relevancy cannot be achieved via editorial reviews. User reviews, especially in quantity, solve this problem. When seeing a user-written review, I try to get a sense of what’s important to the reviewer. Once I can relate to the reviewer on a personal level, due to our shared intent, his opinion immediately weighs more than anyone else’s. To find this kind of personal relevancy requires content in quantity. When there are hundreds of reviews, written by hundreds of people from diverse personalities and backgrounds, you are more likely to relate to and connect with at least one of them.

Now, sifting through hundreds, or sometimes, thousands of reviews is both daunting and time-consuming. This leads me to the next logical question: what’s the future of UGC? With technical advancement, the ability to recommend and feed relevant content to the reader will be key for the next few years. Imagine that when you want to buy your next game, you could use a tool that delivers you the exact reviews you are looking for, because it knows reviewers like you. And those reviewers love to kill gigantic space bugs (EDF anyone?). Wouldn’t that be great? What are your thoughts? Leave a comment below!

Posted in Industry | 2 Comments »

One week of PlayHaven

Saturday, June 20th, 2009

It’s been one week since we’ve introduced our private beta to a select few guide writers, and the feedback has been fantastic. We were immediately able to fix and repair many initial bugs and are working hard to improve the experience as much as possible. I want to thank all our testers for being supportive and providing great, useful guides to read. Tonight we are deploying a major revision of PlayHaven with numerous bug fixes and guide editing enhancements. In addition, we will be inviting the next batch of guide writers in to expand our community. Due to the number of changes in this next build, I’d like to quickly highlight the most important ones as it will apply to many of you who sent us your feedback:

- Video support on guides
We are now introducing the final building block to our guide editor: embedded video. We will initially begin with YouTube videos and then over the next few weeks gradually expand options to other video sharing services. If you prefer another video sharing site over YouTube, please let us know and we will put them on our priority list. For those with YouTube accounts, embedding your video is very easy. Simply upload your video to YouTube, grab the link, and place it in the tool.  The rest of the work will be done automatically.

- Table fixes and enhancements
We were pleased by the usage of the table tool! Due to numerous requests for enhancements, we have both eliminated existing bugs and added a new way to manipulate your table: the resize option. This option lets you remove or add rows and columns at will, while at the same time protecting the existing data in your table. We realize that this is a very popular tool and look forward to adding better functionality in the near future as well.

- Cross-browser compatibility
Any web developer will immediately know the problems that might arise from complex web apps in different browser environments. Due to the great feedback from our beta testers, we have greatly enhanced compatibility across the major browsers, such as IE7, IE8, FireFox, Safari, etc.  If you were experiencing errors before on your favorite browser and had to switch to write your guides, I encourage you to go back to your original browser and let us know if you encounter any problems there.

Additionally, let me give you a preview of a few of the features coming in the next few weeks:

- Search!
Everyone has seen the currently disabled search bars on the site. Our advanced back-end game guide search engine is now complete and we’re working hard to make it nice and easy for everyone to use. Look forward to this feature very very soon!

- Guide Feedback
One of the most asked for features, we will be allowing readers to let guide writers know how much they love their guide! A combined rating and commenting system will keep constant communication between writers and readers open.  The criticism, feedback, and questions of our community will help further improve the overall quality of guides found at PlayHaven!

- Copy and paste improvements
We realize that a lot of you would like to test out our system by simply copy/pasting existing guides that you have written. Due to potential incompatiblities and errors rising up on some of these copy/pasted guides, we have a new system in place to help transition your current guide to PlayHaven’s structure. All changes will be done internally for you when you save your guide. In the near future, we will implement tools to help you in the transition while you edit as well.

These are just some of the bigger changes to PlayHaven. In addition, there have been numerous bug fixes, design and usability improvements, and subtle changes you might never notice! We encourage you all to play around some more and see if all your needs have been met – and definitely let us know if you have more feedback for us.

Posted in PlayHaven | 1 Comment »

Improving the 1996 Guide Publishing Standard

Thursday, June 18th, 2009

It’s time to upgrade our 1996 guide writing standard.

The good old-fashioned ASCII text guide. I believe every gamer in the world, has at one point, looked one up to help them through the various road blocks they’ve come across in their gaming world.

Go to any of the major gaming sites right now: Gamespot, IGN, GameFAQs and you’ll realize that the majority of guides they have are still published as  all text on notepad! Even games that are recently released still have text based guides published for them: Left 4 Dead, Street Fighter IV, and Resident Evil 5, just to name a few.

Come on people, it’s 2009. We’re gaming on PS3’s and 360’s, we’ve built space stations – in space, and according to Terminator Salvation we’re only 9 years away from John Connor battling the first T-800 model terminators. Yet, after all of this, we’re still publishing our game guides on Notepad!

Now before the text-based guide loyalist run rampant on me, I want to make completely clear that I appreciate all of the time and effort each guide writer puts into making a full blown text guide. I still find myself coming across quality text guides that help me unlock important achievements or educating me on how to play a specific class or character. It’s just that I feel that the time and effort going into the intricacies of creating ASCII art for a PS3 controller that shows me where the square button is in relation to the R2 button isn’t completely necessary. Let’s try to avoid time worrying about the obvious and spend more time improving the overall standard of a game guide.

Just in case you didn't know the location of the circle and triangle button

Just in case you didn't know the location of the triangle and circle button

Pure text, all the ASCII art, having to cleverly encrypt our e-mail address in our guides to avoid “spambots” – It’s not entirely clear to me why we do this, why the guide writing culture is still stuck in 1996. Maybe it’s the lack of accessibility to add media such as in-game images and video to enhance our guides. Or perhaps it’s the nostalgic look and feel of having a guide in ASCII text. Whatever the reason, we should collectively make an effort to improve our text guides. One major improvement I’d like to see would be easier guide navigation. As a guide reader I’d prefer to see a nice table of contents with click-able links as opposed to taking several minutes doing a “crtl-f” through a 3MB text file. Another immediate improvement would be to make huge blocks of text more consumable for guide readers by throwing in the occasional bold or italics when applicable.

Back in 1996, having an ASCII text guide seemed like the most efficient and functional way to deliver guide content across the internet. During that time we had browser compatibility issues that did a poor job handling HTML and having a guide in text format was a fine solution. Fortunately for us, web technologies have improved to the point that people who know nothing about creating a web page can easily plop one up without having to dump out a single line of HTML code. As a person who relies on the contribution and hard-work of the guide writing community, I’d love to see us take improvements towards writing guides that incorporate a more aesthetically pleasing and functional style. We can collectively help each other get there, slowly but surely.

skeeball

One of my favorite pieces of ASCII art. Snow Dragon depiction of the cashier behind the ticket prizes (Snow Dragon

Posted in Guides, PlayHaven | 3 Comments »

Welcome to PlayHaven!

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

We are taking PlayHaven into private beta today. I want to take this blog post to give a brief background on who we are and the mission we plan on undertaking to help the gaming community. But first of all, I want to thank all of you for accepting our invitation to join the PlayHaven private beta. If you have not received an invitation, but wish to join, please don’t hesitate to shoot us an Email through the contact form on the footer below.

So who are we? We are a group of avid gamers who love to create tools to help the gaming community. Before PlayHaven, we created MyGameMug.com and WoWHeadhunter.com, which are very successful tools that help online gamers find other fun gamers to play with. Both are still being used by thousands today. In our decades of playing, we’ve had a chance to really experience the pain points of the common gamer. One of these aspects is the way that most prolific gamers acquire strategy and advice for accomplishing their in-game goals: the giant ASCII text guide. While the value of these large text guides are clear to us, we feel that the current state of guide publishing and viewing is in need of a major upgrade.

We aim to empower guide writers with the easiest and most intuitive editing tools possible. Writers can easily structure their guides, add multimedia content, and publish instantly to millions, with a touch of a button. Having said that, we want guides to be just as useful, simplistic, and aesthetically pleasing for the people that read and use those guides. As a result, we wish to create a next generation gaming media site that houses the world’s largest database of micro-guides, across all games and platforms. Whether the obstacle you are facing is beating a boss, finding hidden treasure, or developing a strategy, we are certain the wisdom of your fellow gamers can help you on PlayHaven.

Let me recap our mission statement clearly: to create the next generation gaming media site that is powered by gamers like yourselves. We are all tired of the various annoyances of traditional gaming media sites. Cluttered advertising. Biased reviews. Uninformative articles. PlayHaven aims to differ from those sites in three primary ways:

  1. Every piece of content on PlayHaven is created by people who actually play the games. People like you.
  2. We value quality, cleanliness, and usability above all else. PlayHaven will never be cluttered with poorly written guides, annoying interstitial advertisements, or broken tools.
  3. We believe in the power of the community. Everything we build is for you. So tell us what feature you want to see — we are listening.

We hope you enjoy your first experience here. Please don’t hesitate to contact us if you encounter any bugs, issues, or general suggestions to make PlayHaven better. Our door is always open, and we are always listening.

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Posted in PlayHaven | 7 Comments »