I’ll spare the details but let’s say that, throughout the year 2010, the working atmosphere in the Gamocracy team hasn’t been so good. Nobody’s to blame really but many things have not gone the way we expected, starting with differring visions for the site among us.

It’s not only that of course, but from the moment working at an innovative project isn’t fun anymore, a lot of what made it appealing vanishes at once and there you are left with your crazyness and a lot of risks in your hands.

For the past three months we’ve been thinking and talking about how we could go on, one way or another. It turns out development on the Gamocracy platform is on ice and will stay like that at least for some time. As for myself, I will stay away from the site and community as I’ve done recently. I don’t see myself coming back to it anytime soon. That said, there are no plans to take the site down anytime soon either.

With Gamocracy going the way it is, I need to find ways to make ends meet. I’m not too worried about it, but I need to go for it full time or my rent will become an issue. I’ve started working at other endeavours that should help me do that. Above all, I wish to remain independent and not become an employee again.

Thank you everyone that took part in Gamocracy, one way or another. It was tough and the ending ain’t the happiest ever but I enjoyed walking down that path together with you.

Now let’s go eat that green mushroom!

Today I got more review codes from our man Sean, the same who sent the Doc Clock one. They’re for another indie PC game, called Shatter. It’s some kind of modern day Arkanoid.

I got three codes so here’s what we’re going to do:

• Two codes will go to  people who are willing to write a review after they got the code and played the game. This means you have to be a level 6 player on Gamocracy to apply.
• One code will go to someone who’s willing to write a rating after they got the code and played the game. This means anyone with a  Gamocracy account can apply.

To Apply, just say it in the comments and make it clear whether you’re applying for a rating or a review. You can’t apply for both. In case there are more applications than review codes, we might do a random drawing or share the codes between several people.

Call the firemen and join us in the hot hot fun!

Gamocracy on Steam
Gamocracy on Xfire

R4VI4TOR has been Gamocracy’s first “outside” moderator for that long. By “outside”, I mean outside the founding team: dotsMarc, Morgan, Nomalz and me.

What’s a Gamocracy moderator doing by the way? He can approve or cancel database edits proposed by players.

We chose R4V because… Let me make an understatement: the German dude has been around for some time. He’s the most advanced player on Gamocracy at level 11, 19 000+ DB points and 713 pwnz! garnered. He got himself almost all available Tokens too, including the one that bears his name, of course. (Talking about Tokens, dotsMarc designed a bunch of new ones! They’re coming.)

All that to say that his contributions to Gamocracy have been more unvaluable than a Mastercard advert.

Why am I only talking about all this now? Because I wanted an interview! I wanted to get words from the man… After a couple months of waiting for a reply, I’m giving up and tipping my hat to thee that doesn’t want no publicity.

Please give it up for R4V!

Sean is, guess what, a great guy. He’s helped a bit with Gamocracy already and gave an ear to what it is we’re trying to do. I had some of the most interesting talks with the man.

As it turns out, one of the things we, Gamocracy people, would like to establish is a new kind of relationship between PR people (and their bosses, publishers) and gamers. A relationship that’s clean of any suspicious befriendings, gifts and underlying pressures that would make it hard for, say, a journalist to keep doing their job if they happened not to be nice enough with the games they were provided with – for free – for reviewing.

Actually, to start with, I was thinking we would simply do without them PR guys and gals: don’t need them, don’t call them and let gamers just talk about the games they feel like talking about.

However, it so happens that, in his email, Sean offered a free review code for a new indie game: Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich Of Time.

So, if they’re coming to us, what should we do? Since I’m grateful to Sean for giving this code away, I don’t want to review it myself. It would be stupid to pretend to act as a critic when I’m just a fed animal, wouldn’t it?

That’s where you guys come into the picture. You don’t owe Sean anything, you don’t know him. If you gave Doc Clock the bad treatment, how could he complain that a player didn’t like the game? And at the same time, how could I be held responsible for your speech?

That’s why, your mission should you decide to accept it…
– Level all the way up to 6 on Gamocracy
– Get the secret review code from me
– Publish a review for Doc Clock: The Toasted Sandwich Of Time on Gamocracy within 15 days

Let me know in the comments if you’d be interested to go for it. If several raise their arms, I’ll see how we handle that since I only have one code.

Let’s see who, if any, is up for it tomorrow.

[UPDATE]
Yokiharo and GODJonez are in for the reviewing! Many thanks, guys. I’m pretty happy about all this since… this is exactly what Gamocracy is about.

It lasted about twenty minutes, I had a pretty good time! It was only too short. Strangely enough, I love talking about the site…

Here’s the link to the podcast, I’m jumping in at about 30 minutes.

It’s all in French so if Molière’s language sounds like gibberish to you, here’s what I talked about, in short:

- introduced Gamocracy and the overall concept of an ads free gaming site powered by players inside a basic web based game.

- revealed that making Gamocracy into even more of a game was what we’d been focusing on lately backstage.

- announced that “pwnz!” will soon be renamed… for something else. Hopefully it’s better and you like it!

I’d love to do interviews in English for y’all out there… Go tell those damn journalists to answer my emails!

The differences with the Magazine page:

• The default homepage displays the most popular contents from the past twenty four hours – instead of the past seven days for the Magazine page. This can be changed simply by clicking the menu to the right.
• The homepage also displays six of the latest released games, picked randomly among all the latest releases.

Other updates:

Gamocracy is now using an updated framework. Nomalz had to make several fixes to make it all work. There is a possibility that there still are bugs lurking around. If you come across them, don’t fight! Just let us know through the feedback form and we’ll send the marines.

The game edit page got another update. It may look like it’s a detail but it’s not, really, since it’s about how the gaming industry works and how we’re representing that on Gamocracy. Now for each game, players can specify how the game got financed (Financing model) and how it’s making money, or planning to do so at least (Business model). In previous occurrences, these two fields were merged into one, which didn’t really work (ie: an indie game can be free to play or paying).

This new information doesn’t appear on game pages yet. It will when we update those, along with plenty of other stuff. That will happen at some point, just not tomorrow as we’ve been preparing other things recently.

Before I tell you more about this, I want to show you a picture. We took it two days ago at Paris Games Week, it’s the first time we’re taking a picture with the four people doing Gamocracy:

And now…

How Twitter sharing works:

1. Log on Gamocracy and start rating or reviewing a game (it also works if you’re just editing an existing opinion)

2. On the opinion edit page, at the bottom, tick the “Publish on Twitter” box.

3. When you do that, a dark box appears at the bottom right corner of the screen. Click the link in this box.

4. This will bring up a Twitter prompt asking you to allow Gamocracy to publish stuff on your Twitter account. Click Allow. (This requires that you’re logged in at the same time and on the same browser on your Twitter and Gamocracy accounts of choice)

5. A new editable text field now appears below the “Publish on Twitter” line. This is the text  your Twitter followers will see when you hit “Publish” or “Edit”.

6. When you’re ready with your opinion, edit the Twitter text (or not) and hit “Publish” or “Edit”.

• Added a “glinks” page to profiles. Now you can check the full list of glinks you published, just like for opinions. ie: R4VI4TOR’s glinks
• Added the “database” icon to company pages. Click the icon to edit company information. ie: Valve Software

In addition to that, he worked quite a lot on the “game edit” page:

• The “business model” field now lets you choose between “published” and “indie”. (It’s likely this field will be renamed soon)
• The “paying” field now lets you choose between “paying” and “free”.
  (It’s likely this field will be renamed soon)
• Added the USK rating field (this is the German rating for games)
• Added four “connectivity” options: single player, local multiplayer, online, persistent. By combining these options together in one way or another, you should be able to cover any type of game connectivity there is. For example, StarCraft 2 is single player and online. StarCraft 1 is singe player, local multiplayer and online. World of Warcraft is online and persistent.
• Deleted the “type” field.
• Adjusted the search engine to match the changes to the “business model” and “paying” fields.

This is making the editing of games a tad more complicated but also more thorough and precise… hopefully!

Some of these changes are not reflected on game pages yet. This will come when we update those.

I’m curious what fields you guys think we should work on or add next. Maybe that could give us some ideas.

I can give a lot of praise about this update since I wasn’t involved in it. dotsMarc, Morgan and Nomalz did a tremendous job of improving over something that was already pretty nice. I enjoy how they’ve added some personality to the site’s interface.

Here’s a glimpse at the new status & tokens box in profiles:

To see more of the new style, head on to www.gamocracy.com and take a look around.

The changes are in line with us starting to call Gamocracy a game. When we started, we wanted to make a site with gameplay elements in it. As it turns out, the plan is now to make a game of writing and curating. We have some work to do before we get there: yesterday’s update is the first step.

With our backgrounds in pro gaming, we’ve had a fairly good idea of how a multiplayer game works for a bit. Now that we’ve been looking into game design itself for some time, and what you guys have been doing on the site, we’ve gotten some new ideas which we’re going to try and apply in the weeks and months to come.

Hopefully you like them!