A couple days ago, I gave an interview on French web radio Fréquence Geek.

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!

Last night, Gamocracy got a new homepage for unlogged visitors. It looks a lot like the Magazine page. If you’re not familiar with it, the Magazine page lists all contents published on Gamocracy, ranked by pwnz! count (=popularity).

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.

A few days ago, Nomalz added the possibility to notify your Twitter followers when you publish an opinion on Gamocracy.

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…

>> Find out how Twitter sharing works

This week Nomalz updated several things on the site. Here’s the changelog:

• 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.

Maybe you’ve seen this already: we updated Gamocracy’s profile page and overall visual style last night.

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!