I didn’t check but it’s been something like two months? At least.

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!

TADAM! Here are the top 10 Glinks published this week on Gamocracy, aka the top 10 gaming links that got the attention of Gamocracy players.

The Valve/Blizzard rivalry has only started for good and it’s already being ported to consoles. Add to that pieces of games inspired creativity – you have to check that Bioshock statue carved out of wood with chainsaws – a speed run on Demon’s Souls – one of the toughest games in recent years – and a bunch of trailers and you’ll be set on what we think was not be missed in the past seven days.

1. Portal 2 Delayed to April 2011
thehdroom.com | shared by incolas

2. 200 Gaming Characters as Mega Man Sprites + Interview
blog.pikimal.com | shared by incolas

3. Erasure – Always
youtube.com| shared by yokiharo

4. Blizzard bringing Diablo 3 to consoles?
gamasutra.com | shared by incolas

5. Pagani v Lamborghini: Need for Speed Hot Pursuit
youtube.com | shared by R4VI4TOR

6. Demon’s Souls speed run [0:54:54] by peercast player alternal
youtube.com | shared by incolas

7. 「ジェイソンさん」ビッグダディを彫る「BIOSHOCK」
youtube.com | shared by Nayya

8. All official Vindictus videos
vindictus.nexon.net | shared by Rycharde

9. Nerf NOW!! — Smoking Time
nerfnow.com | shared by Denzo

10. Happy Birthday 2 Us
l4d.com | shared by R4VI4TOR

Check out Gamocracy’s Magazine page for more of the same in real time.

Once again, thank you everyone that took part and played the game. Thanks for all the energy and the link digging!

If you’re new to Gamocracy, know that you too could help us find the gaming information that really matters, it all starts here. (be warned though, to publish Glinks, you’ll have to ding five first)

Earlier this week, I told you that if we got to at least five reviews published by the time of the ’7 Days and X Reviews’ entry (this very one you’re reading now), I would give away one EC1 mouse by Zowie Gear. Well, as the title says, we crushed that number! Thanks everyone for the amazing response.

We reviewed old and new games, on the PC, the iPhone and the Wii. Some indieZZZ, some AAA. Games of all kinds, if you can’t find something you like you have to be blind. Check out the list!

In case you don’t know much about Gamocracy:
To publish a review on the site, players first need to reach level 6. Only a handful got there so far! You too can play btw. Click if you think that reads weird

Since we beat the five reviews mark, I’ll give away Zowie’s EC1 mouse, as promised. And, surprise surprise, since we got all the way to eleven, I’ll add a mousepad to the prize pool, just like that. We’re going to have two winners today.

I’m not sure how the mousepad is called but it’s by Zowie Gear too, and it sure looks a lot like the Swift Black one shown here.

That’s when the Zowie peripherals logged on random.org to let the terrible gods of randomness know about this arrangement we have here. As usual, they started arguing like mad. Very chaotic and all. Sometimes you wonder how they make decisions: could randomness be decided by who screams the loudest?
No clue, really, and who gives a fuck anyway?
What I can tell is they decided that today’s winners are:

>> Click to find out who wins the stuff

Gaming schools? When I stopped studying, the idea of schools teaching how to make games just didn’t exist. To me at least. WTF?!, is pretty much what I thought, when they started popping all over in the past few years. Now, they even have TV ads going all out, like it’s every parent’s dream that their kid ends up making video games: “You too can be a hero game designer, enroll now!”.

Weren’t the people that make games just born with the fire and skills? Someone tell me: what gaming schools did Miyamoto and Kojima attend? And who taught the Final Fantasy makers? The StarCraft guys?

Then I saw a couple interesting videos from students projects here and there on the web. And we started working, at what wasn’t called Gamocracy yet, with dotsMarc, who’s coming out of one French school, ENJMIN, himself. I met other students at the GDC. I even got a friend who got paid to do a talk about game design at the same school dotsMarc’s from. That was the last straw: if they put their hands in their pockets for a friend, these schools couldn’t be bad, could they?

I decided I wanted to check some out and found out a pretty big one is just a fifteen minutes walk away from home: I paid a visit to ISART Digital last week.

In the article below, I’ll introduce you to the school through various angles. I’ll try to be somewhat thorough. Serious and all.

>> Take a tour of ISART Digital

Next Wednesday I’ll get to Jönköping, Sweden, for DreamHack.

That is, if I don’t miss my plane. I’ve gotten pretty skilled at missing planes lately.

So assuming everything goes well, I’ll be at DreamHack. DreamHack is a four-days long festival, a little city set up in a huge convention center. It’s made for gamers and the likes. They say it’s the biggest LAN party in the world.

DreamHack Winter usually hosts 10,000+ PC’s on one giant Local Area Network. They’re all connected at very high speed to the Internet through the biggest modem ever built by machines built by human kind. Or something like that.

There are gaming tournaments with some of the best players in the world in StarCraft 2, Counter-Strike (‘mixed’ and ‘females only’), Tekken and  Super Street Fighter 4. Outside of Sweden, at least twelve countries will be represented, including Iran.

Wait. Iran? I need to say: I am impressed. Whenever I hear about this country in the news it sounds like it’s one huge prison. These guys must have escaped or something… And are they better with the AK?! I need to find out.

There are restaurants and places to buy snacks. A gaming show with publishers booths, a temporary cash mashine just for the weekend and a decent amount of female individuals attending or admining (we know one at least at Gamocracy, and a male one too). You can even talk to them if you’re courageous enough.

Games and women: what more could the people be asking for?

Well, there’s no hotel inside DreamHack but attendees are provided with a table to put their computer screens on and sleep under. The PC’s do for the heating. It’s very clever. A bunch of hotels are standing next to the venue too in case, madness, anyone’s really into sleeping.

http://www.dreamhack.se