Mobile Social Networks with That UGC Factor Built In
Posted on December 27, 2006
Filed Under European Web 2.0, European Web 2.0 pipeline |
The developers at game array are hoping to take user generated content into the mobile games arena, along with a little social networking. Games are an area I’m concious of neglecting. I’m not a gamer, though all my children are and I have a feeling that in the fan and game culture is a little of the something I’m missing out on in life. Henry Jenkins, in his various books on game and fan culture calls it building a shared morality, though I guess he is referring to people who establish communities based around their favourite TV series rather than simple shoot-em-ups.
The thought of people devising their own moral order from fiction is absolutely credible and the kind of paradox that modernity is throwing at us every day. I’ve been saying as much about Second Life. There’s a large element not of escapism but of retreat from the continuous flow of conflict to an area where participants can really think about life and what makes for a just community.
Game array is not in that business but bringing the same sense of democracy and empowerment to games is an important step away from the multi-billion dollar games and ultra high end environments that the big games’ companies now build. I hope game array goes for that everyday market. Here is what they say about themselves.
“….our social networking site (www.gamearray.com) allows users to personalize mobile games using our tools, post them on the site, play them online, send the games to their friends, rate/review other people games etc.
The experience spans across the web and the mobile spaces, and some community features exist also on our handset-client.
It’s a unique “experiment” if you will in cross mobile-online social networking with users actually building the content of that gaming community.
Another interesting angle we have, is the ability to post the games as is in a MySpace page, and allow people visiting your MySpace to play the game that you made - online.”
The plus in any of these initiativse is you never really know what’s going to come out the other end of the pipe. I hope to be tuning into game aray in a year or two’s time and finding out how the public have evolved the concept.
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