O brother, where art thou?
November 15th, 2006 by xamountOne of the many features launched with GameTap’s recent anniversary release is focused on further extending community in the client. GameTap launched online multiplayer games, chat lobbies, and IM back in July, and has continued to work on bringing players together — the inclusion of the new screen name popup is just one minor piece of the ever-expanding community puzzle.
Prior to this release, you could hover over players’ names (as long as they were signed up to be a challenger in a particular game) and see their high score before challenging them. This was great for the single use case of determining whether you wanted to challenge someone in a particular game. But what if you wanted to IM them and make sure they were ready for your steadily improving Galaga skills? What if you’d just played them and wanted to quickly add them to your buddy list for later? What if they weren’t actually playing the game you were (Galaga) and you wanted to meet up with them where they were (Street Fighter Alpha 3)?
The solution was fairly obvious: screen names should return more than just high scores; they should return a menu of options. And you shouldn’t be limited to screen names in challenge lobbies — your buddy list, leaderboards, everywhere you see a screen name should allow access to that gamer. So we hit the angled whiteboard and started sketching out some ideas:
Where we ended up is remarkably close to what we first sketched. Selecting a screen name anywhere in the GameTap client now returns a popup menu of contextual options:
You can IM, buddy/debuddy, block and even follow anyone (with the right privacy settings) around within GameTap. Within an online multiplayer game you can challenge, accept challenges, and see any screen name’s top score.
We think the screen name popup is just one of the many new features GameTap has introduced that will help HOOK PLAYERS UP. I’m always looking for new blood for my buddy list — especially since we also just added Buddy Leaderboards. But I’ll leave the design path for that one for another day. Must go play.