Hey. We Made a Website.

Despite not being very vocal, I've been a member of the Giant Bomb community since before the site was a wiki. But I've held a dark secret. I've been secretly making video game websites since 2000. Back then, I started a community called Kerneldump based around phpBB 2. Instead of being smart and paying money to host it in some datacenter, I threw a linux based Pentium 2 together and ran it out of my condo with no backup. Yeah, you can probably see where this is going.

Kerneldump grew fairly large, we had lan parties, we interviewed Harmonix about FreQuency and Amplitude, then the goddamn thing crashed and burned and never came back. At that time, my roommate had lost interest in helping run a video game website and we were both getting married. So life moved on... but I still kept going.

Next up was Gamer's Pouch. It was more or less a project I wrote in PHP and MySQL to help learn both. It was a game cataloging website where the database was built by the community. I had a decent amount of people on there, but unfortunately, once people added their database of games they had no reason to come back so it stagnated. Lame.

After that I rolled a new website called Sochl, based on the database and concepts of Gamer's Pouch but with a... get this... more "social" focus. Users stlll built the database and added information, and added their own collections, but there were a slew of tools that would help you find others who owned the games you did, and if they were online, even help meet up with them through messaging and stuff. It was pretty rad, but I was a dude with one other dude helping on and off. Despite being my most ambitious project up until that point, no one, at all, used it. It was super depressing... so I decided to stop straight building sites.

Around the time Sochl was being stagnant, Giant Bomb launched and I had moved on to be the newly appointed Editor in Chief of EvilAvatar.com. That was a volunteer gig. During this time I built up a nice little editorial staff, started a podcast, wrote a bunch of reviews, and made some rad relationships with people in the industry. It was cool and a great opportunity, but around the time of my third child's birth, it was time to leave. My real world job was changing for the better, and I had grown tired of the news thing.

Then, the staff I had helped foster convinced me to get going on a new project. As stated before, I was way done with that stuff. I wasn't going to build a site but this time, there were people that were eager to do that aspect. After some hemming and hawing and planning, we went for it. We knew we didn't want to do news, we didn't want forums, but we needed a few hooks to entice people. Splitkick was born.

Through multiple conversations and brainstorming sessions, we decided that we'd do two podcasts with two groups of folks (Tuesday and Thursday), focus on editorials about the gaming industry, and reviews. But our review process is something different. When we're playing games, we let everyone know with an "Open Review" allowing the community to post questions about what they're personally interested in with a specific game. We then compose the review into a more personal one, focusing on the points brought up in the questions.

On top of that, when reviewing a game, we track how much 'fun' we're having every time we sit down with a game. We give each session a score, 1-10, and the final score of a game is an average. Hell, we even chart it out so you can see about where the high and low points with games are.

It's very low pressure, a bunch of cool people, and, I think, some interesting concepts to drive a site. Considering I'm the podcast host of Rocket Jump, I think that show is radical too. If you feel like checking it out. I'd love any feedback on any of the aspects of the site.

www.splitkick.com

Despite not being very vocal, I've been a member of the Giant Bomb community since before the site was a wiki. But I've held a dark secret. I've been secretly making video game websites since 2000. Back then, I started a community called Kerneldump based around phpBB 2. Instead of being smart and paying money to host it in some datacenter, I threw a linux based Pentium 2 together and ran it out of my condo with no backup. Yeah, you can probably see where this is going.

Kerneldump grew fairly large, we had lan parties, we interviewed Harmonix about FreQuency and Amplitude, then the goddamn thing crashed and burned and never came back. At that time, my roommate had lost interest in helping run a video game website and we were both getting married. So life moved on... but I still kept going.

Next up was Gamer's Pouch. It was more or less a project I wrote in PHP and MySQL to help learn both. It was a game cataloging website where the database was built by the community. I had a decent amount of people on there, but unfortunately, once people added their database of games they had no reason to come back so it stagnated. Lame.

After that I rolled a new website called Sochl, based on the database and concepts of Gamer's Pouch but with a... get this... more "social" focus. Users stlll built the database and added information, and added their own collections, but there were a slew of tools that would help you find others who owned the games you did, and if they were online, even help meet up with them through messaging and stuff. It was pretty rad, but I was a dude with one other dude helping on and off. Despite being my most ambitious project up until that point, no one, at all, used it. It was super depressing... so I decided to stop straight building sites.

Around the time Sochl was being stagnant, Giant Bomb launched and I had moved on to be the newly appointed Editor in Chief of EvilAvatar.com. That was a volunteer gig. During this time I built up a nice little editorial staff, started a podcast, wrote a bunch of reviews, and made some rad relationships with people in the industry. It was cool and a great opportunity, but around the time of my third child's birth, it was time to leave. My real world job was changing for the better, and I had grown tired of the news thing.

Then, the staff I had helped foster convinced me to get going on a new project. As stated before, I was way done with that stuff. I wasn't going to build a site but this time, there were people that were eager to do that aspect. After some hemming and hawing and planning, we went for it. We knew we didn't want to do news, we didn't want forums, but we needed a few hooks to entice people. Splitkick was born.

Through multiple conversations and brainstorming sessions, we decided that we'd do two podcasts with two groups of folks (Tuesday and Thursday), focus on editorials about the gaming industry, and reviews. But our review process is something different. When we're playing games, we let everyone know with an "Open Review" allowing the community to post questions about what they're personally interested in with a specific game. We then compose the review into a more personal one, focusing on the points brought up in the questions.

On top of that, when reviewing a game, we track how much 'fun' we're having every time we sit down with a game. We give each session a score, 1-10, and the final score of a game is an average. Hell, we even chart it out so you can see about where the high and low points with games are.

It's very low pressure, a bunch of cool people, and, I think, some interesting concepts to drive a site. Considering I'm the podcast host of Rocket Jump, I think that show is radical too. If you feel like checking it out. I'd love any feedback on any of the aspects of the site.

www.splitkick.com

See, something like this is what I would love to write for. Why do I never hear about these things until after they've launched and are full up on writers?

This actually is a semi-serious question. To get into something like this, do you have to just know somebody who knows somebody, live in the right place, a little bit of both, or just be in the right place at the right time with no bearing on personal connections or physical location? I would love to do something like this, even as volunteer work, since I don't really have previous experience or anything.

That said, I definitely plan to keep an eye on the site, duder. I'll be checking out the podcasts tomorrow at work!

@modeps:

The whole Fun per session thing sounds like a neat idea in theory but I suspect may not be so awesome in practice. One question I have right away is how much time is in a fun session? Is it a set number, set per genre or just nebulous?

If you're like me the first couple days you play a long game you drop some serious time into it and then it tapers off as you go along. So all my sessions are not equivalent and I wouldn't weight them equally in rating a game.Plus some games are gonna have a whole heck of a lot more sessions than some others. E.g. If I drop 100+ hours into Final Fantasy but I get bored grinding for completion in the last fifth, does that really make it a worse game than a Generic Shooter I can blow through in 10 hours?

I guess what I'm asking about this FPS system is that does really tell you anything useful about the game that a star system doesn't?

props for trying something new though.

Great podcast, you got a new listener.

Careful man, this is a dangerous industry

@Dourin: In my case it was basically about me knowing people with similar interests and talking to people around the web. I knew a few of the people who write for us before starting it up. One of them is an old friend from high school (so I've known him since 1993). From there, we all have people we know from having similar interests. Being picky too helps.

@Slag: There's no set timeframe for a 'session'. Thats why it's not a "Fun Per Hour" scale. Very nebulous. In general, they all even out. If you put 4 hours into a game in a sitting, you'll have your own personal score for that sitting. This is basically trying to make math out of something that's subjective and chart enjoyment levels. That's all. At the end of every review so far, I can tell you that the final averaged score has been very close, if not exactly what we thought it would be. The graph tells you more than the final score in my opinion. Example: my Rage review. Plus, if anyone has a question as to peaks or valleys, they are free to ask those questions in the comments.

@Skytylz: Thanks! Feel free to call in or write in. Love user feedback.

@coakroach: Those look like some shifty characters.

@modeps: fair enough. Best of luck to you guys.

i love the graphical design you use for showing variation in review scores. Almost like a heatmap of the scores

@VisariLoyalist said:

i love the graphical design you use for showing variation in review scores. Almost like a heatmap of the scores

actually wait i think I completely misunderstood what that little bar is... so free idiot focus testing for you here! :D

The review process seems interesting but then again, what about a game where it is over within the 1-3 seasions of the game? 
And then you get games like dark souls where it is more or less 60-100hours of playtime.

@VisariLoyalist: Heh, the thin title bar is just a very small slice of a featured image. The graph at the bottom of the reviews is the chart we're looking at.

@biospank: The graphs get a little crazy with sessions on longer games. Our review for The Witcher 2 had 51 data points. Counter to that, our review for X-Men Destiny had 2. Those are still reflective of the overall "fun" score and indicative about what kind of title they are.

Looks pretty legit, I'll check it out over the weekend.

@FLStyle: Oh we're legit all right. Too legit to quit.

Hah, we actually had one of the GB folks request to be a writer. Pretty cool :) Thanks for the kind words guys.

I'm fascinated by the idea of graphing your enjoyment of a game. That is a brilliant concept for any kind of review, really. The tough part for me would be deciding how much granularity is enough.

That said, I'm intrigued by the Giant Bomb audiences reaction to you talking about the site. I quickly decided to avoid talking about my sites on the forums lest I come across either a) like a self-promoting dick, or b) like I was trying to siphon users.

I'm not accusing you of either of these things, to be clear. I'm...pleasantly surpized to find out it's ok to talk about our own projects even if they're technically competition.

@ShaggyPolarBear: Thanks man!

@qraham: Granularity was an initial concern, but due to the fact that it's based on the game itself, it can change at will. Plus, it's all based on enjoyment, and that's a subjective value in itself.

Yeah, I wasn't trying to siphon. I love the hell out of GB and visit multiple times a day. I don't suggest anyone does anything different really. Just decided to throw this out there and see what kind of reception it got. We've got a decent audience already, but it's nice to have new perspective on if what we're doing is something new/cool or just dumb. Glad to see it's the former and not the latter.