Manifesto Myspace Meme Migration

Try saying the subject title ten times fast.

There are tens of thousands of self-professed gamers on MySpace that you could target in driving traffic and community to this site and movement. What you need to do is make it really easy to post those promotional thumbnail link buttons, engage a few hundred seemingly hardcore gamers with nice caches of friends as evangelists, and you get a snowball effect going after a few months. It also wouldn't hurt to start an indie gamers group and tie that into your evangelism.

Developers, you can also promote your game, while in development, using a page on a social network, largely for free. Having a prototype with demo quality art assets running in-browser is the fulcrum to that, but if you can provide that you have a tremendously powerful tool at your disposal.

Patrick:

Great idea. Want to build a Myspace page for us?

I do have enough free time these days to get something like this rolling, and I'd be more than happy to (think about even ten thousand new people who buy monthly, thats another million a year in gross revenues). I'll be spending a deal of time on MySpace promoting a casual game I'm acting as producer on, so I can slip some OGM for Manifesto in the mix. I've learned some loose hueristics from musician friends, but I've also adapted a few specific to games.

I don't think a centralized page works for Manifesto on myspace because frankly, its already right here. What I can do is start a group, target some potential evangelists, and get the ball rolling in that regard, then the size of the group will serve as a metric to how many people are "converted" to the cause.

Two things from you that would definetly help, some cookie code for the link buttons and pointers to any games you carry or will carry that can run browser embedded. With even one good game that runs in-browser I can give people a concrete example fairly easily.

Not sure what you mean by 'cookie code for the link buttons'...

How about Cosmic Encounter? It runs in the browser...

Here is an extremely bare prototype.

I want to give fair shake to other indie portals, like Game Tunnel and so on, I think I'm going to start a forum thread listing them and ask people their opinion on them. Heterogenous competetion is for the best, or at least its in line with editorial integrity. However, currently the site is linked through the last word of the first paragraph (which I think is some concise, well linked copy), so unless people overwhelmingly decide another site is premier, it will stay such.

The next step is fleshing out a nice visual, I'd like to post some buttons and a clean but lush background, not sure which art assets to use at the moment. In addition to growing the group (which does good things for everyone) a specific goal should be pushing penetration of the Manifesto thumbnail link to as many pages as possible. What I meant by "cookie code" is something along the lines of the code underneath the "Leeches" video on this band's page. That way if someone wants to they can put a button on their page fairly easily. It'd also make sense to include to the code to offer the code, you know? Thats meta-memetics right there.

I'm thinking that nesting a browser game as "featured" and doing a rotation as possible ain't a bad idea, and I can see the biz sense in using Cosmic Encounter. Personally the game's UI turned me off, I'd rather have something more accesible, but I could definetly use that at some point.

If only Steam Brigade or such could do browser-embedding...

Haha, sweet damn, this is useful. With Pjio's plug-in we can have people hosting demos of their favorite games on their pages, for free. I mean, holy shit, thats powerful, we just need to get the ripples started.

Just joined the group. If you need any soldiers to help out with rounding up some people, then I'll be happy to enlist. My favorite game Spirit Wars has hitched to your bandwagon, so if you succeed then we do also :)

Anyone know some basic web design/html skills? This is slightly embarrasing, but I need to figure out how to post banner links on the group page, and if possible I'd like to have a function where in-browser games can be hosted on a given user's profile page as easily as possible. Short of MySpace catching on to the potential of games being marketing through their site the way music is, we probably won't get the one button function, but maybe we can get a cut-and-paste field.

Of course, promulgating Manifesto banner-links is probably a more pressing concern, we need to make that easy as well. At the risk of sounding like a technically incompetent dweeb, I had trouble figuring out how to get the thing on my blog (I had to put the picture and a text link as seperate items) so the average user will need some cut-and-paste code at least.

Any volunteers?

While I can't offer much - I can offer my support for this idea. MySpace has turned out to be a tremendously powerful tool for muscisians - even some heavy industry-grounded game designers have chosen to use myspace to store a personal resume of sorts - so this is definately worth persuing. Thumbs up for putting in the work, and I'm really suprised noone has done this before !

To house the 'cookie code', You could use the textarea tag. Please note that this forum is going to filter out the tags, so where there are hard brackets, you'd substitute less than and more than signs. This is an example of the textarea tag...

[textarea]Insert your text here[/textarea]

You might want to slap in the readonly attribute, all it does is stops people from fiddling with the box, and writing in their own text. It would only affect their interpretation of the contents of the box, and only for that session, but it looks more neat if you get rid of that blinking cursor, so you'd end up with this...

[textarea readonly]Insert your text here[/textarea]

As for a hyperlinked image (the button you were referring to), you'd use something along these lines...

[a href="http://www.manifestogames.com/"][img src="manifestobutton.gif"][/a]

Note that the image source tag "manifestobutton.gif" is referring to a relative path, whereas the hyperlink reference tag "http://www.manifestogames.com/" is absoulte. If someone were to use that code on their webpage, the image would need to be in the same directory as the page. I'm not exactly sure which directory you would upload images to on myspace, but changing that value to something along the lines of "http://groups.myspace.com/indiegamers/images(or whatever it's called)/manifestobutton.gif" means that anyone can slap the code into their page and the browser will reference the myspace website. So you'd end up with this...

[a href="http://www.manifestogames.com/"][img src="http://groups.myspace.com/indiegamers/images/manifestobutton.gif"][/a]

Wrap that in the textarea code, and you've got something comparable to the box in the band's page...

[textarea readonly][a href="http://www.manifestogames.com/"][img src="http://groups.myspace.com/indiegamers/images/manifestobutton.gif"][/a][/textarea]

In wedging the code inbetween the textarea code, the browser realises that it shouldn't render that, but instead dump it into the text box.

On second thought, with all that text in there, it's a bit difficult to see. We can set up a couple of attributes which make the text box bigger, using rows and cols (columns)...

[textarea readonly rows = 3 cols = 50][a href="http://www.manifestogames.com/"][img src="http://groups.myspace.com/indiegamers/images/manifestobutton.gif"][/a][/textarea]

As for the embedded game, I'm looking into that. If you want a professionally trained graphic designer to help you out with the graphics, I can help you out there too.

EDIT: I just had a thought - why don't we have a few buttons in different web-standard sizes for the sake of portability - people can pick the one which suits them. I could make a bunch of buttons if anyone wants me to.

pdugan has done a great job getting a useful "Indie Gamers" page up on Myspace, with a cool webgame, links to us as well as fellow travellers in the indie games revolution, and forums. Worth taking a look at, and if you're a MySpace member, consider joining and helping to spread the word.