TriXie Interviews MyGamerCard.net
As of this writing, MyGamerCard.net has 8,670 registered members and displays nearly 700,000 gamertags on its various leaderboards. On any given day, the GamerCard server dishes out 3.5 million gamer cards to over half a million unique IP addresses around the globe.Let's chat with Morgon about how MyGamerCard.net came to be and where it's going.
TriXie: Who is involved in MyGamerCard.net? Give us the cast of characters.
Morgon: I'm Morgon. I'm the sole creator and programmer of MGC. I'm from a town called Glen Burnie, Maryland, which is a few miles south of the city of Baltimore. I've been fortunate enough to make MGC my day job for the past few months, though I would certainly consider any offers from Microsoft.
While being the sole owner, as with any community website, many things with MGC would not be possible without dedicated contributors from the community that have provided their time in some way or another.
Tangled Spider is a student from the UK who is my Forum Administrator, and also helps with planning when he can.
Big Mase 911 is in the Construction Management industry (there's diverse for ya) from Pennsylvania who helps out with graphics for our gamer cards.
As far as I know, XCDP was created in part
specifically for and because of MGC!
TriXie: How did the idea come about? Can you walk me through some of the brainstorming that went on?
Morgon: I knew I should have saved the Xbox® Forum thread on it! It was only recently deleted, but served as quite a nice outline and piece of history as to how the precursor to MGC (aptly named GC2JPG) started.
The general gist of it all is that when the gamer cards were first introduced to the community in October 2005 everyone on the Xbox Forums wanted to put them on every website, despite the fact that nobody had any gamerscore!
Since Microsoft only provided HTML-based solutions that were not compatible with forums, MySpace, etc., it was up to the community to create a solution. Myself and Zamees (of GamerTagPics) both heeded the call originally, without knowing of each other's attempts.
Having had some experience with creating dynamic images in the past with other personal projects, I figured this would be a perfect opportunity to test myself, and got to work. I released the first version of GC2JPG on the early morning of October 29, I believe. As you can imagine, things turned out quite a bit better than I expected—at least, in the long run.
The beginning was more or less one of those special kinds of hell where you are having fun, but going grey in the process. I first served GC2JPG on my home internet connection, and after about a week, I could barely check email, and couldn't even log onto Xbox Live.
This started a series of jumping hosts—I went through three more before settling where we are now. One of my favorite stories from that time is about the fact that the popularity of the service (without a proper caching solution on either end) kept taking down the Xbox.com servers during the week prior to the Xbox 360™ launch in North America! Not many people can lay claim to such a feat!
So most of the brainstorming was more or less how to keep the service running, rather than what to do with it, as the choice was clear—make the de facto community gamer card service.
TriXie: Yeah, thanks for crashing our servers, dude. Once you had the idea, how long did it take you to complete it?
Morgon: I think the first working test case of the image-based cards only took a few hours to get running. Of course, more work was done to make it release-worthy, and additional research on how to better handle internal processes. All said, the first public version was probably active in 8-10 hours or so.
After that, there was the notion of creating a Flash-based version. I'd never touched Flash at all up to that point, so I learned enough to get them working for my purposes. According to an old version history document I found, I publicly released the first true Xbox.com gamer card replacement (i.e. emulating the interactivity of the official gamer card) on November 14.
Then there were the leaderboards. The first global gamerscore leaderboard in the community was made public on November 22, and that took another good eight hours, with improvements being made even to this day.
TriXie: Were you a member of the Xbox Community Developer Program when you started this project, or did that come after?
Morgon: That came much later, actually. As mentioned, I started out before the Xbox 360 was released, so I had a long stretch of doing things on my own. As far as I know, XCDP was created in part specifically for and because of MGC! Microsoft was able to see the power of community involvement and has worked to provide me and the other members with ways to strengthen and further the Xbox community and brand to a higher level of involvement and interactivity.
TriXie: How has being part of XCDP helped the success of MyGamerCard.net?
Morgon: Certainly more so than without it, that's for sure! The team behind the XCDP program have done a very nice job of providing a level of access that has helped me create a number of services and reporting tools that would otherwise be nearly impossible for the number of users we currently serve.
TriXie: What sort of media coverage have you had? Can you share any links with us?
Morgon: Unfortunately nothing quite as big as USA Today, Miss GamerchiX! We have, however, been interviewed and mentioned in a few gaming magazines such as X360, and both US and UK Official Xbox Magazines, as well as GameSpot, About.com, and the website of Norway's largest television station, TV2. One of the most amazing pieces of validation has come in the form of someone adding us to the Wikipedia entry for Xbox Live®. I truly have no idea who it was, but I certainly thank you!
TriXie: Let's talk about the Celebrity leaderboard. Where do you get the gamertags and what has the reaction been like from the celebrities and the general public?
Morgon: Most of the people on there are celebrities by default—Microsoft employees with the Xbox 360 Launch Team banner. These people have obviously helped in some major way to getting Xbox 360 into the hands of the public, so they certainly deserve to be there. Other gamertags have been obtained through Major Nelson's pod cast and sometimes simply by just asking around.
Most of the celebrities seem to love it, but often give me playful jabs about the increased number of messages and friend requests they get because of it. The rest of the community has taken to it as well, although we've had a few people not fully understand our definition of a Community Celebrity.
I try to keep it limited to journalists who have established themselves in the community (for example, writing for a well-known publication or highly-respected website), as well as to game developers, Xbox employees, and the like.
I'm definitely looking to increase not only the number of celebrities we have, but also having job titles for many of the Xbox 360 Launch Team members we currently have, so if you're reading this, drop me a line.
TriXie: How about your recent addition of a GamerchiX leaderboard? Of course the XGX girls love it, but I'm sure you've had a mixed reaction. You must have known there would be backlash … why did you decide to go ahead and do it anyway?
Morgon: Yes, XGX has had a backlash, and I've had personal attacks against myself and the website— but on the whole, the reaction regarding the XGX leaderboard I think has been just as much positive (or indifferent) than outright negative. Why did I do it? Because I believe in what the GamerchiX stand for.
Really, I think those who have lashed out against it just haven't taken the time to consider what it truly means. A lot of people don't realize it, but the GamerchiX are able to help men just as much as themselves. By introducing more women into gaming, it makes it more acceptable and commonplace in society. In turn, it's likely that this will shorten the rift between the genders caused by the past 20 years of video games and good times will be had by all.
TriXie: Any hints about what's next for MGC?
Morgon: Look for some customization options as far as leaderboards are concerned, ways to easily compare yourself with small groups of friends, and maybe a surprise or two with services to the community as a whole. I'm also putting some finishing touches on a special gamer card for exclusive use by registered members of MGC, as well as working on additional public-release cards.
Speaking of additional cards, I'd also like to get another MGC gamer card Poll up soon. If any graphic artists/designers are reading this and are interested in contributing to MGC and showing off your work at the same time, here's your chance!
TriXie: Where would you like to see MyGamerCard.net in five years?
Morgon: I'd certainly like to see MGC being used by more of the Xbox community to interact with their friends and to make new ones. By then, Microsoft should be hinting about or releasing their new console, and I think we'll be able to fit right in before it hits shelves, just like we did this time around.
Perhaps it will become more of a cornerstone in the community than it is now, and I've even had my own delusions about being acquired by larger companies (hey, a guy can dream, right?). Overall, I just want to be able to provide the best site for the Xbox community, and I look forward to seeing the reaction of the new offerings we can and will provide in the future.
