GamerDNA, profiled by Kotaku in january and one of the first sites to meld social media with video gaming, will comb its members' gaming habits and chatter to steer them toward games and gamer communities who enjoy them. It presently has more than 300,000 members.

"Gamers are faced with an overwhelming amount of information and content," Jon Radoff, the CEO of GamerDNA, said in a statement. "GamerDNA's new system takes information from conversations and actual game-play trends to help gamers find the information they really care about."

GamerDNA, which has more than 340,000 members, culls trends from its users online playing histories, on services such as XFire, Steam, Xbox Live or, now, the PlayStation Network, recently added. Based on the games they play, for how long, and what they play them in relation to, the site can refine its picture of what someone's interested in a much, much sophisticated way, says company spokesman Sam Houston.

For a community in which many have formed hard preferences, and may believe they already know the games they want, GamerDNA's proposition is a little more subtle. The site's proprietary algorithm will serve up new or different screen shots, reviews, blog posts, conversations, and videos each time a user visits, says company spokesman Sam Houston.

The site will maintain its capabilities for broadcasting one's playing history to friends via Facebook, Twitter and other networks, but "We're not trying to replace Xbox Live, or Steam as a new instant message client, or way to see what friends are playing right now," Houston said. "At the most, we think that's a piece of the pie. So you can see what your friends are playing on Steam, Xfire, Xbox Live, but we're also focusing a lot more on the relevancy aspect: Games and content and providing great ways to share content and have conversations about it."

Naturally, such a tremendous amount of user data, and potential to serve users such a customized palette of new or just-released games, would be valuable to publishers or retailers. But the site's new system is does not come with any new marketing partnerships, Houston said. GamerDNA will continue to serve users advertising in the manner it has in the past.

GamerDNA [site]

Tweet My Gaming is a site that provides a constant feed of video game tweets from everyone who tweets them. It tags video game names and then captures any Twitter activity containing those names, with updates appearing on the front page in real time. It's fascinating to watch it in motion, but that's only a small part of the site's functionality.

Tweet My Gaming not only feeds the tweets, it also tracks them and ranks games based on their Twitter popularity, giving us insight not only into the games themselves, but a good idea about what kinds of gamers use Twitter. For instance, The Sims 3 is currently on top of the list, with 54,069 tweets, compared to the next highest, World of Warcraft with 10,000. This leads me to speculate that the more casual player is more apt to talk about gaming on Twitter than the hardcore player, a fact mostly backed up by the next games on the list - The Beatles: Rock Band, Left 4 Dead 2 (the anomaly), and Wii Fit.

You can search for games by name, which gives you the number of tweets since the site launched on June 1st, as well as the number of players on sister site GamerDNA who list the game in their profiles.

In order to have your tweets counted, all you have to do is mention the name of a game. No tags; no special characters; just the game's name. I tweeted about The Sims 3, and within a minute I saw my tweet sliding down the front page of the website. Just be warned that watching the scroll is completely addictive.

The team behind the website actually sat down with me at E3 for a moment to show me the website, and by sitting down with me I mean sitting down in the hallway outside the press room. Unfortunately I didn't have much time to spare, so this is the first time I've actually gotten to sit down and explore the site a bit.

It really is a fascinating use of Twitter, and another fine example of alternative gaming statistics gathering from the folks who brought us GamerDNA. Go look for yourself!

“That really surprised me,” said Radoff (pictured) the CEO of Cambridge, Mass.-based GamerDNA, a startup that is literally a next-door neighbor to Harmonix, the Rock Band franchise dev. “The floating hypothesis we had was maybe Bioshock had more of a story, and that’s what’s more appealing to a mainstream audience. But the fact is it’s one of the statistics we observed, and I thought it was a neat one.”

When a company has information on nearly half a million gamers’ tendencies, its value proposition back to the publishing industry sounds pretty obvious. But, approaching the second year of its present incarnation, GamerDNA is showing signs that it can offer a similar value for gamers, too: it’s building up the “wisdom of the crowd,” to provide a gamer voice back to publishers that can speak louder than sales figures, and one that becomes a greater part of the conversation of game development.

“Our long term perspective, that’s absolutely where we want to be, and it certainly is a passion for us to help the industry make better games,” said Radoff, 37, an entrepreneur whose past efforts have included developing Legends of Future Past, the first commercial text-based MMO played on Compuserve and then the Internet.

While “that's not the stage of the business we’re at yet,” Radoff says GamerDNA numbers have shown that wisdom already being observed. An analysis of members’ uptake of Braid this summer, compared with other Xbox Live Marketplace titles like Bionic Commando: Rearmed and Galaga Legions, showed strong word-of-mouth support helping the indie title spread and become a hit.

Among other studies (these were ad-hoc, not commissioned by any developer, Radoff said) was Age of Conan’s decline following its launch. “Most people assumed players would leave Age of Conan for World of Warcraft,” Radoff said. Not so. They checked out of the MMO genre almost entirely, staying within multiplayer but turning to trusted shooters.

“When an MMO is disappointing, they don’t really go back to the obvious market leader; they might try different stuff instead,” Radoff said.

Both observations could conceivably offer some interesting talking points back to an industry still fixated on a top-down process of making games, where sales rather than length of gameplay or other concerns still drive most of the decisions. At least theoretically, one could see games being developed to compete with a completely different kind of title, reducing consumers’ fatigue with, say, an oversaturation of shooters, or sequels, or another category in a year. It also speaks well for independent studios with access to digital distribution, that good efforts can find recognition and become profitable enough to encourage more.

But right now, GamerDNA’s a long way off from giving that kind of precise feedback. It always needs more members, of course. And while it has arrangements through some individual game servers, plus Steam, XFire and Xbox Live to link to members’ accounts, it has no such relationship with PlayStation Network yet. It means Sony users would have to manually enter their PlayStation activity, instead of things like titles played, length of gaming sessions, achievements earned and the like coming in from an automated stream. Radoff says getting PlayStation users integrated is a priority but the process is still in negotiations with Sony.

Of course, here it bears mentioning that GamerDNA does have a privacy policy and controls, so signing up doesn’t put your gaming experiences into some sort of exploitive data harvester. Nothing personally identifiable is sold or shared. For automated information coming from services like Xbox Live, members can restrict its viewing, allowing either no one, only friends made on the site, or everyone to see it. But if you want to broadcast it out beyond the site, you can do that through a number of microblogging services. These are, also, the people who brought you 360voice.com, whose blogging capabilities are built into the site.

Meantime, while studying and aggregating these gamer trends is an interesting aspect of what GamerDNA does, by no means is it the company’s sole focus. It’s business model, loosely speaking, is to recommend games to members based on their tendencies and their likes in other gameplay. Think Last.fm, or Pandora, who serve up songs based on ones you say you like. The monetization strategy of that resource is not hard to imagine, and GamerDNA will begin that part of its business model this year. It may be through the offering videos or game-associated content, or if a demo or the game itself is downloadable, taking members there. But the goal will be to start making those connections.

As of now, the recommendations are driven by the automated streams of info, five personality quizzes, and manually inputting titles you have (or anticipate) and listing the reasons why you like or want them. There’s a social network built into it, too, if in addition to finding games you like you want to find gamers like you. (GamerDNA’s origins go back to 2006, as the MMO social network Guild Cafe.)

But rather than be a Myspace for gamers, or another news-and-reviews portal pointing people to the AAA games they’ve probably already heard of, GamerDNA will seek its success in attempting to know gamers, collectively and individually, better than anyone else in the world. That’s going to be a tough claim to back up. But Radoff argues this industry isn’t so mature yet that it has the tools others use to reach out to customers, get their feedback, and efficiently measure how the market responds to a new product. Hence he’s betting on his company’s usefulness.

“We’re trying to create an awesome service that requires a lot of people to be present, and I think we’ve done a great job in getting 400,000,” Radoff said. “But the more people who are there, the more we can collectively create something that’s good. I would hope that, over the long term, GamerDNA can be of help, that more games and niche games can come out to address the big populations that are hard for the gaming industry to get its arms around.”

It's definitely worth checking out, and who doesn't like sitting around at work filling out quizzes instead of putting covers on their TPS reports? They've just surpassed the 500,000 quizzes taken mark,and that couldn't have all been me. Hit the jump for more information, or better yet, just go to the site.

GamerDNA, Inc. Quiz System Reveals Gaming Preferences of 500,000 Gamers

Quizzes to become a key element of company’s gamer identity and discovery platform

CAMBRIDGE, MA – September 19, 2008 – GamerDNA.com, the social platform for videogame identity and discovery, today announced a milestone 500,000 quizzes have been completed on the site by gamers looking to define their gaming preferences, interests and unique gaming identity. To celebrate the initial success of the quiz system, GamerDNA will further expand their gamer identity platform in the coming months with the addition of new quizzes, aggregation of more gameplay information, and new tools for discovering games.

“The quiz system is central to the identity defining capabilities of GamerDNA.com and we are thrilled with the positive response that it has received thus far from the community,” said Jon Radoff, CEO of GamerDNA, Inc. “Our goal was to have quizzes on the site that are fun to take and that also help us to define what we, as gamers, find interesting. The quizzes not only enhance our identity platform, but also help us to draw unique insights from the collective intelligence of people involved in the culture of gaming.”

The Bartle Test of Gamer Psychology, a quiz that classifies the personalities of massively multiplayer online game players has quickly become the most popular on GamerDNA.com. Additional quizzes on the site measure the play styles of other gaming genres, such as first-person shooters and real-time strategy games, as well as a quiz that measures which decade gamers feel have had the greatest impact on their game preferences. After completing each quiz, a “facet” system shows participants a set of personality traits that represent their unique “fingerprint” as a gamer. Gamers can participate in these quizzes, as well as view current result summaries, by visiting www.gamerdna.com/quizzes.

GamerDNA aggregates each member’s gameplay history from popular networks including Xbox Live, Xfire and Steam. When this-real time information is combined with feedback about game preferences and quiz results, it enables a member to define their unique “gamer identity,” a lens for discovering new games, showcasing experiences and exploring the experiences of others who love games.