I’m not sure why, but I seems to be obsessed with the distribution of my gaming habits. I believe this might tie into my obsession with needing to be in-touch with the world as much as possible – an obsession which I admit is slightly counter to my, more general, anti-social nature. I dunno.. I’m just complex that way ;P

Anywho.. My obsession with the proliferation of my gaming-data started with the discovery the Steam distribution system for video games, developed by Valve Software. It was back when the Orange Box first came out, and I created my Steam profile in order to use their distribution method to get it (rather than buy a physical box). I decided to do that, in large part, thanks to comments made by my friend, Brian. He extolled the virtues of Steam, and I drank the Kool-Aid quite willingly.

Steam tracks your progress in games you download through it, and keeps statistics on time played, achievements earned, which games you play most often… all that good stuff. It also lets you see what Steam games your friends are playing, and lets you quickly and easily join games with your friends. It’s fantastic. I genearlly keep my steam friends list up all day while at work so I can schedule lunch-time games of L4D (1 or 2) or TF2. At this point, when I want to buy a new game, I always check Steam first to see if it’s available through them.

Next came my discovery of XFire. This is another game-tracking application, but it has the added benefit of in-game text chat, voice chat, video, and screen shots. Video and screen shots are automatically uploaded to your profile, so they are available for your friends to see without you having to do anything extra. The voice-chat is particularly helpful for games that don’t offer native voice chat, and it doesn’t require all the hoops you would have to jump through for Vent or Team Speak – most importantly, you can create a voice chat session on the fly. It’s really pretty awesome.

My next layer of obsession came in the form of Raptr – another monitoring application. It is very similar to XFire, but does have a few unique features which help it stand out: Not only does it track gameplay statistics like xfire, it also tracks your achievements, like Steam. Additionally, it hooks in very well with Facebook using the raptr application, something xfire and steam haven’t really done so far.

Bringing it all together, is my GamerDNA profile. Unlike the others, this isn’t an application that runs on my machine. GamerDNA hooks into all those other applications to gather gaming metrics. It uses this data to generate some interesting statistics on game play. It also keeps a record of your overall gameplay activities, including when you play a game for the very first time. I like this site, as it aggregates all this information and lets me generate interesting statistics from it