I was on the phone with HeyLetsGo founder Roy Rodenstein recently. Roy mentioned several sites and resources that I’d never heard of.
One that caught my interest was Gottaflirt:
GottaFlirt is an interactive, fast-paced dating game. A woman plays with several men by asking questions and rating their answers. Create questions with a single click or personalize them if you wish. Too shy to play? No problem! Watch others play, help rate their answers, or chat with new friends.
After talking with the Bunchball team last week, I decided to sign up and check out the site. It also helped that I saw Gottaflirt was an advertiser on zefrank. Great place to get some visibility while it’s getting huge traffic for a videoblog, but not too huge that they have ad salespeople.
A new trend in these types of sites is giving the power to women, where they invite men to participate. Some people may call this empowering, others argue that it alienates 1/2 of the potential audience. What I learned is that is depends on the audience.
Getting started:
Women: Register, create game. Invite men. Play Game.
Men: Register, be one of the first 7 men to join the game as it starts. Your score is determined by the hostess’ and the audience’s real time rating of your answers. When the game ends, the winner and hostess exchange e-mails, while the runner-up only gets his e-mail sent to the hostess.
This actually sounds pretty cool. Quick signup process, and it supposedly inlines your Myspace friends to bring into games, nice touch.
Scheduling occurs on a page featuring a large matrix of times and icon-sized pix of the women hosting the game. I like the gallery view.
Bonus points to the designers for adding some halloween graphics to the site.
I like that they had a menu item called WTF, because that’s what I was thinking while I was trying to figure out how the site works.
I created an account and answered a few questions.
If you wait 30 seconds you can play for free, it costs a $1 to get priority.. I’m waiting to be selected for a game. 48 seconds to go, I hope I get picked because I’m starving and need food.
I’m in!
Waiting 20 seconds…
The advertising module is rotating branded panties and a Chemistry.com affiliate ad.
We’re playing.
Answering questions. The questions are written for a 20 year old gangstas, really, really terribly done. Glad we can provide our own custom answers. I wonder if women can create their own questions?
Players can also provide their own custom (often raunchy) answers, and the rating slider is a nice touch. Not sure what the slider does. Uh-oh. Every answer from my co-players references body parts or insults the woman hosting the quiz. Now they are calling me names I will not repeat here. I see that the woman host may actually be a demo! I can’t tell, some sort of weird purgatory situation. What’s happening?
Game over, I think I got second place from the demo engine. Kind of embarassing. Someone insults my mother so I log off.
There is some sort of chat bot that reacts to curse words and the mention of other programs, but in game I’m not sure if the women can kick or ban players.
Gottaflirt is a tremendous idea marred by a bad user experience. by that I mean if I was female I wouldn’t touch this site for anything. The guys on there were brutal. A game is only as good as it’s players, or something like that. Any dating site that may want to partner with Gottaflirt is going to have to be guaranteed that the language and harassing can be managed effectively. right now it’s a nightmare.
I had high hopes for this site. It needs better questions, better user management, prizes and so on. But I still like it, a lot, great potential here. I will be speaking with the creators soon and will post our conversation.
Technorati Tags: games
