GameLapse

On GameLapse.com you can discover and share machinima movies from anywhere on the internet to be voted on and reviewed by others in the community. Movies with most positive votes are promoted to the homepage and rise on the popularity chart ("top machinima") while movies which are best rated by reviewers rise in the quality chart (top reviewed).

Anyone curious about and interested in finding some good machinima movies can easily browse through existing submissions by category or tags, see what's hot or best rated, vote or post reviews or submit a newly discovered movie. This also makes GameLapse.com useful to both those who make machinima movies and are looking for an audience and the audience itself looking for good machinima.

Quality vs. Popularity

GameLapse.com was designed to promote not only the most popular machinima movies (according to up/down votes), but also best quality, which is reflected by 0 to 5 rating given by reviewers. Reviews themselves can be voted up or down which encourages reviewers to give the best and most honest reviews and ratings they can.

There is also a system or rewards and incentives, the "karma" system, which rewards best rated reviewers most.

Rewards and incentives

Every member gets a point for submitting a movie, and another point for every positive vote of that movie, but loses a point for every negative vote. Effectively, the more positive votes a movie has the more karma points you get.

The biggest rewards, however, are for writing reviews. Every time your review is voted positively, you instantly get 3 points. In order to discourage low quality (like one liners, bashing etc.) reviews every negative vote of the review also takes away 3 points. The total amount of points you can earn with your review is the votes number multiplied by 3. So if your review has 2 points you get 6 karma points.

There is an anti-abuse system in place which limits how many times you can vote in a given period of time and voting practices will be monitored. Members can also flag specific movies as well as other members as offensive or abusive respectively. Abusers may face a ban from the site.

Finally, members who pass a certain amount of karma points automatically become "machinima master candidates" and are eligible to be promoted into a "machinima master" role that gives extra voting powers. The purpose of this is not only to reward best contributors with honorable status, but to also sway the popularity vote further towards quality. Machinima masters are trusted to vote for quality which is proven by their good reviewing track record and the final administrator's approval.

Features overview

• Both popularity and quality based machinima movie charts
• Easily submit new machinima and vote on existing submissions
• Easily browse movies by category or tags
• Users can critically review and rate machinima in addition to popularity voting
• Karma system providing incentives for valuable contributions (such as reviews)
• Anti-abuse system; limited number of votes per period, flag submissions as offensive or users as abusive
• Bookmark movie submissions (along with the whole reviews thread beneath them)
• Subscribe to movies (to be notified of new reviews) and categories (to be notified of new movies in category)
• Subscribe to users to be notified of new submissions and reviews the user makes
• Ability to become a "machinima master", a role allowing extra voting powers earned by being a quality contributor.

If you have any further questions please see frequently asked questions or ask using the contact form. The FAQ will be improved and updated when deemed needed. You are also welcome to visit the GameLapse.com blog for update news, special features and announcements.