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"What's more fun than playing games? Talking about them at length with like-minded players. As the Internet has grown, destinations for gamer conversations are springing up everywhere \u2014 from regular social media sites to Reddit, to forums hosted by enthusiast websites.\nIn an attempt to build a community that follows you wherever you're playing, a team at Red Robot Labs launched First, a mobile-only online community centered around gaming. The app first appeared on Android, but is available for iOS on Thursday.\nSee also: 10 Great Android Multiplayer Games\nThe app was created by Mike Ouye and Peter Hawley, who both have backgrounds in gaming, along with John Davison, a former head of GameSpot and Metacritic for CBS Interactive. The app was designed based on their observations of how gamers communicate online.\n\"When I ran GameSpot, I saw more and more traffic was going to the site's forums,\" Davison told Mashable. \"Media's job has become more about sparking a conversation, which will then travel to YouTube or the places where gamers were talking in depth.\"\n\nThe goal of First, Ouye said, is to capture all that fragmented traffic and put it in one place. The app allows gamers to add in their favorite primary sources as conversation starters \u2014 articles, YouTube videos or just simple thoughts or question. Then, they can continue discussion under each topic, adding comments, other YouTube videos and even animated GIFs.\nPosts are sorted by tags, and users can subscribe to games of interest \u2014 as well as users they enjoy interacting with. Users can also star their favorite conversations to easily jump back in. The ease of access is an important feature for First, since mobile allows users to jump back into conversations on the go.\n\"We wanted to bring together the best elements of forums and live chat and make it accessible,\" Davison said. \nThe team launched on Android first as a testing ground and to seed conversations with passionate fans in controllable numbers. Since its launch on Android, many have used the app to seek recommendations on what to play next.\n\"Gamers are very outspoken and have very specific tastes,\" Davison said. \"The recommendations we see are not what you'd see on an editorial list or a chart. They are really pushing each other using all the different media types.\"\n\"\"One of the biggest frustrations is a lot of the [app] stores are still driven by the top ten, and then that drives the downloads,\" Hawley added. \"If you look at the charts generally it's super frustrating, it doesn't allow you to find stuff. An algorithm is one thing, conversation among like-minded people is another.\"\nFirst currently also serves as in-game chat for Red Robot's mobile title Friendly Fire, but the company has developed an SDK so it can be easily rolled into other mobile games. \nImage: Kevork Djansezian/Getty Images"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://mashable.com/2013/10/17/first-ios-app/>