I mentioned this briefly in a post a while back, but I wanted to point once again to an area of the Strutta site called "Open Games."

As you probably already know, any Strutta player has the freedom to create any game they like, but until someone comes along to challenge them, the game will not start and voting is turned off. Once someone else joins that game and adds their video submission though, it's GAME ON.

Here's a video I'm especially fond of that's waiting for a challenger in the "Best Golf Shot" game.

A sampling of a few other other great games started by Strutta players that are still awaiting challengers: Greenest Video, Best Original Tech Song (check out Alana Taylor's Twitter Song), Best Concealer of a Fart (yes, on Strutta, games like this finally have a home), Most Romantic Video, Most Hazardous Martial Arts Stunt (destined to be a Strutta classic, I'm sure), Magic/Illusions (can you beat Tod's coin trick?) and the piece de resistance, Best 2Girls1Cup Reaction video (if don't know what this one is about, you might want to skip it).

Of course, if none of these flat your boat, you can browse through all of the existing games, or create your own at will. Happy playing!

Drupal Camp Vancouver was an awesome mix of tech, social fun and open source collaboration. Our thanks go out to all of the organizers for throwing together such an excellent conference.

Strutta's very own Chief Mailroom Officer, Lyal Avery, delivered a great presentation on how we can all help improve Drupal modules and give back to the community, shocking everyone by demonstrating that his technical expertise extends far beyond sorting mail.

And he finished off his talk with a "hippy" yet important message.

While you may just get a free beer for attending the DrupalCamp Vancouver kick off party tonight at Flux, every drupalist knows that the open source movement is about more than just free software and free beer (although, I won't turn one down). It's about community, knowledge-sharing, peer review and building something awesome together. DCVO8 brings everyone together from coders and creatives to architects and business folks for f2f collaboration and networking.

Strutta is powered by the open source content management system, Drupal and is proud to be one of the DCVO8 sponsors this year. Our CTO, Lyal Avery will be kicking things off tomorrow morning, May 9 with a lively session entitled Popular Modules, Their Use, and How to Help Them Through Development. Pop by room 470 at the Wosk Centre to be part of the discussion and check out our job fair table during lunch tomorrow if you are interested in finding out more about office life at Strutta. Lyal, Steven and Alexa will be there to fill you in on our latest job opportunities.

May 10 sessions will be held at our friendly neighborhood Workspace (Best.coffee.ever) starting at 10am -6pm. Lunch and drinks will be provided.

Many thanks to Raincity's Dave O and all of the amazing volunteers, who have worked hard to round everyone up and put together a pretty kick ass event.

Check out DrupalCampVancouver.org for more information.

It's amazing how video game music has developed such a following and infused itself into popular culture and other forms of music, from classical to beatboxing. The "Best Video Game Music" category on Strutta is one of the most diverse in terms of the different instruments used, but only one player was born playing his instrument: Poizonus, a Canadian beatboxer that recently got in the game with his "Super Mario beatbox" video. Check out the awesome video below and visit Poizonus' website at: http://www.poizunuslive.com/

One of my favourite features on Strutta by far is the ego video on the playercard. The video ego is a cool way to add personality to a profile, so players aren't just names, but real, live, trash-talking, happy dancing people.

Just login to your Strutta profile and click the red record button on the playercard to get yourself up there in streaming, live-action glory. You do need a webcam to record an ego video, but honestly, if you don't have a webcam yet, what exactly have you been doing on the Internet?

For our readers that like to know about the pipes and tubes the Internet runs on, the playercard was created with Flex3 and the ego video streams with open-source Red5 Flash server technology. For those of you who don't know what that means, that means the playercard is really neat. And it flips! Game and voting statistics are displayed on the back of the card so your fans can keep track of how you're doing. The playercards will soon be embeddable so you can blog your own card or post the playercards of other players that you're following, like Alexa, who I'm following so I'll know exactly when I beat her in the vote count. She's going down!

Strutta has been nominated for two PopVox New Media awards: Best Usergen/Crowdsourced Content Site and Best BC Based Venture.

The PopVox awards are part of the Vancouver International Digital Festival, produced by New Media BC and are especially cool because they're voted for by the people, to honour the most innovative and creative minds in the industry.

Now it's up to you, the people to vote. So get out there and vote (for Strutta)! Click on the PopVox "Vote for Me" badge to register, check out all of this year's amazing nominees, and vote for Strutta!

It's no surprise to most of you by now that we at Strutta like our video games. It's probably even less of a surprise for me to say that I'm addicted to video games, especially Guitar Hero. Anyone who has visited the Strutta offices has probably been challenged by myself at one point or another.

One of the reasons I have become so addicted to games and specifically the xbox360 is their achievement point system, which basically tracks stats for the games you played, allowing you to compare your progress and score with friends and other players you meet online. Other games like Grand Theft Auto which has a nice big list of stats (distance travelled, cars totalled, etc) always makes me feel warm and geeky inside when I check the stat list to find out I've driven my car into 7 more trees since the last mission I completed.

Of course these are possibly slightly less useful or relevant stats, compared to a statistic of how many votes or views a video has received in the past day- these are stats that most people can relate to and really want to know. For the collection of Guitar Hero videos I've posted to Strutta so far, I really enjoy checking out their stats (viewing history, time spent watching video) as well as the stats of competing videos and videos in other games.

Strutta has a good mix of commonly expected stats, views and vote counts for each video and game, but if I want to view more stats? There is a Leaderboard for more indepth stats, enough to satisfy someone like me.

The Leaderboard is the main place to indulge all statistic viewing desires- to check out where all players and voters stand today, overall, who's been voting the most, who's receiving the most votes, which games are being viewed the most and which locations are leading. Of course these sections can be further narrowed down and sorted by location, gender, and age- basically every statistic I could want to view about the games and videos on Strutta!

Now it's even easier to find the Strutta games you'll love. We've just released a new "Featured Games" page on the site that displays our picks of some of the hottest games on the site.

There's also a page for the top games based on the number of votes and entries, and a place where you can see all off the "open games," which are games that have been created by one player, but are still awaiting challengers.

All of these can be found nestled in the lefthand menu of the Games listings page.  

The Office Lip Dub Challenge is heating up in the most international of ways. Helping to prove that every office should have its own tennis court, the French company Gymglish.com has uploaded their lip dub of the Gorillaz's "Feel Good Inc.", going up against the highly original, text-infused lip dub of Blur's "Boys & Girls" from the stylish offices of Net#workBBDO down in South Africa. And of course, we've got our own Strutta lip dub of "Blister in the Sun" in the competition. Very cool videos, and fun offices to work in:

Check them out in the "Best Office Lip Dub" game and then upload your own office lip dub!

Well, it's Earth Day...what are you doing differently to help save the planet this year?

In the spirit of the theme of the day, we present you with the "Greenest Environmentalist" game, which has videos of everything from green inventions, to explanations of the greenhouse effect and a few others that fit the category.

Click the image to play:

Visit. Vote. And while you're at it, get to work trying to save the planet, will ya?? Via Jeremy Latham, here are 50 things you can do right now to get started.