GreatGamesExperiment, which launches in public beta today, is a social network for games. The aim, says creator creator Jeff Tunnell, is to provide a hub of great games - just as content producers can upload their clips to YouTube to get more eyeballs, game creators can upload their games to GGE and grow their audience.
Great Games Experiment hosts Flash games, old classics and mainstream commercial titles - that means some games can be played on the site, while others can't. That's a fact that makes the proposition less compelling: while sites based solely around Flash games (Kongregate etc) keep you clicking from one game to the next, GGE has a lot of dead ends. In some ways, it's more of a game directory than a place to play games. Social features include tagging, rating, reviews, groups, profile pages (with support for YouTube embeds) and the ability to post gamer badges to MySpace, hi5, Piczo et al. These badges are static html, and provide a list of your favorite games.
I'm on the fence with this one: it's well implemented and there's plenty of content, but it doesn't seem as addictive as, say, Kongregate. Given the choice between success and failure, though, I'd say it will almost certainly succeed in building a community, but it may not turn out to be the leader in this space.