This year at E3, video game publisher/developer Electronic Arts revealed the release of the newest of their extremely popular console-based first-person shooter (FPS) series with Battlefield 3. They demonstrated beautiful rendering and game play that will certainly push modern hardware to its extreme for the gaming enjoyment of millions of customers everywhere. This year, though, everyone is jumping into the social game as well.

In what seems to be a response to the recent development of Call of Duty Elite, a service announced by Activision, that would allow players to track one another in game, hook up, and track each others stats as friends—basically a friend-coalescence network that would foster competition and cooperation. We’ve already seen how instrumental to modern video games that networking in general is (and social networking is no exception) with what happened to Sony when the PlayStation Network went dark.

The Guardian brings us some news on the subject of the Battlefield 3 Battlelog,

“The service is a hub of powerful social tools, where gamers can connect, communicate and play with friends,” said Karl Magnus Troedsson, the general manager of the game’s developer, EA Dice. “You can launch a game, manage friends lists, squad up, create platoons, check out your stats in real time – and all 100% free.”

The Battlelog name is, of course, a reference to “Autolog”, the innovative social gaming feature added to last year’s racer Need For Speed: Hot Pursuit.

Autolog allows players to track and compete against the best times and performances of their friends, enlivening the single-player and creating a new form of asynchronous multiplayer activity. Battlelog will no doubt endeavour to fulfill a similar function.

EA is clearly making social gaming a key element of its business. The company also announced the EA Sports Club, which allows players to seamlessly track matches played by friends as well as challenging other gamers to online matches.

The fact that the Battlelog will be released for free is a response to the tiered support of the Call of Duty Elite service—which contains a for-pay tier alongside its for-free offering. The fact that Elite would have a for-pay element got caught up in the media and overshadowed that most of the service is expected to be free; as a result, the Battlelog press releases and information will probably try to play on this misunderstanding to look like a better service.

As we know, gaming brings people together and video games have a real impact on the modern economy through socialization and customer buying power alike.

Call of Duty Elite is expected to integrate with social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter and allow teammates to rank themselves up against one another. Thus, we also expect that Battlelog and others to follow in its footsteps, will provide mobile access, voice chat, and the ability to follow the progress of friends in these games in real time.

What I’m going to look forward to out of all this social media integration is the aspect of big data on the social playing field. Xbox LIVE and other networks are already highly social and contain a great deal of mount-points in their systems that this information could be leveraged with dashboards; also, integration with Facebook means that 3^rd party apps may arise that can take the information generated by players for the purposes of visualization.

This is an untapped resource for networkable games such as Call of Duty and Battlefield. Expect more to arrive on the scene this year, possibly developed by well known social media movers-and-shakers already in the field.