games: Social Networking for Gamers

Once upon a time gaming was seen as quite an antisocial habit, and gamers as socially-inept pasty-faced weirdos who spend too much time on their own in their rooms. But the internet and particularly the rise of online gaming over recent years has changed all that.

Gaming is now much more widely recognized as a way to socialize and meet new people thanks to the mainstream acceptance of online social networking via sites like Facebook and MySpace.

So today I’m going to be looking at a handful of social networking sites aimed specifically at gamers. Whether you are looking for someone to join your guild or just like-minded people to chat with, these could well be the addition you’ve been looking for to your online social scene.

First up is avatarsunited.com, which is currently in open beta. It is a social networking site like any other, except with the rather original twist that it is for your virtual personae only, and references to your real life and identity are forbidden. Avatars are organized into groups by server ,or world for over 30 games and site activity is threaded to a page for each server. So for example, you can see what events people have posted, or read bog posts about recent activity relevant to your game.

You can make profiles for as many avatars belonging to as many servers as you like, and you choose to either show or hide the fact that they are family i.e. all registered to the same account.

You will find the usual array of blogging, messaging and group tools, as well as uploaders for in-game photos and videos. It’s a great way to find and keep track of PCs you’ve met, or for meeting new people on your server and for organizing or finding events. The avatars only policy may seem strict, but it makes sure that things don’t stray too far for the game world, which gives the site a nice specific focus.

Another interesting site on the more practical side of social networking is Sayswap.com, which is a social video game trading community. Here you register a list of games you have available for trade and a list of games you want. You start off with a certain amount of purchase points and when a game on your want list becomes available it will be sent to you and the points deducted. When games you have on your trade list are required you will be told where to post them out to and this will generate further purchase points for you.

You can also supplement this by buying trading tokens if you are buying more than you are trading. The site includes a few other features, such as user videos, cheats and reviews, and there are chat and profile tools too to encourage a social aspect to your trading.

Curse.com has to be the big daddy of them all for MMO gamers. This is a very smooth, very well designed site, with all the trimmings. It has over 5 million unique users per month so you can be sure you are part of a large community, but it also streamlines information according to its 200+ supported games, so you won’t get lost in the swell of too much data. As well as the usual community tools like blogs, forums, images and video, you also get news items keeping you up to date with the gaming world, and sections for downloads, most popularly World of Warcraft addons, and a shop which filters gaming relevant entries from Amazon marketplace.

And for non-MMO gamers, there are lots of other great networking sites either targetted specifically at your favourite platform or game, or open to everyone. Open sites that have caught my eye include gamervision.com, ugame.com, whose tagline of all games, all platforms, all people says it all, and gamerdna.com a beta site by the Guild Cafe team. All of these are along the same mould and allow you to build profiles around your gaming life and achievements, share information and files, set up guilds and events and generally network with people with similar interests.

So there you go, we’re not all just antisocial misfits afterall! I hope you check out some of these sites, and do please join in with the our community at channelflip.com/games where you can leave feedback and join in discussions about myriad aspects of gaming.