Social Networking and Gamers

Social Networking for Gamers by Geek Woman

For this story about gamers and social networking I went “undercover” into four separate experiences. First Live Journal, Then RPG Matches, MMO Faces and most recently MySpace.

In the mornings I have trouble walking and talking. Often my “sentences” don’t contain verbs, or are missing other words entirely. On that particular morning, as I poured pretty pink powdered vitamin C crystals into my spring water, I mused about those verbs being stored inside the vitamin pouch ready to pour. When I verbalized this it came out as “Verbs come from fizzies.” My partner reached over to the eMac screen and air - shoveled me some content from Live Journal.
“Here have some verbs.”
“Oh no, too many verbs! Not Live Journal verbs please!”

Live Journal is a prosaic blog space that has been around for years. It runs like a top and it has gone down only one time for 24 hours in its history. It was originally an open source code project. Last year for good or ill they were bought out. Last year the service was bought out by Six Apart. Track records of the mergers of cottage industries gone corporate will be hard to get around…

The features of Live Journal or LJ are blog driven. People log into to private or public publishing software that they control. Most of the activity or in the case of Live Journal inactivity comes through the phenomenon known as the Friend’s List or the F-list. In a reality TV style selection process you can add or delete “de - friend” people as you choose. When friended the up to the minute bloggings of the those you have tapped will be published on your Friends Page, making unique web content of your choice.

That is the greatest thing about social networking services across the board. The options that are available for finding new friends can be from general to specific. If for example you want to meet witches who crochet and are fans of the British Sitcom Coupling - you can. If you only want to talk to people in your area or even world wide who have those same interests you can. You can make it so only a certain few people are “reading you” with what are called “filters”.

Live Journal attracts people who like to maunder, proselytize, and ego-ize. It is a collection of writers and poets. There are many very talented bloggers in Live Journal. But when I started a gamers blog over there it lay practically dormant. It wasn’t getting much attention. Not for lack of trying. I used it to join about 20 “groups” which are collections of bloggers that form a blog as a “Community.” These jointly written blogs usually are popular when they are started and eventually taper off. I did many hours of searches seeking female gamers and reading their blogs in Live Journal. I lurked, and apparently so did everyone else. Live Journal is a library. It is voices echoing in an empty room. It is the things that people say into their mirror. For gamers I give Live Journal a stoic and functional score of 4.

I tried RPG Matches and after the odd sort of experience that I had there, I spoke to the web-master. Over there the main concern was privacy.

<blockquote>I’m sorry that we can not approve your profile at this time. For your protection, as well as ours, we can not allow personal information in profiles. This includes e-mails, phone numbers, websites, etc. Please revise your profile and resubmit. Thank you for your interest in RPGMatches.com</blockquote>

I was not allowed to post links, or mention my location. There were maybe a dozen women in the membership at the time. Very few games were represented, and except for playing original Everquest, the web-master was clueless about other games. I couldn’t even present the interview I did with him. He didn’t know much gamer slang, or even what Homebrew games for PSP were. The “service” was useless to me because I needed to network. I wanted to meet women in my area that play video games as well as connection with women world wide to recruit for my Guild Wars guild. No such luck. I give RPG Matches a Not Much Use to Anyone 2.

MMO Faces is a new website that also intends to help gamers connect. It has a slick looking website style. They have an aggressive marketing plan to get gamers to join and they offer perks to those who do the recruiting. But looks are not everything. In spite of good intentions the website suffers from bugs and spam.

When I joined I got 14 emails that had nothing in the subject line and nothing in the body of the message. At the time there was no place to go for support. When one of the women on the staff posted a folder for Tech support I put up several questions and requests for help with the new site. I got no replies at all. When I emailed the site administrator I got no response at all. Eventually the blank spam emails stopped.

When I returned to the website a few weeks later it was full of pop up and pop under ads for Party Poker, and other ‘Get A Free Whatnot’ advertisements. Windows started jumping all over the screen. It did that repeatedly. When I attempted to go to the tech support folder, that was gone. The web-master may have some grand ideas and a fine concept, but it is far from new or “only” as they claim. The pop up ads are not just an annoying turn off, but include adware and spyware which is totally uncool. The website has some potential in the future and I’d like to see them get the glitches squared away. I give MMO Faces a Hopeful 3.

Too much privacy on one website, and a clueless web-master that didn’t know what a LAN party was. The third site had a more than savvy staff and a marketing approach that was far too aggressive. Trying to make money by using those click through ads never works. It’s naive to think that you can make money that way, and it alienates the members.

Determined, I turned to the most popular social networking website to see if it could be adapted for the applications that I needed. I joined MySpace. It was nothing like I expected. Myspace runs like a rusty row boat with one oar operated by a drunken hamster. But it is fun as hell. There it is. It is where people are. You got to go where the people are. The BBS was where it was at in the early 90’s, then it was AOL until 2000, after that it was all about Yahoo chat rooms. Lately - it’s MySpace.

My Space gives you several pages. You get the obsequies friends list with the option to subscribe and read friends blogs - or not. You can choose favorites or even collect blogs to read as a subscriber without actually “friending” the writers. You can post pictures and your profile page gives a space to put descriptions of your life style, blurbs about your interests and there are boxes where you can indicate your favorite books, movies and heroes. You can add an endless variety of backgrounds, photos, music and video clips to the page. It’s a way to have a free website that is completely customizable within a few minutes. You can lock your profile as private so that only you can see it, or just your selected friends. You can choose to screen who friends you, and you can filter out bots with other easy to use security features.

The match up features are the best part about MySpace. You can filter or browse the profiles of other people by interests or location. The discussions and the traffic is lively. You can send a group email to all your friends with another feature called a Bulletin. There are many Groups that gather around public or private forums to discuss the world’s problems. Within hours I had more friends than I did on both my Live Journal blogs combined.

Like all good things that mean progress Myspace is controversial. People complain too much. Most of the complaints are about how kids are doing bad things via Myspace profiles. They are seeking out sex and drugs as they always have. It doesn’t matter if it is at “that park” or at “that street corner” the way it was years ago. Now “the streets” are online. Bad kids are going to find ways to do bad things. Myspace is no different than any other sector of the internet or life in general. Does anyone remember how Yahoo! got so much flack a few years ago? Some things never change. People don’t like to watch their kids. They don”t like to take time out to spend with them, and when the babysitters like TV or the Net become providers of every sort of content the resource is blamed instead of the parenting. To that I say :Yawn:

I’m a mature female journalist, I like Myspace. I am an adult, I enjoy adult pass times. MySpace has been a great networking tool for my business. In that pursuit I haven’t come across anything seedy - because <b>I am Not Looking for Trouble.</b> People should take responsibility for what kids do online, and for what games they are playing. Keep the censorship off my toys dammit. I’m entitled to my good times.

MySpace may be the devil we know today, the devil we don’t know will come for certain tomorrow. It may be a choice between the lesser of the evils of social networks. For what I wanted to do it has been unbelievable. I have meet hundreds of female gamers, and I choose who I friend very carefully. I’ve started a network of terrific female gamers, clans and game developers in only three months. I filter the spam and in my profile I am very clear that I am not there for relationships. I give Myspace a rank of Half - Demon, and a score of 9.

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