Gamers are a social bunch, despite the negative connotations that may currently exist with the term "gamer". For some reason, there's a belief that gamers enjoy spending time alone in the basement playing games in the dark, while it's actually quite the opposite. In fact, with the industry's emphasis on the multiplayer aspect of games, gamers are more social than ever. And until now there hasn't really been a place for us to migrate to.
There are social aspects to many sites, but that spans as far as creating a profile and posting comments on articles. Gameswise is a new website that heavily emphasizes the social aspect of video games. At it's core, it is a social network for people who love games — with a ton of helpful game information thrown in.
Gameswise operates as a wiki, providing plenty of useful information about video games. If there happens to be no information about a game you are looking for then you, the user, can fix that by editing it yourself. That hopefully helps the next person, like you, looking for that same information. It's all about creating a tight-knit community of gamers looking out for each other.
To assist in creating a community, Gamewise employs several tactics aimed at encouraging like-minded gamers to connect. When you first sign up and create an account, you are required to rate at least 20 games. Taking your answers into account, it then matches you with several other gamers with similar interests. I'm not exactly sure of the formula being used, but apparently it's pretty accurate — for instance, it matched me with my brother. Now THAT'S pretty impressive.
Once you are connected with your core friends, you can engage in discussions and conversations. Each user has their own "wall" where they can share thoughts, start a discussion, or write reviews and articles. You friends will then see what you wrote and have the option to like it and comment on it.
This isn't the first time we've seen a website attempt to expand upon the social element of video games, but this is one of the best we've seen for a while. Apparently, gamers agree as the site already has over 75,000 user created accounts.
Speaking of social elements in websites, GameZone has some big changes coming this year included a complete site redesign with an even bigger emphasis on social networking and user-generated content — similar to Gameswise. Our beta should be launching soon so be sure to check back frequently.
