So some of you may remember that I reviewed a website called MeetAGamer.com not too long ago. Somehow that brought a curious little human to my digital doorstep to request that I review more sites of a similar nature. This seemed rather peculiar a thing to me. I hadn’t intended reviewing social-gaming sites to become habit, but if no one else is doing it I might as well fill the void. The heads of one of those sites then contacted me that same day requesting that I review their site.

Now this was actually a bit confusing to me. After all, my overview of MeetAGamer.com (that is only a courtesy link please don’t click it) was not the most kind. In fact, I was relatively brutal. Yet these entrepreneurs wanted to see my own perspective on their expanding website. Who am I to turn down masochism?

No gratuitous cleavage pasted like a porn ad everywhere. Off to a good start so far.

The website in question is GameKrib.com, and already I can tell you that I like it better than…that other one with the jail-bait. The two primary heads in charge, Jeremy and Justin, have a much more professional attitude as well as proper spelling and punctuation. However, they are also laid back enough to seem like other guys. In other words, they aren’t sleazy businessmen but aren’t children either. They are adults with a vision and a sense of responsibility. Already we’re off to a great start.

As for the site itself, it’s certainly functional and has plenty there of interest. The main issue is the same thing as MeetAGamer.com. No matter what sort of playground you choose to spend your time at the experience is going to be modified based on the other patrons there. If they are all assholes then it is doubtful any time spent is going to be positive. Meanwhile, even if the playground is full of used up heroin needles and rusty equipment the people there can make it the best place on Earth. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of GameKrib.com, as there simply aren’t enough of the different types of gamers yet that everyone can have their own social needs fulfilled.

What I can say is that there is variety at all. I’ve examined a few other sites since MeetAGamer.com, and the vast majority of them are filled with the same young crowd that is obsessed with Major League Gaming or simply the concept of competitive play. Try to speak about art and design and they’ll look at you as a puppy might a copy of The Bible. Show it to them all you might they’re still not going to understand the significance of what you’re talking about.

The membership is also a sort of refugee camp of various other gaming websites, which means a good deal of the crowd is already familiar with each other. This makes it increasingly tough for a new member to come in and try to find a place they belong. This is most apparent in the chat room. It’s like walking to a party late where you don’t know anyone. Everyone is already in their own little clumps and groups talking to each other in the middle of their own topics and trying to jump into the middle not only seems rude, but leaves you confused.

The chat is regularly as confusing and direction-less as this, pretty much.

Then again, the chat room discussions also remind me of the conversations I used to have over AIM when I was in high school, an experience I have become so detached from it’s almost like it was another person’s life. It just feels to me as if they are speaking about nothing, and as a result I have nothing to say. As for discussion on video games, they’ll talk about Halo 3 and Modern Warfare on occasion, most often in terms of the multiplayer, but if you have little interest in those games then you’ll never have anything to discuss or contribute.

Of course, part of this problem is because there’s so many people in a single room, but there aren’t enough participants to split them into different conversation categories. There are already two separate chat rooms on the site and one of them is always empty. If you were to try and divide them into different categories then you’d simply have a large number of empty rooms no one visits. The only cure for this problem relies on membership. More people coming into the chat room to discuss more topics that more people can contribute to.

At which point the flame wars begin, but hey, baby steps.

From what I have observed, the moderators of the chat are pretty no-nonsense about what goes on in there. I don’t have specifics but there seems to have been some members banned for disorderly conduct, and there is frequent communication from the moderators reminding why the bans occurred. While this is bound to generate drama it only effects you based on just how deeply you involve yourself with the community. From what I’ve seen, however, the moderator decisions have always been mature, rational and responsible.

Pretty standard forum fair, though minimal action overall…but more than my forums get at least!

The forums seem as if they’d be a great spot to begin meeting new people in, and in some cases it certainly was, but there seems to be this giant vacuum of knowing what to discuss. If a new game is coming out or about to release, a new thread will pop up. However, discussion never really gets much deeper than “I’m really looking forward to this it looks so awesome” or “I’m not really into it” or even “I think it sucks”. You aren’t going to have long debates on the minute details between Modern Warfare and Bad Company 2, or even Final Fantasy XIII and Franchise-That’s-Actually-Still-Good.

This isn’t to say there aren’t people that appreciate longer blocks of text and in-depth thought. They happen to be in the minority and you are more likely to find them in the blogs.

This is pretty much where most of my time on the site is spent

It seems your greatest chance to meet and discuss people is actually in the blogs. There are plenty shallow discussions and thoughts posted there as any weblog community will be filled with, but there are also plenty of interesting ones to read. While there’s no guarantee you’ll make more friends this way, by posting new entries and commenting on the thoughts of others you may find yourself making new friends. Jolly keen!

The only attempt at social networking that becomes a complete disaster is the Groups, however. Here you’ll find a lot of the same narcissistic groups that were in MeetAGamer.com, where people are uniting in their love for a certain member for God knows what reason. There are a few other groups, but no real discussion ever seems to go on in them. In the end the groups are a complete wasteland and are incredibly forgettable.

I don’t even know why people make some of these groups.

I’d say the greatest cause for this, however, is that it takes too much work to view a group. There’s no quick link to the groups you are already a member of, and if updates occur there is no real notification. Contrast this to the blogs, videos, forums and images which are always updating on the front page. These areas are active because attention is brought to them easily through the front page and require little work to get to them. If you want to check groups that you are a part of then you have to either find them manually or visit your own profile page and click on the groups you are a part of. This is more work than it ought to be and simply pushes them to the background of everyone’s mind. The groups are there to be a part of, but no one interacts through them in any significant way.

No Nintendo category? Seriously? Like the Wii and DS don’t even exist.

Otherwise the front page is handled very well, if not in a mildly cluttered manner. More information is available to the viewer when they’ve logged in than if they are not a member, and it shows all of the latest activity that has been going on. The community feels alive and draws attention to the variety of things to do at the site. This includes the weekly caption contest (which doesn’t often offer substantial prizes for the time being, but the site is still growing so there’s plenty of room for sponsorship and expansion in the future) and other goings on such as the recent video promotional contest.

Including the games most often played on the front page is interesting, but also makes it seem as if the community favors Xbox over other platforms. This sort of biased image is best avoided and though it’s neat, the feature should be removed. That or supplemented by a similar PS3 functionality.

Also of interest is original content, such as the advertised Bioshock 2 video review by Jenny “Doomsday”. In an effort to increase widespread appeal the heads of GameKrib are frequently scouting out talent that can write interesting and insightful pieces on games that are also entertaining. Now, I have pretty high standards when it comes to what I expect from games writing. I hate the majority of what’s out there and view a handful of (unpopular) sites and blogs daily. Yet I can say that the talent enlisted for GameKrib.com isn’t some group of amateurs that happen to know proper punctuation. There’s some skill and intelligence there, and most importantly it turns the writer into a personality. You are free to like one writer while disliking another instead of generalizing them all under one banner (such as happens with big gaming sites all the time).

Unfortunately there are no quick and easy links to the individual columns yet, aside from that review link. If you want to view the original content you have to search the blogs for the appropriate tags or find another link to it. I imagine this is already in the works, but my recommendation is to replace that big Bioshock 2 review image with a banner of the column and text beneath noting the latest article posted. This way a single glance can inform the reader if there has been a change since the last time they were there while new members have quick and easy access to ever column available.

HEY WHO’S THAT HANDSOME FELLA?

Finally comes the personal profiles. Well, there’s a lot of customization available. You can go all out and make your page look like a MySpace reject or you can make small modifications to give it your own personal flavor. There’s plenty of room for whatever information you want to share, be it images, videos, the games you are currently playing, movies you like and even the dreaded built-in music player.

I’m going to be honest, I can’t stand the concept of built-in music players. This day and age it shouldn’t be too surprising that most people are already playing music from their iTunes, Winamp or Zune players (all five of us Zune owners, that is). To open up a profile, potentially in a new tab to browse in a few minutes, and suddenly hearing someone else’s tastes pop through the speakers is a major distraction. This is the opposite of Zen and it only fulfills some childish need to make everyone look at you as if you’re somehow special for your tastes in music (and most often you’re not because you enjoy mass-produced pulp whose sole purpose is to sell to the masses like McDonald’s dollar menu cheese burgers).

Unfortunately this functionality has already been built in and it is too late to take it away. It would be like trying to remove a tumor with your hands. The only option is to reduce the effect of damage, which has been done by offering players that tend to wait until you’ve scrolled down to load. While I’d much rather the music player wait until I hit the “play” button, this will do. I at least am capable of preparing for the inevitability that I’ll have to shut someone else’s noise off.

I can recommend the potential of integrating Twitter feeds into personal profiles. The members are self-absorbed enough to take photographs of themselves in the mirror, I think it is safe to assume they will also have twitter accounts and like the idea of following their inane “tweets” throughout the day (I know I do!).

Gamerscore: Enzyte for the E-Penis

On the whole I enjoy GameKrib.com. It hasn’t suddenly provided me a new community to game and debate with, but it’s certainly provided a place for me to spend some time and share thoughts with a few other folks with. The majority of the user base is your typical teenager or early College student obsessed with taking photographs of themselves as well as “pwning n00bs” in Modern Warfare or Halo, but the site has enough going on that they can easily draw a much wider user base and have a greater variety of discussion and ideas passed.

The greatest flaw right now is the simple fact that the site is too young. While Justin and Jeremy, the heads of GameKrib.com, certainly try to bring their community to the forefront and make members feel at home and happy, there is nothing to the effect of finding every female member willing to show their boobs and plastering them all over the front page. In fact, their attitudes seem to be the opposite of that, where they’d rather monitor the content to make sure nothing too risque is going on. They aren’t dictators and I have yet to see any complaints of banning or censorship arise past the chat room, but there is a sense of personal responsibility and professional integrity in mind.

This gives me faith in how this site can and will turn out. I can easily recommend to my readership that if you want to give a social network a try that is focused on games, GameKrib.com is the one you’ll probably want to go for. It won’t be replacing Facebook or anything, but it will provide another place for you to share your love of gaming with others. Plus, the more people that join and participate the stronger the site will grow. If you make recommendations to the owners of the site they will listen and do their best to implement those features. It’s a site that can be improved based on the membership, and so I recommend giving it a try.

Ask me how much Justin and Jeremy paid me to say nice things on the forum