During my weekend visit to VGXPO in Philadelphia I was approached by a young man adorned in a hoodie and jeans. He handed me a card, informing me of a new online enterprise known as “MeetAGamer.com”. He asked if I was on Facebook, and when I gave him my confirmation he informed me that his new site designed to establish personal connections was of a higher quality. In any other instance his garb may have made me thought otherwise, but this was a gaming exposition. If you weren’t wearing typical street clothes you were dressed as a video game character.

A few weeks later I decided to give the site a try. At the very least I could write about it, after all. So I type the URL into my computer and stretch, awaiting for Facebook’s latest competitor to loa-Oh dear God…

Gosh I hope they’re all legal.

I thought this was supposed to be a competitor to Facebook? It looks more to me like a porn or adult dating website. Already I can just hear the reactions of my gaming friends. All of them. Even the ones I don’t actually know very well. One look at this page and they’d click their bookmarks over to a site they already frequent. That is, unless they’ve gathered their friends to point and laugh first.

Yet I do not turn. If I could give a game like Eat Lead, Too Human or Mushroom Men a fair chance when no one else would then I can be fair and give this site a try. So I create an account and login. The first thing I witness is the news feed.

I swear I’ve seen you before.

Something looks familiar…sure it looks a bit like Facebook, but there’s something else… Ah, I got it!

Oh yeah! That’s where I’ve seen this interface!

Gameleon is a website for gaming journalists, though most of its active members are centered in the United Kingdom. Now, while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, it’s pretty obnoxious to claim your site is better than Facebook when your technology isn’t even proprietary. Everything in Facebook is built by Facebook. While I’m sure MeetAGamer may one day have their own proprietary engine, you can’t say you are better than someone else if the technology isn’t even yours.

Yet everyone has to start somewhere, right? I’m willing to give them a break and look around. After all, the engine they are using is pretty nifty and comes with a lot of desired features.

So I go to customize my profile and…what? Updates already? I click a bubble in the corner informing me of new goings-on in my account and find someone has already requested me as a friend. That’s curious, because my profile says nothing of who I am. I decide to finish my profile first, and by time I’m done I’ve got four friend requests. I check out their profiles and each time I’m confronted with “blinged up” pages that more resemble MySpace than Facebook. Each person is also roughly 18 years old and, well, far as I can tell has no reason to want to friend me. So I let their invites hang in my inbox and go to type in my status update how odd this occurrence is.

Only the status update won’t apply. I’ve never had a problem with it on Gameleon, yet here I tell it to save and nothing happens. I try it from my profile page and it still refuses to work. How awfully problematic. So instead I write a note in the blog section mentioning that I will not friend someone that I don’t know and log off the site for the night.

I wake up the next morning to my usual activities. Boot up the computer, check Twitter feeds for gaming news I’ve missed, open G-Mail and-oh crap.

That’s a lot of people I don’t know.

Now, I don’t mind Facebook notifications. I can usually read what folks have to say right in the message so it’s almost like sharing e-mails anyway. I keep in contact with friends that I don’t get to see often and share inside jokes. MeetAGamer, on the other hand, has suddenly spammed me with nothing but people I don’t know asking to be my friend. Oh, and one person actually sending me a message trying to get to know me as per my request. However, I can’t read the message through my e-mail, or any other comments made to my account, as I can with Facebook. I’m pretty much forced to jump in and shut off a bunch of e-mail notifications to reduce the clutter of my inbox.

From there on it’s just a small adventure into the depths of the site. As recommended I gave the chat room a try, which is a sort of actively running news feed that bogs the rest of Firefox down as opposed to a well-running Java applet. Whether this is built into the social networking engine or pulled from another third party is unknown to me, but it would be a wise idea to get a better system that makes multi-tasking a bit more smooth.

The further I dove the less I was interested in being a part of the site. Your most common and active user is roughly 18 and is either in MLG (Major League Gaming) or wants to be. This presents two problems. These kids are just now getting out into the world and learning who they are. I’ve passed that stage of my life and am ready to move on. While it’s not bad talking with younger folks once in a while I’d much rather be making connections with people my own age. People that were old enough to see Jurassic Park in theaters or remember Star Wars before computer animation.

The more widespread problem is the simple fact that gaming has become so broad that several different niches have developed. Competitive gamers, the sort that are or want to be a part of MLG, play games more like a sport rather than an art form. I and many other gamers are the latter, who enjoy games for the atmosphere and experiences they allow us. Then there are people that simply play them because they are fun. There’s a whole world of gamers of varying ages and styles.

Yet MeetAGamer is thus far not built for that variety. The guys that built the site are catering to themselves, and thus the only people that have signed on are of their demographic. A look at the front page is bound to get a lot of people to turn away in disinterest, and those that actually give it a chance will be turned off by the one-dimensional crowd. It’s even more apparent when you check the news feed or groups selection.

Those are some classy groups I’d like to be a part of, lemme tell you.

This isn’t “better than Facebook”, this is a more professional looking MySpace. Facebook gained popularity in the first place because it’s professional look was intended to keep all of its users looking classy in some manner. Sure you couldn’t customize your own page, but most users in College and beyond had long since outgrown the trends set in by Geocities and Angelfire. People wanted all the networking tools of MySpace, sure, but they didn’t want an MP3 player blasting out of their speakers like it was a MIDI track from 1998. By having such a blank and consistent background Facebook actually managed to appeal to a wider audience, the root of its success. Success founded in focus groups and market tests.

I should take a moment to be a little less brutal here. Yes, the site is problematic and its current userbase is primarily made up of people with a very different personality than my own. This is not to say there is something wrong with those people. I understand everyone is different and not every gamer is the same. However, this world is built upon ignorance. No matter what color, creed or political alignment most people only know what they believe to be true. A lot of gamers are going to be completely turned off to the site simply by the more common user. In order to bring in a greater variety the site’s style and marketing will need to be changed. There are already some tolerant folks who view gaming in a similar manner as I willing to reach out and make connections, and once the site makes some improvements those numbers will continue to grow until you have a true melting pot of gamer cultures.

Similarly, as I said, I do like the engine the site is currently built on. I like that the people running the site are attempting to add more features, particularly those similar to what you may find in Facebook. However, there are some fundamental presentation issues that will harm the experience. Particularly, coming up to a College-educated intellectual (or conceited asshole, whichever you prefer) and saying your product is better than Facebook.

Sir you make a mighty fine argument and I see no logical reason to decline your offer.

My recommendations to the people running MeetAGamer are as follows.

Have a humble attitude. If you approach people with nothing but good things to say about yourself you may seem more conceited rather than confident. It’s good to let people know you are taking it seriously and are working with the goal to be better than other social networking sites, but at this lowly stage it’s nothing more than hubris.

Find people with knowledge in business and marketing and web development to help you out. The business and marketing person will help you shape your site in a much better manner while conducting user surveys to discover the pros and cons of the current system. Simultaneously, a web developer can fix small problems such as the status update bug while working behind the scenes on a proprietary engine, which will be essential to succeeding as a social network taken seriously. If you can manage a front-end trained developer bringing in knowledge of user experience as well as a back-end developer, more power to you.

Take down the pictures of girls flaunting your site from the front page. If you want a section to showcase fans promoting MeetAGamer, then make it a separate page. First impressions make a deep impact, and the current one is going to come across negatively to a lot of people. It is of no insult to the girls themselves, either, but most reactions will likely resemble my own.

Lastly, always be sure to take criticism well. I myself know it can be hard to hear when someone tells you how horrible your work is. Sometimes these people may be full of themselves, but it’s always best to ponder what they’ve said and figure out if they are right or wrong. If someone says your site sucks, then they have no credibility. If someone presents you a dissertation on why your site is no good, then you need to study it and see where they are right and where they are wrong. Just never shrug it off.

Now for the bottom line. Would I recommend MeetAGamer.com to any of my friends? Overall I can’t see many of my friends buying into it, but they also don’t need to go out and find other gamers. They already have a group of gamers they know that they can invite over and that’s all they need. Gaming is just a passing hobby as film and television. However, I also have friends that are pretty deep into gaming that I might try and talk into joining once I’ve had more time with the site myself.

The primary difficulty is in convincing them that MeetAGamer.com is a site they want to join already. That is, after all, what marketing is all about. I need to be able to convince them that this site will allow them to meet other gamers that feel similarly about the medium, and at the moment there aren’t that many people I know overall. I think the site needs to grow and develop a bit more before I can truly recommend it to anyone, as right now they already have plenty of forums they participate in for their social connections.

UPDATE: It would seem that the person that went around saying things like “we are better than Facebook” is no longer with the group, that statement being precisely one of the reasons why. As such, the perceived conceit is not an issue. Many of the points made in the above article do still stand, however the website’s goal is not to be a direct competitor to Facebook or MySpace. Their goal is to simply become a gaming social network.

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