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 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 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 (aka “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 worldwide 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”, or 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.
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