A Girl Gamer's Guide to Finding Other Girl Gamers

I have been gaming a long time. My earliest console was the Nintendo Entertainment System. Back then gaming was not about frag counts or how many achievement points you had. It was more about having fun. Sometimes I would have friends come over, but most times it was just me gaming alone.

This past year I found myself with a PlayStation 3, two controllers, no boyfriend, and no female friends that were into games. Granted, the boyfriend thing is no biggie. I caught him cheating, and gave him the boot. The thing that really got me was the no female gaming friends. I mean there are plenty of places that you can go to find blokes to play with. You can log onto PlayStation Home and find plenty of guys that are willing to follow you around on the off chance that you are a real girl, and not just a Quincy. The problem is finding actual real life gaming girls.

My first idea was to search for female gaming clans. I found a couple of them, but ultimately I didn't like the vibe I was getting. I am all for girl power as it pertains to women being just capable as men, but many of the groups I found seemed anti-male. Cool for them, but bad for me. So, predominantly female gaming clans were out.

I then searched for social gaming communities. There were not many. I found a really huge one that encompassed the 3 major consoles, but most of the people there were the "frag it all" immature types. I quickly cancelled my account, and opted for the singles site approach.

Singles Site Approach: Create a profile telling everyone that you are ONLY interested in playing online video games. Put up a nice picture. Wait for the flood of guys and a few girls, that didn't actually read your profile, to begin to fill your mailbox with typed responses of potential romantic encounters. Scratch this method off your list. Seriously, I only got one decent response, and she never gets online anyway.

Since, the Single Site Approach did not work, I opted to re-visit the gaming community method. This time I found two decently good options:

1 - PSNteractive.com - Very small community website with a good mixture of guys and girls. It's kind of a gamer myspace of sorts. I was able to find a couple really good gaming friends on there.

2 - Generationxclub.com - PlayStation based forum for older gamers. There is not a lot of traffic, but it has friendly people that are into games.

If I had to choose one, I would probably give the nod to PSNteractive.com, as it has an advanced search that allows you to find a specific type of gamer. Both sites are great ways to finder mature gamers, and so far, I have not had any bad experiences with either.