Gamers are usually not the most social of people. That said social gaming- when not applied to Facebook’s Mafia Wars and when gregariously applied to the mass of hardcore gamers is something only the internet can conjure up. However, with the advent of MMOGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Games), and other games such as Counter Strike, Quake III Arena, Battlefield 1942, Halo and others of yesteryear the entire paradigm of gaming shifted to accommodate a second, a third and then many more players along with the original player. LAN parties became prominent and eventually gamers felt the need to discuss their games on a platform dedicated to their passion. Thus, social gaming websites popped up on the internet. These websites provide various services, but their core service is the same to bring gamers on the same gaming platform together. So, without further ado, here are the top 3 social gaming websites.

1. Raptr ^[1]: Sporting a cute orange cartoon velociraptor as its mascot, Raptr aims to be a merger be ^[2]tween microblogging and gaming. The dashboard is reminiscent of Facebook’s status update or Twitter’s home page, while the entire experience is like using last.fm ^[3] with review s, collections and ratings only with games. Users get to update their status like a normal microblogging service, but users can also update their status with which game they are playing, or they want to play. If the user’s account is connected with Twitter or Facebook, this is also reflected in the two sites. Apart from that, Raptr also has its own multi-platform IM client that also logs the amount of time spent playing a game automatically, and updates the status message of the client accordingly. With support for a huge variety of games, it has become the premier destination for gamers who wish to socialize while not giving up on their passion.
2. GamerDNA ^[4]: With the advent of blogging, the proliferation of news and the amount of duplication of said news is humungous. For gamers, this means sifting through a ^[5]very large collection of gaming news blogs, RSS feeds and/or official sites for the latest updates on gam es, new DLC and other things of interest. GamerDNA hopes to make this sifting through’ process slightly easier with aggregated content of games that you like or you might be interested in (based on your library of games). Again, this also includes user-posted content and reviews for your reading pleasure. All this goes into filling the empty space between one gaming session and the next!
3. UGAME ^[6]: The most obvious feature of UGAME is the privacy control. While most of the features are similar to the other sites – with certain shortcomings the UGAME network makes up for this by ensuring that with its ^[7] privacy controls gamers can share content with either the entire world, or with a limited set of people, and categorize between their friends to share only specific content with some friends. This is akin to Facebook’s friend lists and privacy controls. In all, a worthy addition to this list. Check it out!