A hardcore gaming habit can encourage a person to spend hours researching games and connecting with other people who are equally as passionate about the hobby. That kind of intense dedication requires a good tool to obtain said research and a decent platform for social connections.
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When you first start a Gamewise account, the website asks you to rate at least 20 games. It then matches you with similar users to help you get involved in the ongoing conversation with people who may share your tastes.
“Gamewise is both a social and a reference platform — gamers can read and chat about current topics of interest while in the background is an expansive wiki-style database which aims to cover every minute detail of the gaming universe,” Gamewise co-founder Dean Walton told GamesBeat.
The more games you rate, the easier it is for Gamewise to match you with other users, and the more likely you are to interact with people who also think that Bad Piggies was the best mobile game of 2012.
“By following and rating items that are of interest to them, they can create strong connections which we can use to filter the content we show them and to recommend new games that they may be interested in,” said Walton.
One of the big innovations that helps Gamewise compete with other gaming wiki sites is the ability to quickly add an item to its appropriate place by tagging it.
“For example, if I add a discussion item about a new trailer released for Dead Space 3,” said Walton. “I can tag ‘Dead Space 3 (game),’ ‘Dead Space (franchise),’ ‘Visceral Games (company),’ [and] ‘Electronic Arts (company)’ to my item, and not only can readers then click through to read more about any of those related entities, but my item will show up on the discussion section of each of them. So if someone happens to be looking at the Visceral Games page, they might click through to my post.”
Of course, a site like this works best when it hits critical mass. It still has a long way to go to reach a site like Giant Bomb, which has a similar wiki feature, but Gamewise is off to a fine start. Coming out of its beta, it has over 45,000 user-created game pages.