If you are new to gaming the first step might be finding your tribe online. When I first started gaming, I registered for a Steam account and then decided on a tough-sounding username.
I downloaded the program onto my PC and started exploring the Steam community. You can add and invite Friends, like any similar social media network. At the top of the discussion board is one called “New to Steam”. It has a few helpful pinned articles to get you started.
There are Game Forums which are grouped together under particular games. You may like to sort these by most popular, your recently played games, recommended and more. Each Steam Group has tabs for different sections: Overview, Announcements, Discussions, Events, Members and Comments.
I explored a local group of gamers. The user icons range from Japanese anime, shoes, logos, Jesus, Obama, Barny, and famous actors. I estimate that only 1 of 100 were an image of the person in real life. It seems that very few people use their real name when gaming.
To be honest, I was pretty disappointed by the range of female-friendly groups. If you search for ‘girl’, ‘female’ or ‘woman’ then the results and summaries become unfriendly and aggressive quickly. I did find a few groups to join like: Girl Gamers, Australian Girl Games and Women Gamer Group.
The language in two of the leading high school gaming groups is an embarrassing situation. I learnt that the private school is ‘dank’, while the public one was ‘trash’. It quickly descended into teenagers ‘locker room talk’ – full of slang, acronyms and emojis. Fortunately, I’m not allowed to post to either group.
The Steam Community does have a dedicated group of moderators – some of these are volunteers who help to keep discussions on-topic and friendly. They help to remove any reported content that violates the guidelines. There is also a group of Steam Developers and Support Team to help out with technology issues (employed by Valve).
The language and liberal use of acronyms make the Steam community only suitable for adults with ultra-tough skins. It’s one big fat flaming troll city. Game on.
Steam website: https://steamcommunity.com/
About Valve
Valve is an entertainment software and technology company founded in 1996 and based in Bellevue, Washington. Valve’s portfolio of titles accounts for over 100 million units sold worldwide, and include some of the most played online games in the world.
In addition to producing best-selling entertainment titles, Valve is a developer of leading-edge technologies including the Source® game engine and Steam®, a leading platform for digital content offering thousands of games to millions of users around the world. In 2015, Valve introduced the Steam Hardware devices, a collection of hardware devices designed to extend Steam beyond the desktop. In 2016, launched SteamVR, a platform for the creation and distribution of leading-edge VR products.
