Are you a gamer? Are you lonely? Here's something that might help

Yes, fellow gamers, GameCrush has launched!

This service allows you to play your favourite games and have some female companionship! Unless you're married, of course, in which case the female companionship you're actually getting is probably complaining about you playing games instead of painting the living room or something.

I kid! I kid! That's a dirty stereotype that I'm not going to propagate. Too late? Oh, ok. Never mind.

Anyway, Gamecrush lets you play games with women who are also playing your games, allowing you to talk to them while you're playing, socialize with them, or whatever else you want (and whatever else they're willing to do). You can play everything from Facebook-style social games to Halo Reach, and talk to a cute woman while you do so!

And ladies, you're not left out. There are some male "play dates" on there too, for your playing pleasure.

According to Mashable (my favourite tech and social media blog):

"Users of GameCrush have four basic options for making connections with PlayDates. The Arcade is for casual gaming, The Arena is for serious gaming, The Academy is for learning “tips and tricks” from PlayDates and The Edge is this service’s version of a red-light district.

There is a catch,of course. PlayDates don’t crush their controllers for free; it costs
$0.60 per minute to have a pretty girl sniping with (or at) you."

Yes, this is a pay service (you didn't think you'd be getting this for free, did you?). And how much do you want to bet that, eventually, "The Edge" will cost more than the other areas?

However, it can be pretty lucrative for those PlayDates, who can get paid $20+ an hour to play with these guys (I don't know if the male PlayDates make anywhere near that much). It can all be good, clean fun, or it can be a bit more edgy and adult (though doing that while playing Call of Duty just seems...odd). I guess you can tell what type of woman you're getting from the PlayDate name and the picture provided, eh? (I guess this is where I should warn you that a couple of the profile names, and a *lot* of the PlayDate pictures, aren't necessarily safe for work)

The way it works is that when you find a PlayDate, you invite them to join a game (on the site, I assume). Once they accept your invitation, you hook up in a video-enabled chat session. If you're playing a game on a console, I suppose you have to be sitting at your computer so you can take part in the web cam session while you're playing the Xbox (or whatever) game on your TV. You join on Xbox Live, PSN, or wherever you're playing the game.

Note: This does not work *through* the console's online network, and isn't affiliated with any of them whatsoever.

Ok, all of that being said, what does it say about us as a society that something like this might become popular? Are we turning into a world of shut-ins where we get our jollies at home rather than going out and meeting new people?

I said in an earlier post, back in May, when this was only in Beta:

"Would I have done this if it were available when I was single (and if I
had been playing games back then, of course)? I don't know. I might have
tried it out. It not really *that* much money (the equivalent of buying
a woman a drink at a club). However, I can see it becoming as addictive
as any of those chat lines where you pay $3.99 a minute to talk dirty
to some other hot babe ("hot babe" in Fantasyland, anyway). It might get
really expensive, really fast. "

Honestly, my opinion hasn't really changed. I guess this fulfills the same adult niche that those chat phone lines fill, only for gamers.

But I still think it's sad.

What do you think? Do you think it will be enormously popular?

You don't have to say whether you'll use it or not, though you're more than welcome to!

(Note: Some people may find this post familiar, as I did post about it back in June.)