Gaming as in Minecraft, Garry's Mod, Dinosaur Horde, Dota 2, TF2, The Walking Dead, etc. Must haves: A good graphics card, hardly any lag, a mic and webcam.
I understand that finding a decent gaming laptop for this amount of money is hard, but I need some suggestions that won't get me bankrupt.
It not that hard if you know where to look. Over the summer I got a Lenovo y400 paid $735 for it. It has an intel i7 processor, 8gb of ram, 1tb hard drive, Nividia gt 650m with 2gb of dedicated memory. My keyboard even lights up and it came with a blu ray disk drive. It was refurb straight from the manufacture, which means that it could have been sent in because of hardware problems and bad parts were replaced or it could have been an open box, someone returned it and got something else.
It works great, it play minecraft, batman, civ 5, dishonored and all sorts of other games I have from steam. I would look at newegg and tigerdirect. And look at Asus, Lenovo and Sony.
I found it on amazon, it's in the market place, but it is in your price range.
Use this website and maybe it'll help
Ya don't really need a gaming laptop for those games.
Good processor and integrated graphics is good enough.