No harm in getting a wireless-n card if it doesn't cost much extra, but for gaming it won't make a difference over an "old fashioned" wireless-g (54mbps) adapter. It would only help when transferring large files across the wireless network and that kind of thing. Personally I've found that wireless-n doesn't help with the maximum range of a wireless connection.
(Apologies if any of this is stuff you already know...)
I have in the past used a 54mbps USB wireless stick for gaming and it worked flawlessly. But there can be snags. When gaming what matters is response time. Not how much data can be sent per second (your wireless connection will undoubtedly have more bandwidth than your internet connection, and your internet connection is likely to have more bandwidth than the game requires) but how long it takes for a single packet of data to be sent from your PC to the server hosting the game. When you're using a wired network connection from your PC to your router, a data packet's journey from your PC to your router will take less than a millisecond. Good, responsive pings between your router and the server running the game are in the range of tens of milliseconds, so a wired connection effectively adds no lag. With wireless networking there are a couple of ways in which they can add, a lot, to lag, adding tens or hundreds of milliseconds to your ping.
- The wireless connection's signal strength needs to be as good as you can reasonably make it. Four bars out of 5 (according to the Windows wireless connection properties page), also called "very good" should be fine, and should give you pings of about 1 millisecond. 3 bars/"good" might also be OK. Below that, an increasingly large proportion of data packets get dropped so (I might be wrong on the detail here) they have to be re-sent and there's a delay.
- Windows can have an annoying tendency to stop for a second, perhaps once every minute or two, and look for other wireless connections in the area that you might want to connect to. When gaming on a desktop PC this is completely unnecessary - you are connected to the wireless network you want and you're trying to get on with using it, thanks very much! The result of this scanning for other wireless networks is that you get large hitches in your ping - ping spikes, lag spikes, whatever you want to call it - of the order of over a second of delay. This is extremely annoying in online gaming, to say the least. There are ways to disable this periodic search for other wireless networks, but the way to do it depends on your version of Windows. Google "wireless ping spike" to find discussions on the topic.
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