Now, unfortunately it's befriending your neighbour because he has a pink cow that gives strawberry milk.
Last week, Disney paid a massive $563.2 million to buy Playdom, a social game developer, recognising the immense potential that games have today on the internet. I don't know why, but news that social gaming online is the second highest source of internet traffic behind social networking worries me. If a friend of mine says he's busy and doesn't want to meet me, is it because he's waiting for his next energy pack to pretend he's killing someone and stealing his grenade stash? Or does it mean he's cleaning his fish tank and feeding the fish?
From the Washington Post:
In olden days, games were played in the living room. Chess. Battleship. Monopoly. Then the world changed. The family nucleus dispersed, especially up and down the information superhighway. Online gaming first gained popularity with those adults-living-in-the-basement types. But now, through smartphones and Facebook, where users tend to imaginary plots of land in FarmVille or hire friends to run eateries in Restaurant City, games are mainstream again.
As if geeks sitting around playing World of Warcraft 20 hours a day wasn't enough, (don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of geek culture) now there are people playing games that don't require as much skill, and hardly give any returns. It's not like your bushel of wheat will go for over $7 because Russia will experience a drought in the near future. (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-08-04/wheat-surges-to-22-month-high-on-russian-drought-corn-soybeans-advance.html)
I remember playing a game called Dope Wars, and deriving so much fun out of the fact that an old lady sitting next to me on the subway would say, "I hear there's gonna be an acid raid tomorrow," then spending all my capital on acid, and then selling it the next day for through-the-roof profits.
This is, of course, before I realised I was spending a couple of hours a day looking at a computer screen and pretending to be Pablo Escobar. He's dead by the way, but I bet he didn't get carpal tunnel syndrome.
If http://mostpopularwebsites.net/ is to be believed, facebook.com is behind live.com (ridiculous, I know) and the fifth most visited website on the internet. I was so proud when YouTube used to be the biggest thing on the internet, and was all praise for humankind, and how we could have developed something that allows us to watch virtually anything uploaded by anyone anywhere. My mood has been somewhat dampened now, especially because Disney is entering the gaming world (I'm slightly more excited about Google Games though, Pacman on an HTML website was brilliant) and because FarmVille is one of the biggest things to have ever happened to the World Wide Web.
Still slightly irritating though, is the fact that Google plans to base its gaming around Zynga, the company responsible for the vomit-inducing Mafia Wars. What Google will do remains to be seen, but it can't be as bad as spending fake money to build a fake fence to protect your fake farm from your fake neighbour's fake farm in a fake world... I think.
To sum up, from the same Washington Post article quoted earlier:
Today's popular pursuits are not your weird cousin's games [...] Millions of women throw parties together on Sorority Life.
Ahahahahaha.
You gata blag more my friend:)
ReplyDeleteLike that you are taking a good laugh out o most things, and enable your reader to see that also. Love that you cite your stuff.