Journal 15, December 6

Article: Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction

Social networking has been a big hit on the Internet with Myspace and Facebook being some of the more well known contenders in the USA. Orkut a Google service is also widely used in Brazil but hasn't seen as much success elsewhere. These services are great for keeping in touch with friends but most of them also offer other features.

Facebook allows members to play games with their friends online without separate registration. Personally, I think that most of these games are very repetitive with little real interaction between players. However, that hasn't stopped a game called Farmville from becoming possibly the most played computer game ever with over 69 million people playing it!

The article speaks of the addictive nature of the game. Players find themselves spending considerable amounts of time playing these games either for long periods so they can reach the next level or revisiting the game often to check up on progress or make decisions that affect the game. Farmville like most social networking games frequently asks to post join requests for to your friends so they too will join in on the game.

The way Farmville and other online social games works reminds me very much of how computer viruses spread except in this case it is not the computer that is becoming less productive it is the person playing game. I think this is becoming a problem for many reasons such as poor performance at work or in school due to being mentally exhausted from playing games. There have even been deaths attributed to being addicted to games one example being a Korean man who played an online game in a cyber cafe for 50 hours straight and died of cardiac arrest and exhaustion.

While such games are not necessarily bad too much of a good thing is usually is not a good thing. Perhaps game developers should place limits on how long their games can be played on the same username to help deter excessively long gaming stints. I think there is a good possibility that the idea that playing games improves motor skills and prepares children for the modern work force is not going to work the way people thought. Instead we end up with lazy teens and adults that would rather be playing a game than doing meaningful work or studies. Obviously this is not the case with everyone but for many people it truly has become a problem.