Recently I had a discussion with a friend who works for a game distributor. I asked her what she was currently playing in the way of games and was extremely suprised to hear it wasn't the lastest Guitar Hero or even Modern Warfare 2. "I'm totally addicted to Farmville - you know the Facebook game?"

[URL=http://www.farmville.com/]Farmville[/URL] first came to my attention in a [I]Gears of War 2 [/I]lobby on Xbox Live where the guys in my party discussed the finer points of how they had to "farm more crops". And they were very serious about this, going on to explain how addictive the game was and how they couldn't stop playing it.

I've never played the game myself and after hearing so many people gushing about how 'addictive' it is, I'd have to think twice about a game that is obviously, seriously addictive fun. The fact is, quite a few gamers out there are addicted to games like Farmville and others like it that fall under the category of 'social games'.

According to a recent [URL=http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/02/23/facebook.games/?hpt=Sbin]CNN article[/URL]:

[INDENT]"Zynga's top title, FarmVille, is played by an estimated 75 million people each month -- roughly equal to the number who have played the classic arcade and desktop game Tetris during its entire existence."

[/INDENT] That's a serious amount of people playing this game, considering [I]Tetris[/I] is listed by several [URL=http://gamers.guinnessworldrecords.com/news/270209_top50.aspx]sources[/URL] as one of the most influential video games of all time. Maybe it's time to start thinking about swapping out those AK-47's and swords for a tractor and a hoe...

[url=http://www.gameculture.com/2010/02/23/what039s-deal-quotfarmvillequot]More...[/url]