And no I do not want to help you get your crops ready, so do not send me any requests for you games either.  You might wonder why I don’t want to join you in Pet Society or play a rousing game of Bejewled with you.  Well, here it is folks, plain and simple.  I have a life.  I do not spend countless hours glued to a stinking computer alone.  I like to be active and grow my own garden at home, so why would I want to help you in your virtual one?

It is sad that there  are so many people in the world who play these games in my opinion, but hey you are on a gaming blog so you probably like it.  Take a look at the other people who like social gaming too.

Initial testing during the closed beta revealed a number of hurdles that needed to be overcome in the code, which was according to developers  ”actually quite early and not representative of the final game.”   Multiplayer mode testing on Xbox Live and PS3 continues since October 10.

Playing this game requires some minimal processing power: your processor should be  at least an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 GHz processor with 2 GB RAM ,NVIDIA 8800GS / ATI Radeon HD 2900 ,DirectX 10 or 11 video card pro or equivalent.  The game is reported to run on Mac as well. The release date is October 25, 2011.  If you can’t wait until then to get in on the action, check out the trailer below:

The following infographic by onemorelevel.com seeks to break down some of the overall stats on the kinds of games people are playing.  I thought it was interesting that 28% of all gamers are girls and women.   Also, 62% of gamers have played online games, and the majority of games being played is not RPG.  Funny, I always thought the world revolved around World of Warcraft, but it seems people mostly prefer quick games like card games, puzzle games, and word games.  Old style arcade games are still popular as ever, too. Click on the graphic to expand it to full size.

The future of online poker tournaments is looking pretty good when you compare last year’s number countries participating, and the number of players who took part.  The worldwide growth is a strong indicator that online poker is more than a passing trend and will be here for years to come.

Zynga pretty much single handedly paved the road for social gaming as we currently know it. Indeed, until very recently, Zynga was the only game in town with its popular city building simulation games. Occasionally, users on Facebook or other social networking sites might run into a brand or movie tie-in with game-like features, but these were nothing to write home about. In social gaming, the challenge for developers lies in providing an engaging game experience that doesn’t require a huge commitment of time or attention, after all, the social gaming scene has been dominated thus far by people up for a quick distraction while hanging out on Facebook.

This is drastically different from the type of engagement console enthusiasts expect; there, the longer it takes, the better. A good console game will draw you in and keep you there for at least an hour at a time, and we all know about the marathon gamers who have been known to spend entire weekends in one session. These kinds of gamers stay on some kind of natural, legal high, and can spend huge chunks of time gaming without a break.

Is there a happy medium somewhere that has been grievously overlooked? Firaxis and 2K Games seem to think so. A cross-over between traditional games and social games may have finally arrived with their Civ World, made to be played exclusively on the Facebook platform. The game, currently in public beta, instantly resembles the incredibly popular 20-year old core game, Civilization. Yet, it is designed to be played in a style that much more closely resembles Farmville. Too odd? Maybe so, but social gamers seem to be excited about the prospect of a civ game for Facebook.

Some early reviews point out the fact that Civ World faces an enormous challenge to deliver the sort of experience is seems to be aiming for. One reviewer categorized the early beta as a collection of great ideas that just haven’t surfaced yet. Game play has been described as slow and laggy, which undermines the intended purpose of the game — which is to provide the micro-bursts of entertainment social users need in an efficient way. The tutorials that should explain how to play the game have received staunch criticism for lacking enough information to be very helpful.

Are you in on the Civ World open beta? If so, drop us a line. We’d love to hear from you.

Anyway, I was browsing the Internet last week on my Macbook Pro (15″, 2.53 Ghz, mid 2009) using Safari of course, I was searching for Direct Satellite, when I logged in to my Gmail account and noticed an interesting message somewhere on the page.  I do not have the exact words to share, but they were something to the effect of “Angry Birds, now available on Google Chrome” or some such.  I have to say, I was curious and mildly interested.  I don’t use Chrome, for one thing.  I mean, I’ve used it at work where I use Windows 7, but not at home on my precious Macbook Pro.  Was the possibility of having yet another version of Angry Birds worth downloading this renegade browser from Google?  Not to mention, how would you even play it without a touch screen device like my iPhone or iPad?  The questions were raging in my mind as I launched a search for Angry Birds Chrome in my search bar.

Yes, I wound up downloaded Google Chrome just so I could try out Angry Birds.  Immediately I thought “what genius marketing on behalf of Google!” because, like me, there are million of rabid Angry Birds fans out there who use touch screen devices, most of which are made by Apple.  Angry Birds didn’t find its way to Android until the last quarter of 2010, and it had been available for iPhone since December 2009.  But I digress.

Anyway, I downloaded the browser, went to play Angry Birds, and realized that there is just something missing from a browser based Angry Birds game.  Yes, you can click to pull back the bird sling-shot with your mouse.  Yes, it works just as well.  But it’s not touch, and I believe that Angry Birds is just meant to be played on a touch screen device.  Having said that, I did keep Google Chrome on my Macbook Pro for a few hours.  When you first install it, it runs really fast for a while.  It does seem to bog down after time, and there are still a lot of websites out there it doesn’t work very well for so I don’t plan on making it my main browser anytime soon.  But it was nice for a while.

So, final words on Angry Birds for Google’s Chrome Browser:  I give it only 2 Beaks Up (out of a possible 5.)  What about you?
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In 2005, the New York Times published a statement that over 100,000 professional gold farmers in China alone earned their entire livelihoods trading in game currency and HD Satellite Dish affiliate programs, though the origin of trading is believed to have been Korea.  The first games to have had this happen were Ultima Online and Lineage, but the practice rapidly spread as newer, more modern MMORPGs hit the market, gaining more and more players internationally from highly developed and third world nations alike.

The game that is the subject of today’s disturbing headline, Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft, has been the subject of previous controversy unrelated to gold farming.  Stories of hopeless game addicts to lose the ability to distinguish their real lives from their gaming personae have rivaled those levied at earlier games;  Everquest had its share of similar tales, as did Neverwinter Nights.  But not until now have reports emerged of organized governmental engagement in the use of what amounts to slave labor by prisoners forced to play these games to earn the prison masters money.

And you could be unwittingly contributing to their misery.  Here in the United States of America, and in other wealthy parts of the world, people with more discretionary income and less patience are most likely to be the ones funding these schemes.  There are people such as these who pay cash to owners of characters who have done the hard work to amass game world wealth and powerful items to hand those things over to their characters.  Basically, the laziness of people with too much time on their hands and money burning holes in their pockets have fueled this illegal and black market economy without even realizing someone half way around the world is suffering because of it.  The next mega weapon you arrange to “find” after paying someone in another country to “drop” or “trade” with you could really be a black market arms trading deal in disguise — and even a matter of homeland security.  No, it hasn’t gotten federal legal status yet — but after this news story breaking today, it can’t be far behind.

First of all, you’ve always got your portable device with you, and there is no better way to suck up spare minutes while you wait in retail store lines or the doctor’s office than to break out Angry Birds and let a few fly.  I mean, those pigs are really asking for it, aren’t they?  And somebody’s gotta do it.  If you’re like me and you have a serious Birds addiction, you’ve probably downloaded every available version (and even paid for more than one of the same version just so you could enjoy it on your iPad in HD as well.)  At first, I tried just bringing the iPhone app over to my iPad and 2x-ing it.  This worked really well, actually and I probably could have gotten by without the HD iPad version — but the temptation got the best of me and I snapped it up, too.  I have no end of fun trying to beat all the levels on both of my favorite devices, in all versions (including Angry Birds Rio HD, which was free when I downloaded it last month.)

Another great game is Plants Vs. Zombies, where you have to defend your suburban house without a Home Security Device and garden from an onslaught of creepy undead dragging themselves across the street towards your home with certain damage in mind.  Your weapons of defense are sunflower seeds and seed-shooting plants, that let you plant more seed-shooters and fire on the zombies as they encroach.  You begin with fairly few zombies coming, and more than enough flowers at your command to fend them off — but it soon becomes nearly overwhelming as the zombies’ numbers increase.  You earn extra weapons and special attacks as you go, though, so applying some strategy is helpful.

Cut the Rope is a fun game where you have to feed little Nom-nom his candy.  You have to cut ropes the candy is suspended from, to help it fall into Nom-nom’s reach so he can munch down happily.  If he misses the candy, you hear a pittiful little sound that makes you a little sad.  This discourages you from miscalculating where to cut the ropes and which ones to cut, because you instinctively want to feed the little monster and make him happy.  Very sweet game.

All in all, I would say that the mobile gaming industry is firmly rooted and here to stay, and the outlook is only getting brighter.  Gaming apps are among the most popular downloads in the Apple App Store, and even the Android App marketplace is experiencing an upturn in game downloads.  These games seem to appeal to a broader demographic than some of the console games, possibly due to the quick availability of them and their relatively lower cost.