When I first joined facebook, the games available were very static. It had games such as mafia, vampires, where you do jobs, level up and more options are unlocked. Those games had no flash, just pictures as descriptions of items, words, links and virtual money used to do buy/sell like Utopia the online game on the internet.
Slowly, more developers joined in developing applications either for making money or for interest which bring birth to flash games. I started with playing "Pet Society", "Who has the biggest brain?" which was owned by Playfish games. Then more games started to come and compete with them which brought Zynga's "Farmville", "CafeWorld", "Roller Coaster Kingdom" and many more from both.
Pet Society was about you having a pet, you earn money by racing and visiting other people, you use the money to buy clothes, food, furniture. Earning money was hard but it was fun to buy stuff, sort of like a Sims 3 game but in a much smaller scale.
Then the fun "Restaurant City" from playfish games became the hype, most of my friends were playing it. The game is about you owning a restaurant and serving customers a variety of dishes based on the ingredients you have. Everyday you'll get ingredient and there is also a quiz that gives an ingredient as a reward. Ingredients given are totally random so it's hard to upgrade your dish cause a few are needed for one dish. Serving those dishes to the customers (AI ones) increases your level in the game which unlock more space or more staff. Money is used where yo can buy furniture to decorate the restaurant and change the clothing of your staff.
Competing with Playfish games was Zynga. The first game I played from this group is "Farmville" where you own farm and you plant vegetables, you can have an orchard. All those grow in different timing. You also have farm animals to produce goods for you to sell.
After this game came out, Playfish games introduced "Country Story", in comparison, "Country Story" was drawn better but less vegetables are available for harvesting, but it had quest for you to complete that rewards points and food to level up and many items for decorating the farm.
Zynga has "Roller Coaster Kingdom" which reminded me of Rollercoaster Tycoon. Basically you own a theme park, you level up by having customers visit your park, you add more features by the money you earn. In terms of graphics, it is much better than "Farmville".
The current game that most of my friends are playing now is "Cafe World", the concept is similar to "Restaurant City" where you sell food and earn money to decorate. But one thing different is you get to prepare the dishes, there is a time limit on how long it takes to cook it, therefore you are not serving the same thing in your restaurant.
While some surf Facebook to check out on their friends and look at pictures, many of us indulge in the games that are available to spend our time using the internet. Facebook certainly changes the concept of Social Networking sites compared to Friendster, with this they remain interesting for all ages.
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