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The Fringe: Farming games
Welcome to The Fringe, where we totter on the edge of MMOs with a guide for playing Facebook games. If you aren't one of the millions playing games on Facebook and aren't interested in joining the throng, that's ok. We won't judge you. But we'd appreciate you returning the favor. In before all the "you got Facebook in my Massively again!" complaints: GDC was full of Facebook game announcements and with all the money being made by Zynga and others, we have a long future of Facebook MMOing ahead of us. With massive amounts of people playing and interacting in these online games, it's time to take off the blinders and check out what's going on in your peripheral gaming vision. Or not. That's fine. If you don't want to read about Facebook games, you can skip to all of the other great content here on Massively. But unlike my last column, where I let the haters vent their frustrations in the comments, only constructive criticism will be allowed from now on. I was going to write up a guide to Country Life next, but it has been going through much development over the past few weeks. So even if illness hadn't delayed my writing about it, the information would have been obsolete soon after. There are many farming games to choose from, varying in features and popularity. So this week I'll be covering how to choose a Facebook farming game by giving an overview of three notable ones.
The Fringe: The Dos and Don'ts of Facebook games
Welcome to The Fringe, where we totter on the edge of MMOs with a guide for playing Facebook games. When we asked on the Daily Grind if you played Facebook games, many of you said you did. But Facebook is very polarizing. Some people love the games, while others don't see them as games at all and hate everything having to do with them. It doesn't help that there's so much spam associated with most of the games. But those of us who do play know that there are a wide variety and that many of them include the same gameplay that our favorite MMOs have. We get XP, levels, acquire loot, make avatars, play minigames within the games, quest, trade items and even participate in PvP. The sim games are extremely popular and require quite a bit of strategy for proper allocation of resources. But if you don't like text adventure games or never got into games like old school SimCity, you're not going to get the Facebook versions either. If you do play these MMO-lite games, there are things you can do to get the most out of your play sessions. And there are things you shouldn't do so that you don't annoy your friends (as much) nor imbalance your life. Those of us who have spent time playing casual games of all kinds know that they can suck you in even more than full-blown MMOs. Most of us can't play WoW at work, but casual games with their low resource consumption and their easy access are tempting when work isn't keeping our full attention. This applies to games like solitaire, but add the comeraderie and variety of Facebook games and we can be even more tempted to play when we shouldn't. So here are some general Dos and Don'ts:
