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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:
