Social gaming

There's been an astonishing development over the past year. People are moving from video games to social gaming — playing free online games with people in their social network. Facebook is the hottest playing field around, and Zynga is one of the biggest players. Zynga's Mafia Wars has gamers teaming up to fight other gangs, and its FarmVille has players planting virtual crops and inviting online friends to become neighbours and help with the farming. This "new school" of games features simple, single-player action that's enhanced by teamwork and that can be picked up and interrupted at any time. So is it surprising that it is encouraging women and other non-traditional gamers to play?

Since Facebook launched in 2007, social gaming has become a billion-dollar industry. Social games are finding new ways to become monetized, or make real money, through the sale of virtual goods and services. Gamers can afford to, say, buy cheap advice to build better alliances:

Second Life made the concept of virtual money popular, and gamers are engaging with each other by exchanging gifts or buying bonus points to beat the competition. If you're already "playing the game of social networking", that is, raising your social status by building a network, playing a Facebook game together is just another way of investing in your relationships. And it is to be expected that companies will increasingly use these games to provide their customers with bonuses, for advertising purposes.

This week we use the context of social gaming to review verb expressions with -ing forms, to-infinitives and bare infinitives.

Anne Hodgson