Facebook gaming shows how the future will be better.

It may be a far cry from what I dreamed the games industry would turn into, but Facebook and its new social games craze may just be the start of an entirely new way to play and enjoy video games. While not a traditional video gamers first choice, I believe that Facebook is going to very quickly grow to become the defacto method for game developers and game players to interact, share thoughts and ultimately play together.

What we are looking at is the start of truly world wide gaming platform. With Facebook second only to Google in the amount of traffic it generates it's easy to see why. While it seems like only yesterday that communities were restricted to fan sites and official forums, it is almost a must for companies to put a virtual presence up on the social networking giants site. Gain a large following and interact directly with its player base through the social giant.

Cloud computing is going to do a great deal to help this out I believe. Instead of downloading and installing a multi-gigabyte game, and spending a great deal of time doing so, you will simply login to Facebook and have the game rendered and streamed through Facebook to you. There are a couple examples of this already in the works.

Gaikai.com
And,
OnLive.com

With the explosion of Farmville we can start to see the truly awe inspiring way that Facebook is connecting people. Now a grandmother and grandchild can host virtual farms and interact with each other in near real time. Some of the other games coming out on Facebook lately are even more interconnected. Games like Evony and Backyard Monsters make it possible to attack fellow players and communicate with the enemy in real time.

In the old days we needed to install extra software to communicate with friends. I can clearly recall having AIM, Xfire, mIRC, Ventrillo and Teamspeak all installed just so I could keep in contact with my friends. Now, we can all stay in touch through one site. Play games through one site. And even publish our good scores for all to see.

Even the console makers are starting to notice how useful a Facebook presence is, in fact the Xbox 360 has a built in Facebook application now.

While it may appear like the culmination of the casual boom, I believe it is really the beginning of the next big thing for hard core gamers. If you have held off starting a Facebook account, or just never got around to it I urge you to sign up now and find out what all the fuss is about. Cause when they add "Facebook Achievements" you will be glad you did. :)

Check for signs of the apocolypse, the "never gonna happen" has finally happened.

Being an old school gamer such as I am, I have constantly made disparaging remarks about "Facebook Games". Not understanding how someone could "waste" so much time and energy on those silly games I would always go out of my way to remind anyone I conversed with that those types of video games are complete wastes of time. I mean, there is no direct competition with another player like you would see in chess or Call of Duty. There is no clever strategy to find like you do in games of Baduk or StarCraft. Mainly, there is really never another player you are against. For the most part those games are single player.

Enter Desktop Defender on Facebook. I have always had a small inkling for tower defense type games. Granted there is no other player to strategize against, but there are countless ways to setup a defense against a nearly never ending onslaught of enemies. With typically small time requirements for games I usually always have at least one type of tower defense game installed at any given time. One of my all time favorite tower defense games would have to be Defense Grid. With a very good graphics engine and classic tower defense game play this is one of my most recommended games.

Getting back to where I was though. For the last week or so whenever I find a few spare minutes I keep finding myself with Firefox open and turrets a-blazing. Even with the horrendous amount of time required to fully unlock everything (without spending real world money) I just can not seem to stop.

Has it finally happened? I have somehow been converted into a "Casual Gamer" without knowing it? Has my long time obsession with the tower defense genre caused some type of de-evolution? Only time will tell of course, hopefully I will stumble across a more hardcore type game and will forget all about Facebook and desktop defender. Until then I think I have a few minutes until that coffee is done brewing...