白天Candice Mann是挨蒙顿高级中学的教学助理，而晚上她就摇身一变成为一个互联网农民，管理者她的房子、仓库、农田、鸡舍和小狗屋。

虚拟农场生活

今年38岁的Candice Mann是7500万虚拟农场（farmville）的玩家之一，除此以外它还迷恋着宠物小镇（Petville）和珍宝岛（Treasure Isle）。我们很难用一般的游戏玩家来界定这群社交游戏爱好者，据PopCap的研究，社交游戏玩家平均年龄是43岁（这个靠谱不？），超过一般是妇女，其中还有四分之一是在家带孩子的。

尽管Candice Mann玩的虚拟农场表面上是可以免费玩耍的，但其实里面涉及到了相当的虚拟交易是需要付费的。

据商业周刊的报道，全美2099年的社交游戏产值为7.2亿美元，到2012年更是将达到20亿美元。

在朋友的邀请下，Candice Mann加入了农场游戏大军“它看起来是一个没有穷尽的游戏”Candice Mann表示“虽然它看起来很傻瓜，但是我还是上瘾了，你很难放弃你现在已经经营的这些东西。”

这是这样，开发者们看到了无穷无尽的商机。

Max Gaming的Logan Foster表示“社交游戏已经是旧金山游戏开发者大会讨论的热门话题。”

Dollar Cookie Cutter

By day, Candice Mann is an educational assistant at an Edmonton junior high school. By night, she’s a dedicated farmer, tending to barns, houses, chicken coops and a puppy that needs to be fed every day.

Luckily, the work is easy. Mann barely needs to lift a finger to seed and till her crops — that’s the benefit of operating a virtual farm.

The 38-year-old mother of three is among the 75 million players a month on Farmville, one of the most popular applications on the social-networking website, Facebook.

Mann also plays Petville, which boasts more than 19 million virtual pet owners, and Treasure Isle, which has 27 million fans digging for gold on an animated island.

She doesn’t fit the stereotype of the typical gamer. But as the appetite for social network-based games continues to grow, the definition of “gamer” is changing.

A survey done this year by Information Solutions Group for PopCap Games (the people behind the game Bejeweled) showed that the average social gamer is 43 years old. More than half are women and more than a quarter are married, with children living at home.

The popularity of social games has made a huge load of money for their creators. Zynga, the heavyweight behind Farmville, Petville and Treasure Isle, is said to be worth $4 billion. According to a recent cover story in Business Week magazine, U.S. annual revenues from social games reached $720 million in 2009 and are projected to jump to $2 billion by 2012.

On Farmville, which is free to play, participants gain points and virtual coins for growing and developing their farms and adding “neighbours” to their Farmville network. Users can also pay real cash to buy special items for their farms.

“It’s one of those never-ending games,” explains Mann, who has never lived on a farm and harbours no agricultural fantasies. She signed up for Farmville after repeated requests from friends to join.

“I thought it was kind of silly, but I just kept playing. It’s kind of addictive. You just get stuck playing them and you just don’t give it up.”

That’s often the case for those who embrace social games, some of which are also available on smartphones and other social-networking sites such as My-Space.

“I think it’s something that you could compare to (online) solitaire,” says Mann, whose kids all play Farmville. (Every once in a while, Mann says with a laugh, her eight-year-old will ask her to send him a virtual pig.)

“Solitaire comes with your computer, and there are probably millions of people who, just for something to do, click on that solitaire game and play it. This is just one of those things that’s just something to do to waste time, and that’s probably why it’s so appealing to so many people.”

It helps that games like Farmville are simple and non-violent, and winning doesn’t require multi-button co-ordination and military tactics.

“You don’t have to be a genius to play,” Mann says with a laugh.

Developers see huge potential in social games.

“When I was at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco back in March, (social gaming) was the talk of the show,” says Logan Foster, whose Edmonton company, Max Gaming, is working on a game for Facebook.

Games based in social networks make big bucks fast, says Foster. While a traditional video game for consoles like Xbox and PlayStation might cost millions of dollars to make, one like Farmville would cost, at most, $500,000, and end up bringing in profits of $150,000 to $175,000 a week.

“The catch is that they burn out very quickly,” he says. They ride the viral wave, jumping from friend to friend until people move on to the next hot thing.

Of course, now that social games are so ubiquitous, it’s hard to go a day without Facebook telling you someone gave your friend a cow, there are as many haters out there as there are lovers. Search “I hate Farmville” on Facebook and more than 500 groups will turn up.

There’s also been controversy over alleged scams, with some Zynga players complaining they’ve been tricked into paying real money for in-game “offers” purported to give special perks.

Last month, the U.K.’s Guardian newspaper reported that a 12-year-old spent more than $1,300 on Farmville, while a quarter of PopCap’s survey respondents said they’ve been misled by an ad or other special offer relating to a social-networking game.

(Zynga did not respond to an interview request for this story.)

Still, people keep on playing. Mann, for one, isn’t worried. Keeping social gaming fun, rather than expensive, is simple, she says: “Don’t use your credit card for a silly game on Facebook. Just know that it’s addictive, and just have fun.”