Are social games taking over traditional computer games? (Xbox 360, Friends, console)

[ragnarkar]

I talked with a group of old college friends (they're all in their mid to late 20s) and we brought up computer gaming. Seems they were all into it but they were shocked to hear that I'm into World of Warcraft. They were like, who wants to play that game when they're social games on Facebook like Farmville.

I've grown up with games like Doom, Starcraft, Sim City, Final Fantasy, etc. well over half of my life and I still finding it shocking those Facebook games are catching on with mainstream society much faster..

*rant*

[Saintess]

You can still socialize in multiplayer games. It'll be a very big difference in the people you chat with, but it's still possible. I've had some pretty good conversations and made some good friends playing co-op and multiplayer games on my Xbox 360.

I do agree that these games like FarmVille get tons of socialized gaming activity. I used to play FarmVille, but it got boring after a while, so I went back to play those "real" games.

[missRoxyhart]

By computer games I'm guessing you mean PC and console games right? Anyway, I wouldn't worry about it, the social games are attracting all kinds of people that never really played games at all in the first place, but they're not gonna turn anyone off from real game to play the social ones exclusively. The social games are just attracting an audience that was never there, all the people who were playing real games are still playing em. Also, the real ones are already really social and getting more so, so it's not like we're behind or anything either.