I was just thinking about this the other day-- how tons of freemium games require you to add/invite/spam people before you can move on to the next step. This aspect of social games has always been incredibly annoying to me-- it just feels very forced and I end up knowing lots of people I really don't care for. And most of the time the game doesn't even attempt to help you with that-- the end goal is to get more players, not to make the game more interesting or fun for the user. So I was wondering...has anyone actually met new people or made friends through these games?
I used to play Zynga game such as Mafia Wars, Farmville and Cafeworld rather intensely on facebook for a time. And I went on their forums and gathered a whole lot of 'friends'. Some of them turned out to be really nice people and I had a lot of fun in the game with these folks, really appreciated their "help" and all. There were a few that seemed like potentially could become "real" friends beyond the game. But as these things are, the minute I stopped playing, we are instantly irrelevant to each other. I agree with the point that the social games do not promote social interaction as their genre indicates, it's just out to get more people to play over anything else. It's why I stopped playing them, because even my real life friends became just plain jerks playing them, there wasn't anything social about some of these anymore. It was just an endless routine of asking for things and expecting returns.
