Cityville and Farmville use the same psychology that massively-multiplayer online role-playing games have used for years. Endless amounts of crafting, storytelling, questing, and trade through a virtual world, much of which requires virtual social interaction.

Wrap your head around this: World of Warcraft, the most popular online game, currently has more than 12 million subscribers! Each of these people pay $15 a month to continue playing. On top of that, the game was released in November 2004 and still has that many people playing and subscribing. There is a lot of money and effort invested in games like this.

Do Cityville and Farmville have options for microtransactions, where you can pay small amounts of money at a time for money, items or upgrades?

Given the declining quality of game play in the genre, the next game will played on a cell phone using text and emoticons only. But will have 2 billion players the first week.

It seems like the natural next step… :p

I still play a couple of other ones, and post to my wall (because I assume everyone but my friends who share those games have blocked the apps) but I can feel the annoyance building and the fun fading. I do actually like the contact it gives me with some people I rarely see – sort of the fb equivalent of a chain email about kittens. But the social gaming thing doesn’t work so well if it ends up annoying your friends!