Is Farmville the New ‘Jaws?’
Posted on August 7, 2010 at 8:00 am
An article in the Washington Post about the popularity of online games like Farmville, Mafia Wars, Sorority Life and updated versions of classic board and word games like Scrabble has a provocative assertion:
“Whereas the 19th century will be remembered for the creation of the modern novel, and the 20th century was dominated by movies and images on screens, I think we can now see that games will be the dominant form of entertainment in this century,” said Jon Radoff, an early Internet entrepreneur, game developer and armchair gaming historian.
If that sounds like blasphemy, consider that online games just passed e-mail as the second-most popular activity online, behind social networking, according to Nielsen. Last week, Disney paid $563.2 million to buy social game developer Playdom. Google is reportedly in talks with game companies to start a site called Google Games, having noticed that on Facebook, the fastest-growing Web site in the world, 40 percent of the company’s 500 million users regularly play social games.
Radoff predicts that these games, which are free but which charge nominal amounts for accessories and add-ons, will be a more viable business model for social networks than advertising. But what interests me more is his notion that this is the form of creative expression that fits our time better than books and movies. Is it because of the interactivity, with the player affecting the direction of the game and engaging with other players? After sororities, farms, the Mob, and fish, what will be the next venues for these games? Sports? Safari? Outer space?
as the mysterious women (or is it woman?) who drove Jimmy Stewart crazy. He plays a detective who is hired to protect the wife of a wealthy man but is unable to prevent her from committing suicide when she climbs up to the top of a tower because of his fear of heights. Then, when he meets another woman who resembles her, he becomes obsessed with making her over to look exactly like the woman who died. “All right, All right!” she says. “If I let you change me, will you love me then?” It was selected as the second greatest film of all time in 2002 by the prestigious film journal “Sight and Sound.” (First was “Citizen Kane.”) 
, including her re-teaming with Stewart in the delightful romantic comedy, “Bell, Book, and Candle,” co-starring Jack Lemmon, Elsa Manchester, and Ernie Kovacs. She plays a witch who enchants a man so that he falls in love with her, only to risk losing her powers by falling for him.