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Talking about games is something I loved doing. I was an avid gamer myself, I played a lot of online game – mainly MMORPG to the likes of WoW, Ragnarok, Gunbound, Heroes, Maple Story and the list goes on. This was before game consoles cater online games, so I played most of these games on my desktop computer. I was once obsessed with playing online games and I spent a whole chunk of my teenage life in front of my computer screen. Heck, I even skipped school to go to Cyber Cafes to waste my money and time playing online games. Me, a girl! It was highly unusual for girls to be skipping school to be playing hardcore, gory games (at that point of time I was hooked onto playing Left 4 Dead). But that was the reality of it. There’s something so addictive about online games that can easily get people hooked.

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Left 4 Dead

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Gunbound

I was very selective of my games, however. I liked games that have story plots, or is constantly progressing the more I play it. Which is why I never was interested in Facebook games such as Farmville or Cow Clicker (which I just got to know of its existence after reading the article). I can never, never understand people who get so hooked to these games because they are honestly mundane. You do the same thing repeatedly every day just so you get to collect points, or ‘mooney’ (ha nice pun) and for what? Just so they get to decorate their farm (notice i used the word ‘decorate’ instead of ‘build’) or buy other types of cows that will not even benefit you in any kind of way. To me, I find it important to gain ‘satisfaction’ from the games I play, depending on the type. Like instead of playing Farmville, I’d rather play Harvest Moon, where it has the same concept, but better gameplay and graphic. It’s a light, no brainer game and the game progresses the more you play it. You can make a girl fall in love with you, you can get married and have kids. You can have cows and make your cows pregnant. You can grow crops, harvest them and sell them to get money. This is an example for “gamification”. Gamification is “this notion of emerging ludic elements in everyday life is called gamification. Gamification is the use of game mechanics to boost interest in non-game applications,” (Phillip Man, 2011).

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Farmville

McDonald had a farm – oh ha ha ha very smart.

But those days are long gone. I don’t even use any social media sites for about two months now (Facebook, Twitter, Instagram the three most famous social sites and the only social media sites I signed up for). Ironically I deleted them around the same time I started taking online classes. I just happened to wake up one day and decided that my life would be so much better without any social media sites. I do play games on my PS occasionally but only when I have time. I remember going on Facebook and receiving tons of requests from friends to give them life on Candy Crush or asking me to pay their farm a visit and I remember how enraged I was. It was really annoying and I felt like telling them off. But I knew all these games would just be a phase. For now it’s Flappy Bird (god knows what’s that. I don’t even have the slightest interest to even try and download it). Let’s see how long the Flappy Bird phase will last.

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Well at least I don’t have to worry about receiving game requests on Facebook now, do I?

Images via Google