Online, community-based games are a relatively new facet of social networking. Such sites are rapidly establishing themselves as extremely popular social networking sites due to their very nature of socialization. Daily, thousands of users are log on to these sites, meet with each other, play games and have fun. An ideal social networking place, indeed! The idea of gaming and socialization has greatly influenced both online gaming and social networking. Not only gaming sites are adopting the social networking culture - famous social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook are also attracting online gamers by providing the facility to play games online. This combination of online gaming + social networking is amazing, powerful and result-oriented. Therefore, experts believe that online gaming is the social networking trend for 2008.

Games have been an important way of social networking throughout the ages. The invention of the internet introduced online games, which gained tremendous popularity among all age groups, and have become one of the best ways to make new friends and keep in touch with them, to spend leisure time and to promote products and services. Online gaming is a community by itself, which is growing rapidly. According to USAToday.com,

“Social and gaming networks, once considered polar opposites, are cross-pollinating as online interactions replace prime-time TV and other, more traditional media experiences.”

Due to this great demand, the internet is now teeming with many different types of free and paid online games. Popular online games are Second Life, Kaneva, World of Warcraft, KartRider and LittleBigPlanet, just to name a few. For our readers’ interest, we’ll review the two most popular games, Second Life and World of Warcraft.

Second Life:

“Discover a whole new world of friends, fashion, music, videos, and fun,” is what Second Life claims.

Second Life is an online, community-based game, and it is awesome! It is a 3D virtual world game, developed by Linden Research Inc, and launched in 2003. It is based on ‘metaverse’ philosophy, where users are called ’residents’ and they have their ‘avatars’. Residents communicate with each other either through ‘text-based local chat’ or ‘IM’. Second Life is based on buying and selling earth-like regions, called grids. Residents buy and sell property, build and manage landmarks and exchange other items in Second Life for a currency called the “Linden Dollars” (or simply L$). An exciting feature is that in addition to walking, running and driving to move around, avatars can also fly! In SL, residents can create applications in different domains such as education, religion, embassies and arts.

The best part about Second Life is its advance level social networking services. It is a great social networking site, indeed! Surveys and statistics show some amazing results about this social networking, gaming site.

“Over 2 million people have taken the leap by interacting online with other in-world
residents. And these people are not kids. The average age of Second Life users is now 32, with a majority being female and most are technically adept. To add to this, Linden Labs states over $500,000 in transactions are taken place daily in SL, and transactions are rising at a fast pace.”

Second Life is not just a place to meet with friends and play games online. It is establishing an emerging marketplace, where companies are investing to market themselves. Because the site gets huge traffic, business owners believe it will be a great place to introduce their business to their targeted market. According to surveys,

“Some real world news agencies like Reuters, among others, have set up shop in SL. EBay has a huge investment in Second Life. The list goes on and on. Small, medium, and large corporations are paying serious money to consultant agencies to get set up in this new market place.”

Second Life is now internationally recognized and has a large clientele, covering both English and non-English speaking customers. Surely, it is a social networking site for the year 2008.

World of Warcraft:

World of Warcraft (WoW) is another popular online, community-based game. It is a massive multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), which holds 62% share of the gaming market with 10 million subscribers. WoW is a product of Blizzard Entertainment and was first released in 1994. The main theme of the game is to create avatars within a game world, and then play with them. An avatar can explore the landscape, fight with monsters and complete quests. Players can play two types of games in the World of Warcraft: player versus player (PvP) and player versus environment (PvE). In PvP game, open combat between players is allowed, while a PvE game focuses mainly on defeating monsters and completing quests. It also allows players to do different monetary transactions during game play, such as depositing treasures or crafted items in the bank, buying and selling on auction houses, etc.

The most exciting feature of WoW is its virtual community and advanced level of social networking services. In the WOW virtual community, players can participate in different creative activities like fan artwork and storytelling and can download machinima videos. The World of Warcraft community is no doubt a great social networking community!

Social networking sites and online gaming sites are helping each other reach the next level. Gaming sites want to improve their reach and social networking sites want to increase their hits. Hence, online gaming is the ultimate social networking experience.

References:

1. http://www.usatoday.com/tech/gaming/2007-11-22-socialgames_N.htm
2. http://ezinearticles.com/?Second-Life—A-3D-Virtual-World&id=395753
3. http://en.wikipedia.org/

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