Posts with tag social-gaming

The other day over dinner, my wife and I were talking about a new game on Facebook and how easy it would be for us to game the system. My brother-in-law stopped us mid-conversation and asked, "What the hell happened to you two? You used to be hardcore raiders! Now you're talking about min-maxing a Facebook game!"

My wife and I looked sheepishly at each other and hung our heads in shame. This is what it had come to. While we're committed to playing together come Cataclysm, we had now been reduced to the most casual of casual gamers -- playing browser-based games with no real, complex story or engaging gameplay. At least, nothing as complex or engaging as the World of Warcraft. But the reality is that casual gaming is a bigger phenomenon than we can imagine. Zynga's Farmville has over 61.6 million active users -- that's almost six times WoW's 11.5 million subscriber base. Never mind that World of Warcraft is subscription-based and that not all of Farmville's players are paying customers. Forget about revenue for a moment. That's 61.6 million gamers playing one game.

Higher Learning is one of the most peaceful achievements in the game (all you have to do are read a few books that spawn around Dalaran), but it's no less desirable for that -- the achievement grants a miniature Arcane Elemental pet that looks awesome. Teniblue over on WoW Ladies has a few good tips if you're trying to get all edumacated in Dalaran -- she's got links to two addons (including the perfectly-named Dalaran University) to use to help you track spawn times, and she's got a link to Breanni's great guide over on WarcraftPets.com (which our own Allison R. touched on briefly in a recent OverAchiever post).

What's fun about this achievement is that reading the books won't delete them, so it can be very social -- people have created #bookclub channels on many servers to keep track of when and where books are appearing in the city. That makes it a lot more fun than the, say, cooking daily quest that sends you after mushrooms in the sewers. It actually makes this social game, well, social.

So next time you see a book sitting around the city, be sure to give a shout to the chat channel -- here's one in-game situation where everybody can benefit from a little extra chatting.