If you’ve ever been addicted to a social game that involves gaining levels by repeatedly clicking on “finish quest” buttons, you’ve got to try Progress Wars. Progress Wars is Jakob Skierning’s new parody game that allows you to repeatedly click on a button to finish quests and gain levels… but that’s all there is to it.
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Kirstie Alley, the very public and notoriously inconsistent dieter, has made a cameo appearance in the Zoo World Facebook game.   The game, which revolves around building a zoo and keeping your customers happy, now allows for you to either purchase a Healthy Snack Stand item that is sponsored by Kirstie Alley, or you can buy a Kirstie Alley Greeting stand, which just sits there and looks pretty.
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Playfish has launched it’s newest game, Hotel City, on Facebook. The game is a hotel management simulator, and is in fact quite different from all the other “city” games that have been released lately. The production values are great, and the gameplay is truly innovative. We’ll have more details on the game as it goes through its first week of bug-fixing and play testing.
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Yahoo today announced that they are acquiring Citizen Sports, a company that creates fantasy sports leagues for Facebook, iPhone, Android and other devices.  The acquisition is meant to enhance Yahoo’s position in social games and fantasy sports, and “strengthen Yahoo!’s social strategy of enriching, aggregating and distributing social content from across the entire Web, and offering a highly customizable social experience.”
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What has large cuddly pandas, New York rock n’ roll, virtual coins and talking squirrels?  It’s Music Pets, one of the fastest growing games on the social gaming scene.  The game has accrued 700,000 users in only a month, and is one of the most talked about applications on my news feed.  The game is best described as a cross-breed between Pet Society and the Pandora music service…  Yes, you read that right.  Read on for the review!
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MetroGames, an Argentenian social games developer, has just secured a $5 million round of series A funding from social games developer Playdom.  The investment will be used to expand MetroGames existing selection of games and also further development on their games platform.  The release is available here.

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Just as farming games like (Lil) Green Patch, Farm Town and Farmville once surged in popularity, the city-building genre is rapidly gaining players.  Playdom’s new Social City has gained 5,600,000 users in 2 weeks and is an excellent example of a city building game; it has great graphics, a pleasant interface and some great social features.  On the other hand, the game seems to be more about the “City” and less about the “Social”.  We review the game below.
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With Flash Gaming Summit (FGS) and Game Developers Conference 2010 (GDC) now over, we’d like to take the opportunity to reflect on some of the key takeaways. One of the most discussed areas was career opportunities in the gaming industry, particularly in the area of social gaming. Here’s a few of the opportunities gleaned from various sessions, panels and interviews last week.
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To be known as a “social game”, games need to have a number of elements that encourage player engagement amongst friends.   Players need to be able to interact with their real world friends in many ways: they want to compete, cooperate, show off to and taunt friends.  To better understand the ’social’ in social games, we put together a list of the 7 elements that should be included in every social game.
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If you are looking for a job in social games, you better be ready to be guided by metrics and not just your creative genius. That’s what Scott Jennings told a small groups of gaming enthusiasts and curious minds during a conversation led by him and James Au at SXSW 2010. It was in response posed to him by Social Times about what specific skills social game developers need that traditional game developers don’t have.
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