FarmVille, other online social games mean big business, and bonding

More than 200 million people play social games every month, and the numbers grow by the thousands every day. “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.

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