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I was looking for a third game to do a case study on when I first saw EA Playfish’s announcement that they will be releasing Sims Social soon. Looks like I wasn’t the only one looking forward to playing this, since there happened to be a lot of The Sims addicts among my friends.

I have never played The Sims. That is, until I needed a replacement for Gaia Online’s Monster Galaxy, whose frequent downtimes had caused it to fall from the top 25 of FB DAU (daily active users) and MAU (monthly active users) statistics. Now that I’ve started playing Sims Social, I found myself getting thoroughly frustrated when I kept getting this message:

To think, I had a hard time logging in when I first signed up. It doesn’t have a record on MAU and DAU reports yet but as you can see from the graphic, there are reasons why: so many people all over the world wanted to log in that their servers couldn’t handle the capacity.

That should be a good sign, right?

Anyhoo, like in most FB games, you will rely on your friends to build certain areas of your house.

Which actually shouldn’t be a problem because I noticed that all the circles in my FB contacts are actually playing this game.

I swear, besides Playdom’s Gardens of Time, this is hands down the easiest FB game to play in terms of getting help from friends. I mean, goodness, I see former students from APC and CSB, colleagues past and present, and classmates in my neighbor’s list. The only irony is that I don’t see my aunts in there yet…

Above screenshot: Watch my neighbors build another room for me. Heh.

Aaaand the downside to having so many neighbors actively playing is that you end up with so many requests to accomplish before you load the game.

This is one of the nice features that the original Sims had that will definitely gain a lot of advantage on the social gaming ground. The downside? Unlike the original Sims, where you’re allowed to date a maximum of five people, here you can only be completely monogamous. For now. I hope.

I still don’t get why I’m so addicted to this now (my character is so needy!!!!), so much that I’ve actually ignored all my other gadgets (Game of Thrones book on my Android, Persona 3 on my PSP, and DVDs I should be watching on my laptop).

Maybe I’ll be able to figure it out once I’ve done my dissertation analysis. Although…I am having doubts about featuring this since there are two reasons why it cannot fall into my study sample. Will talk about that later, I suppose.