Building Happiness: Lessons I Learned through Facebook Games

Originally published at Am I the Only One Dancing?. Please leave any comments there.

cc by Marc van der Chijs

I’m in the middle of plowing up all my fields and tying up all my loose ends, and saying goodbye to my pigs and sheep and chickens. I (re) started playing several Facebook games three weeks ago, as a bit of a happiness experiment (and, let’s face it, because I wanted to have an excuse). Experiment over, I am now in the process of tidying up my farm, my city, my frontier village, and my medieval fair. My English time garden will remain open. This post will tell you why.

Once upon a time, I played Facebook games (mostly Farmville, YoVille, Restaurant City, Mafia Wars, and Vampire Wars, back then) pretty regularly, for about a year. I got to the point where I had so much gold in Mafia Wars and Vampire Wars that I could buy anything – unless it was a ‘pay real money’ item. I had a nice farm going in Farmville, and an attractive, midsized restaurant in Restaurant City. YoVille I never did get the hang of, so I was still living in an underdecorated apartment (even virtually, I don’t do housework, apparently).

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