Computer games are a great way to spend our free time, they help us have fun for free.

I like games that can be played in teams, so I can invite friends to play too, and it’s more fun than playing with strangers.

Whenever I have some available time I like playing what I like to call “small games”, and I mean cards any other non strategy game.

Strategy games are “big games”, they imply more concentration, more time and a good disposition. I have friends that meet weekly to make such games sessions, they create teams and play against each other. There are strategy games that look so real! Killing people, monsters, going trough a tunnel or saving lives, the scenario seems so real. Maybe that’s why even grown up people spend a lot of time in front of the computer relaxing with such games. Sometime you can not control the time you spend playing, and here is a problem.

There are studies that reveal the danger that computer games represent, because they “steal” our time and make us forget about reality. Strategy games are often catchy, especially for children. They like to play and win, and they are not aware of the fact that they need to spend less time in front of the computer. Monsters that appear in such games make children more aggressive, say the psychologists. Especially when the child is very small. They tend to imitate the gestures they see in those games and so they become more solitary and aggressive with friends and family. The isolation is not good for children. Isolation is the first sign that demonstrates that children prefer computer games monsters than socializing. Children should understand that the world they see in this games is just virtual, that nothing is for real and, in most of the cases, those places and monster heroes do not exist.

Monsters from this games are created to kill and destroy. A child can understand this is something normal that should happen every day, and so he feels like a hero that needs to save the world.

90% from the teenagers play computer games, and 15% may be dependent of this kind of activity. Some children admit that they play over 12 hours a day! Even grown up men recognized they lost their jobs of families because they considered winning a game more important.

If the children (or any other persons that love to play) understand that the dangerous things may be part of our lives only in small quantities and only for fun, I am sure that computer games (even monsters) would not be a big problem. It’s very important to take care especially of our children.

Mobile games are great inventions! When they can be free downloaded, the joy is bigger!

I am a big fan of cell phone games. It’s a great and funny way of spending time. I like this occupation especially when I travel, because I get bored of listening to music all the time. I like playing all kind of games. Mobile games are easy to understand and to play. I like to play even during classes, because nobody notices J Even on my way to school, I like to avoid the looks from the people from the bus, and listening to music would distract me too much.

Downloading free mobile games is great, because if you get bored of one game, you can just change it with another one and prepare for another day. There are still some traps that we should be careful at. Some sites may lie. You might search for free mobile games and you might find free games, but most of them ask you to create an account. This is not much of a problem, because you may use the account to download more games in the future. But some sites say they offer free games, and in the end they ask for money.

You should be careful when you download something, because that could be a virus pack and this would not be good for your cell phones. Most of the sites ask for your email to send you notifications when a new game appears or any other news.

Most games and applications available are for Iphones, and with a phone like that you can not complain you are bored. From strategy games to card games, this phone ca support anything and ca be a great source of fun.

Not all phones support games, that’s why a new version of cell phone is better for you, so you can have the game you want. There are categories, there are games for children, girls, boys, cars games or anything your heart desires.

They help you loose time in case you have too much, just like computer games. The difference is that cell phones are available everywhere and anytime and are easy to carry around.

It’s funny how we get excited when we win a game, even if no one knows why we are smiling about. I use to play cell phone games before I go to sleep, but I use to play the most boring one, so I get quickly bored and want to sleep.

It’s great what we can do with cell phones and computers…I agree that cell phones offer us large possibilities, from listening to music, radio, calling whoever we want and playing our favourite games.



ME? I don’t like solving puzzle games….I have not enough patience to do something like that and I don’t feel that it offers me any kind of satisfaction. But I admire people that like to solve puzzles, like my brother. He has over 20 puzzle games, each of them with 500-2500 pieces. Sometimes he just stays locked in his room to finish the puzzle, especially when it’s a new achieved one. He remade each for about three times, and he is convinced that a new puzzle game would make him happy ….

He likes especially puzzles with great images, and I mean great places on earth, special cities, unique castles or strange buildings. The pieces are so little that you have to try several times to just find the perfect match and this is for me really hard. But I also think this makes the passionate people eager to see the beautiful result. My brother just says that puzzles are something challenging, that every new piece he matches makes him want to keep on going. In the end, the results are amazing, and I am sure he is proud of himself. It’s a great hobby, and it’s interactive.

I’ve heard of people who gather together to solve a puzzle, and they find this entertaining and fun, and there’s a competition going on, who makes the most matches per minute. It’s a brain exercise that makes you react fast and pay attention.

The computer puzzles are not the same as the real ones, because they cannot offer you that part of originality. But there are still users that prefer this kind of games, maybe because it’s cheaper (You don’t have to buy the puzzle, which are mostly, not really cheap). Usually for a normal puzzle you need some space, if it’s a big one, and that table will be out of any other use until you finish the puzzle.

Children are also very pleased with this kind of occupation, it makes them achieve patience and concentrate. In the end, if he manages to solve it, parents might observe that this can be one of his hobbies or, if not, he is certainly a patience person that likes challenging activities…There are this puzzles for children with cartoons characters, Disney World and Princesses, and this will definitely make the child eager to see the result.

I read even about personalized puzzles, with your own picture, name or anything else you might want. I find this great, it’s a perfect and unique gift. I’m sure that a passionate person about puzzles will appreciate this, “constructing” his own image.

Although I’m not that pleased with the idea of making a puzzle on my own, I always appreciate the results and encourage people too keep on doing this beautiful work!

Most of you probably have a Facebook account, and most probably know or play Pet Society, Treasure Island, Cafe World, Bowling Buddies, Tower Bloxx, Social Town, Poker or Farmville. All of them are strategy and social games, exclusively available on this networking utility. If you have tried at least one of them by now you are probably addicted, especially if you tried Farmville.

Farmville is a real-time simulation game developed by Zynga, launched in June 2009 and available exclusively as an application on the Facebook network. The game allows players to manage and develop a farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees and raising livestock. From its launching, Farmville has become the most popular online game, with users representing over 20% of the Facebook users and over 1% of the population of the world. Still, the company considers  Farmville to be in a Beta testing stage even if the game is actually a clone of the popular FarmTown.

Lately, Farmville has been in the middle of a very disputed controversy. Apart from the fact that in the second part of 2009 the game had 63 million active users, being surpassed at the begging of the 2010 by Texas Hold-em Poker with 14 million daily players (Farmville still has about 8 million daily active gamers), Zynga has given Farmville users virtual cash for various advertising offers. For instance, the players would get virtual currency for signing up certain sites, like Netflix. The company has been accused of cheating its users through misleading offers, such as filling up surveys or IQ tests which in fact subscribe the users to an unwanted service, most of the times appearing on their phone bill. Inspite of the accusations, Facebook continues this policy because an important part of the money obtained from such leads is being reinvested inside the Facebook network. Still, Zynga removed all virtual cash offers in November 2009 but only on the pages of farmville.com domain. Even though the users that actually spend real money to obtain certain advantages in the game are a small percent of the total users, authorities suspect that most of them are actually underage, even though children under the age of 14 are not allowed to have a Facebook account. But if they really exist, the network will verify and cancel them. Still, the developing company, Zynga had 150 million profit last year from these practices.

Beyond the existing controversy, Farmville continues to be a very interesting phenomenon. More than 40 million virtual farms being registered in the farmville.com domain, 20 times more than the actual U.S. farms and still growing, the game reflects the condition of postmodern virtual farmers, tired of their lives in urban jungles around the world. Farmville users are actually given the possibility to achieve goods, to develop and to have a certain lifestyle, currently not available in this restrictive times.

Nowadays chess is more and more about human-computer chess matches and for a while, forty years ago, it was quite unclear whether any chess  program would ever be able to defeat the expertise of top humans. That`s why, in 1969 International Master David Levy made a famous bet, that no chess computer will be able to beat him in the next ten years. In 1978, he won his bet by beating Chess 4.7, the strongest computer at the time and predicted that it would not be so long before he would be surpassed and he was right again as it has been proved in 1989, when David Levy was defeated by the computer Deep Thought in an exhibition match.

At that time, Deep Thought was still below the World Championship Levels, as then number one chess-player of the world Garry Kasparov demonstrated with his two victories from 1989. It was not until 1996, when Kasparov lost his first game to a computer with IBM`s Deep Blue at a tournament.  It was the first time for the reigning world champion to loose to a computer using regular time controls but he regrouped himself to win three and draw two of the remaining five games of the match for an actual convincing victory. In May 1997, an updated version of the Deep Blue defeated Kasparov in a return event and with an increasing processing power, chess programs running on commercially available workstations began to rival top players.

Most of these games were not played at normal time controls and as a result, at least  in fast games, computers played better than humans but at classical time controls, at which a player`s rating is determined, the advantage was not so clear. In 2000, commercially available programs such as Junior or Fritz were able to draw matches against former champion Garry Kasparov and classical world champion Vladimir Kramnik. In 2005 , Hydra, a dedicated chess computer with custom hardware and sixty-four processors and also winner of the 14th IPCCC in the same year defeated seventh ranked Michael Adams and chess engines continue to improve. In 2009, chess engines running on slower hardware have reached the grandmaster level, as a result a mobile phone won a category 6 tournament, a performance rating 2898. Chess engine, Hiarcs 13 running inside the Pocket Fritz 4 on the mobile phone HTC Touch HD won the Copa Mercosur in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Pocket Fritz4 searches less than 20,000 positions per second in contrast to supercomputers such as Deep Blue, that searched 200 million positions per second bu the Pocket Fritz 4`s higher performance came from being smarter and not faster.

In the beginning, no one understood all the ramifications of having a super-grandmaster on its laptop and what would this mean for professional chess, but chess computers definitely have an effect on the quality of human chess. In 1998, Kasparov launched Advanced Chess, a form of chess where a human plays against another human and both have access to computers to enhance their strength. The result was an advanced player, stronger than a human or computer alone, although this has not been proven. A rapid proliferation of powerful chess software and the heavy use of computer analysis has pushed the game itself in new directions. The machine doesn`t care about style,  patterns or hundred of years of established theory. It just counts up the values of the chess pieces, analyzes a few billion moves and counts them up again.

What can you say about romance novels? Most of them are one-plot, displaying heaving bosoms, pectorals, furtive sighs and physical attraction nurtured by a certain kind of dislike which eventually turns into lust and love. If you are a fan of all the above mentioned elements in a book or a movie you will probably enjoy Harlequin Presents: Hidden Object of Desire, a romance-type story in the world of gaming.

Leading romance publisher Harlquin Enterprises has teamed up with tha casual game producer Big Fish Games to produce this romantic novel-like type computer game, Hidden Object of desire. The game could be called a mash-up of a romance novel and hidden objects game, based on the Harlequin miniseries “The Royal House of Karedes”. Without any further details, the premise is already simple.

Journalist Allie, on behalf of the Midwest Messenger, and her photographer arrive in the Kingdom of Adamas to cover the Aristan crown prince 30th birthday. With one half of the famous Stefani Diamond missing, the nation is unable to crown  either Prince Karedes from the island Aristo (or his opposite on the island of Calista) as king and the nation becomes  suddenly restless. But things become immediately more interesting for the American tourists when Allie meets the devilishly handsome charming ladies man of the prince and her photographer Shaun is thrown in jail after being accused of stealing the other half of the Stefani Diamond. They quickly uncover a plot that threatens the prince from his inner circle and Allie will have to protect the prince and her heart.

Even though Allie`s on a quest to find some breaking news in the kingdom of Adamas, she must now choose  between her friend`s well being and true love. The bachelor prince is the most enchanting man she has ever met, but she must fend off his charming advances, long enough to figure out what is really going on. Your mission: to help Allie find valuable clues. The story progresses with chapter headings, dialogue word balloons and torsos at the bottom of the screen, and with occasional  fullscreen comicstrip.

This is the first computer game in a series of games for the romance novel aficionado that enjoys a casual game every now and then. The game is available for purchase and costs only $6.99. So, if you have what it takes to help Allie solve the mysteries, get the handsome guy and find those hidden objects of desire you will be more than happy to know that Big Fish Games will let you get your feet with a free hour trial.

Most of the reviewers considered Harlequin Presents: Hidden Object of Desire a solid gameplay but a trite story with bad writing, boring mini-games and lack of imagination. The actual “hidden objects” levels were considered rudimentary, completely lacking imagination . The player gets a list of objects and will have to search a clumsily assembled room full of junk for them and will need at least one item to advance the plot, the photographer`s hidden memory card or the dress Allie will be wearing to the gala, objects that will not actually be treated any differently than anything else on the list. So the gamer has to find them and get a brief comment from the character and then get back to searching.

The environments are not particularly interesting or well drawn and Aristo is not the exotic location you would probably expect but if you are a truly Harlequin fan or a big-hearted romantic you may find this predictable story quite enjoyable.

Over the last few years, one of the most interesting events related with gaming is the increasing presence of such activities in libraries. Most of such institutions have been turning to gaming as a way of bringing in new demographic groups and exposing them to library services. This is mostly an American phenomenon and recently an American Library Association publication highlighted different types of activities in libraries, while other librarians have written about their experiences in books and online.

Gaming is rapidly growing in the area of media sales, as games sales are faster growing than box office sales and are predicted grow beyond music sales in the near future. Gaming in the library is not something new and it used to cause controversy in the past when libraries started adding fiction to their offerings and circulating recreational videos. Libraries are creating controversy today by supporting gaming through in-house gaming activities and circulating gaming material but the reality is that actual little data about how many libraries are supporting gaming and in what ways is being known.

A recent survey showed that most U.S. public libraries support gaming, at least seven out of ten of the public surveyed libraries supported gaming in some way. For decades, these institutions have supported gaming  by providing chess sets and other games in the children`s area but the most recent games enjoyed by patrons in libraries are the Web-based games. Even more interesting is the fact that women over the age of 40 are more likely to play these games than other demographic groups. Still, a big contrast  exists between the types of games offered by libraries and that`s why most of the researchers prefer to have a holistic perspective of the gaming in order to provide convincing results for their surveys.

What is sure is that larger libraries are more likely to support gaming and most of them host formal gaming programs including: board games, traditional games, console games, physical games, summer reading, card games, computer games and role playing games and 82% of the libraries did allow patrons to play games on the computer in the libraries as a part of an important strategy to bring gaming into their community. Libraries that support the recreational needs of their patrons through fiction or movies are simply extending their services to the popular entertainment media for a growing sector of the population.

Introducing the topic of gaming in a polite conversation might  actually kill it because most of the people believe that games are for children or adults who are trying to regain a lost adolescence, but the truth is that games can be a positive force in the teaching of history or other subjects. Recently, books and software with suggestions for designing gaming programs in library appeared. These materials can help librarians with sample forms, bibliographies and gamer`s glossary included for reference and seem essential to help developing collections and services that advance the needs and the skills of the young people they serve and not only.

As a result of this growing reality, American Libraries declared November 14 as National Gaming Day and it seems there is no turning back in this issue. So, game on!

If you have probably never heard about Sid Meier, the great Canadian programmer and game designer, you must know the Pirates!, one of the most popular computer games of all times. With a long history behind, Pirates is still very popular today due to its newest versions, the 2004 remake for Microsoft Windows and the 2008 Sid Meier`s Pirates! Mobile released by Oasys Mobile.

Pirates! is a computer game created by Sid Meier, first published in 1987 and developed by MicroPose. It was the first time when the company used the name of a creator in a game`s title, making considerable efforts to attract some of the earlier fans of Meier`s games, most of which were flight simulators. The game has been widely ported from the original Commodore 64 version to AppleII(1987), as a PC Booter(1987), to AppleIIGS(1987),  Macintosh(1988), Amstrad CPC(1988), AtariST(1989), Amiga(1990) and the Nintendo Entertainment System (1991).

Pirates! is a single-player game, a simulation of the life of a pirate(more accurately a privateer) in the Spanish Main in the 16th, 17th and 18th century. The player receives a letter of marque authorizing service as a privateer for Spain, the Dutch Republic, England and France in the Carribean. His loyalties may change over the course of the game, holding ranks with multiple countries and may turn to piracy  at anytime. What made it very popular was the fact that the game has no predetermined end, although as time passes, recruiting new crew members gets more difficult and as the character ages the same happens with fighting and the deteriorating health will eventually force the character into retirement. The game ends when the player retires at which point the character is given a position for his future life,  from beggar to King`s advisory. More than being an open-ended gameplay, Pirates! tests a wide range of skills: hand-eye coordination, tactical abilities and strategic thinking. With this game you have a wide-open world in a real time, open-ended possibilities, a multi genre game with role playing, action, strategy elements in very attractive 3D graphics.

The game won  Computer Gaming World`s Actiongame Prize of the year 1988 and has been voted one the top twenty games of all time by Computer Gaming World in November 1996 and since then  publishers try to develop and to adapt the concept to the new technologies.Nowadays the game is even more popular and this can be easily understood if you visit  the site dedicated to all the addicted players from around the world.

In the world of pirates computer games, the newest version of Pirates! is being played by thousands of gamers all around the globe and if you like classic strategy games spiced up with swordfighting, ship-battles, land-battles, digging for treasures and finding lost relatives, you will soon become one of them.

For decades, extortion for money has been a powerful weapon for the Italian mafia to shakedown successful bussinesses and underworld operations. These extortions were legendary and such powerful images have been implemented in the American collective psyche through the popular gangster movies. Nowadays, mafia criminals wearing dark suits , glasses and threats of bloodshed are not a reality anymore. Due to the powerful Internet medium we are dealing with a new style of gangsterism, not quite visible but more powerful than in the past. This new-style  involves extortion of gambling websites carried out in the cyberspace by very powerful human forces, communicating demands all over the globe.

This is the case of the Russian mafia, extorting gambling websites of millions of dollars, hacking the websites and shuting down operations. Once a site is inoperable, the extortionists contact the website owners to ask for money. As a result, the afraid customers will place bets on rival gambling sites and produce great losses for a certain website owner. Nowadays, with the advancement of technology, Internet has emerged a popular multi-billion dollars industry and we are facing a new type of gambler, who preffers to stay  at home, in front of the computer instead of traveling to Las Vegas to wage bets. This kind of gambler will place online bets  to worldwide casinos.

Mafia criminals use software tools to hack into websites of online gambling, corporate bussiness and financial institutions, ripping off millions of dollars in what is becoming an increasing global epidemic. According to the law enforcement agencies there is an increasing number of reports of organized criminal gangs carrying out denial-of-service (DOS) attacks with the intention to blackmail online gambling and ecommerce websites. These attacks have seriously affected the online casinos, who rely on their Worldpay system for their transactions and payment services.

DK Matai of MI2G, which monitors unauthorized computer hacking has reported criminal syndicates operating  from Russia and Eastern Europe having targeted online payments systems, mostly belonging to gambling sites. Technically, DOS attacks involve flooding a website with malicious traffic and exhausting the servers with false requests, resulting a great number of  frustrated customers who will leave for a competing website. Most of this criminal attacks come from Russia, Eastern Europe and recently Brasil, countries with  a high level of programming talents and  this is possible mainly because of the lacking cyberlaws and government monitoring. In the given conditions, a good Internet connection with some basic hacking knowledge and DOS tools will make this quite an easy task.

These kind of actions produce a huge damage for the global economy with both denial-of-service and productivity losses. Such criminal actions are closely watched by the FBI  and the Britain`s Hi-Tech National Crime Unit (NCU) but a real evaluation of this situation is being hindered by the refusal of the victims to report the threat, as it might seriously put them to risk.

In the early 90`s a new form of entertainment appeared through the growing popularity of dedicated game console machines. Most of you probably remember them because of their consecrated characters: Sonic the Hedgehog or the extremely popular Super Mario Brothers. With the appearance of the Internet we find ourselves in front of a new gaming medium consecrated as a new and challenging gaming forum. New games emerged, enabling people to link up online and to game together.

The rise  of computer games as a leisure phenomenon was subject to little research and when it actually happened, researchers preferred a quantitative perspective rather than a qualitative one and mostly concentrated on the more negative aspects: excessive play and addiction.

Almost all of the research studies focused on arcade and console games.

Most of the studies showed that on the Internet, as a new medium for video games, the majority of the players were males, approximately 85% and over 60% of them were older than 19 years. The results of these recent surveys attempt to break a consecrated stereotypical image of an adolescent  online gamer. It has been proved that the typical online player is not a socially withdrawn young male with limited sex role identity, even though this kind of image continues to be misplaced and the image of a typical gamer is seen as socially negative, remaining firmly within  what has been called youth culture.

One of the positive aspects of the online gaming phenomenon has been displayed by the results of a recent online empirical survey, indicating that both altruism and reciprocity influence prosocial behavior simultaneously. So, male players are more likely than female players to seek friendship of opposite sex and for most of them the interaction among players is more important than actually playing the online game, creating premises for a prosocial behavior.

Online game communities, more than other virtual communities are designed to promote a real-world look and feel within the borders and many other unique properties of the cyberspace where anonymity rules. That why some of the researchers are still skeptic about how the results of previous prosocial behavior studies might be applicable to online communities. Still, in the case of social exchange theory, stating the expectation of obtaining  feedback and rewards after helping a person, virtual communities studies draw some very interesting conclusions. In this case, the feedback of reciprocity may come from the entire community rather than from a specific helped person.

Other studies regarding the impact of the online gaming showed that sometimes in the virtual gaming space, sex roles are changed and some of the online participants even play avatars of the opposite sex. Also the case of the  physical gaming space, mainly Internet Cafes, is very interesting because they were speculated as a masculine space and thus considered highly gendered. But male and female respondents exhibited similar patterns when predicting their intentions and behavior towards visiting Internet Cafes.

If you have probably thought that video games, computer games and Internet Cafes are part from a male`s adolescent  universe only, you were not entirely wrong, but stereotypical.The above mentioned aspects are just a few research aspects of this very challenging subject. Online gaming is a very powerful phenomenon, likely to produce addiction but with subtitle, yet numerous positive aspects, essential for a healthy, personal and social attitude.