Will games destroy the Facebook community?

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As games become a more prevalent part of the Facebook experience, games are changing the way that users see Facebook. For many gamers, their “gaming” friends on Xbox Live, Xfire or WoW are not real-world friends: they are people who first and foremost have the game in common.

This is beginning to emerge on Facebook as well. Gamers are adding friends who they don’t know because they are both playing Farmville, Pet Society or some other Facebook game, and many of the games reward you for having lots of friends in the game. A-ya Chiu of Taiwan, for example has 4,500 friends on Facebook, many of whom were added because of Pet Society.

This is a fundamental shift away from Facebook’s original purpose of being a place to communicate with people that you already know. I’m keen to see how Facebook reacts to this development, which threatens some of the social ties that have bound the Facebook global community together.

What do you think? Are games bad for Facebook?

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