The next step in gaming…

It doesn’t seem to matter which way you turn anymore, the future of social networking and gaming is merging at every corner.

Word with Friends.

Draw Something.

Scramble with Friends.

Dice with Buddies.

Song Pop.

Oh the list could go on and on. If you have access to a smartphone or, for that matter, Facebook, the games are coming from all over.

It’s about time to check the virtual farm, isn’t it? Or maybe it’s time to collect rent from somewhere in your city, of which you built from a small town to a major metropolitan area.

There’s so many games out there, I can’t keep up. Well, I don’t even really want to try to keep up. I’m on all of these games. But I can only pay attention to one or two at a time. If I did all of them, I’d never get anything done.

I guess I could set aside 15 minutes a day and play just that span. Maybe then I’d be able to keep up on everything. Who knows.

But there are so many games!

And then the ones that aren’t even connected to others. Such as Angry Birds. Or Bejeweled Blitz. (For the record, there’s a Bejeweled game for playing others… but I don’t know how to actually score big and losing everything by more than 200,000 points doesn’t seem fun). There’s Boggle and Tiny Tower and Temple Run. Don’t forget Doodle Jump or Order Up or Parking Frenzy.

Holy cow can it go on and on!

But it’s those social ones that can really get you.

You find opponents who are better than you and you want to get better to beat them. Or you find ones who are worse than you and you want to continue to play them and stomp them to boost your stats.

Those stats are huge, too!

My biggest addiction is Dice with Buddies. It’s quick to play and you can check in on it here and there. It’s basically Yahtzee, with a different name.

It’s funny with video games. I’ve played them throughout my life, but I’ve never gotten too into them. As a kid, there was the Atari 2600. Yes, I’m serious. And yes, it was an awesome system. In fact, I’d love to get my hands on a working one because I still have a bunch of the games. Talk about a throwback of fun. And what a great blog post it would make. Oh the games were awesome. Frogger. Pitfall. Donkey Kong. Elevator Action. Defender. Space Invaders. I could go on and on.

From there, it was the flip-open Nintendo. That’s where the likes of Super Mario Brothers came to life. Games like Pro Wrestling and Ice Hockey were awesome. And Tecmo Super Bowl? Awesome! And getting to and beating Mike Tyson was one of the greatest things one would ever do in gaming!

I received a Super Nintendo for Christmas one year and that was the latest and greatest in gaming. It was during the Sega wars and things like that.

Then came Playstation. Wow.

That’s as far as I went. The new systems are incredible. The graphics? Amazing. And the fact that people can hook up and play online (which is a total blast, for the record) is insanely cool.

Imagine being able to play someone in the old days of Atari baseball? As if!

Now there are systems like the Wii, where one can do so many things with the game.

But not everybody sinks money into the gaming systems. They have their phones. Computers. iPads. And whatever else. So that makes social networking games — where you can utilize Facebook and Twitter to find friends to play against — an even bigger market.

It’s items like this that make me really wish I had done something in college with gaming and learning how to make these games. Then I’d just need the perfect idea and a way to do it.

Maybe I could still make my millions. It’s never too late, is it?

Never mind. No time. I need to figure a way to draw “hula.”

Feel free to leave a comment, or e-mail P.J. at hoohaablog [at] gmail.com. Also, please “Like” HooHaa Blog on Facebook!