lost in games

I know that slavery was officiallly abolished during the previous century but over the end of last week i have been buying and selling people all over the world for a profit and increasing my investment worth total in a Forbes style ranking system.

But first things first.

Facebook for me so far has been merely a subsitute of emailing friends living abroad. Social networking and applications? What’s that? 99% of the people in there are also people that i actually know in person. There is the odd one here and there and for the most part there was no digital social networking. Nor were there any applications in my wall. The spam of invites i have continuously been receiving has also been consistently ignored with the click of a button with the same name. I was not bothered at all.

Until last Thursday. During a visit to a friend’s flat when he started talking about buying and selling people’s photos on Facebook using an application called Owned. Needless to say the majority of these were of women. Out of curiousity than real interest i asked him to explain how it works. It is as simple as it sounds. You just bid on photos and make profits when these are then acquired by others similar to regular stocks. You also get funds when you own photos get bought and sold. And at any given time someone owns the photos. Unlike stocks however you really care about some of them. Did i mention that the most traded and high valued photos are of women….? You get attached and it usually ends up with 2-3 people bidding over some girl’s photo.

As i left my friend’s flat i was more surprised by the effort and time he invested in this application more than the actual application. Could not figure it out. Sure it’s sort of fun but what’s the point? I woke up the next morning and found that a couple of my own investments had been bought and so did my own personal photo. I had a strange feeling of loss and pride combined. “Loss” for a photo of a girl i was particularly fond of but also pride cause someone actually “spent” money to acquire my own photo.

I spent a lot of my time on Friday raising funds (by sending gifts/spam to my friends) and buying back the photo i lost and also investing smartly in some promising ones. With a mixture a boredom at work and real interest in owning a photo of a real person i was hooked. Or should i say owned by a “pointless” application for the whole of Friday.

Facebook has come out of nowhere invading offices, flats and dorms. I can’t see myself or my friend bothering with Owned after 1-2 weeks but applications similar to this, which involve human interaction are getting people hooked all over and i have to say i really want to see what they will come up with next.