Facebook games

As a child, I was extremely playful. This made me also efficient in everything that I did. I was required to do dishes by the time I was five years old. I had my own “lines” of corn to plant or harvest, or even weed before I was ten. Still, I looked for my own time to be a child. To get this time, I was forced to be very fast in doing my tasks so that I could go and play with my friends outside. Most of our games were very simple. We made our own balls and ropes to play with, and we played a lot with stones and sticks. There were no electronic games of any kind.

I was very worried when I heard that we were going to play a game on facebook. My classmates chuckled and said’ Anyango, now you have no choice!” They meant that I had to finally be on facebook in order to take part in this assignment. And I did! I went in and clicked on the first game I saw, and that was “Bubble witch saga”. Knowing myself, this is not a kind of game I would play. I do not play with witches, because I know they can be dangerous. 

However, I tried to play this game. I did not go far because I did not understand it very well. I tried to click everything there was to click, including using the hints I believed I was being given, but I did not go far. After adventuring and playing aroundh with the game, and only seeing an old witch stirring something in a pot, I gave up! I decided that I needed to venture into more productive waters.

I finally landed on the “Lost jewels.” This sounded much more fun and it was making sense. I played it on three different days, but I did not like the fact that it could ask me to make purchases with my credit card at times. Do people actually do that? It is inexpensive, of course, but I was not ready to do that for that part of the game. I started over and it allowed me to play again.

I really felt that I had connected very well with the “Lost Jewels”. The beautiful colors and the shapes were attractive, and I learned the game well to be able to play and move from one point to another. The aesthetics of it attracted me, and it was not as scary as “Bubble Witch Saga.” I won many crystals. By level 4 I had 85 and then I added 67. I do not really know what that means in comparison with other players, but I improved from level to level as I got to know the game better.

The game is very friendly. It gives you hints when you take your time to make a move. I realized, though, that it has you make the big moves on your own, and it only gives hints on the moves that have very few points. I think this also helps one to learn more, because after you see the hints, you are able to think of the big move without giving up. The game also has the spirit of facebook, and that is connection. It kept asking me if I wanted a friend to join me, or if I wanted to share my crystals with any of my friends. Although I did not do this, I thought of how much fun it would be to share the game with someone, or even how it can be played in collaboration.

The best thing that this game is how it reminded me of a childhood game I used to play; “seven stones”. While the crystals were falling after I arranged similar colors, they neatly fell on top of one another, or if I matched many colors, they got crushed and disappeared. My favorite game growing up was “seven stones”, a game that I grew to be an expert in, and one that was a lot of fun for me. We could divide ourselves into two teams; then we had seven flat stones on the ground to arrange. The stones varied in circumference so that one would arrange them according to sizes for them to stay in place, the same way I would arrange the jewels of the same color in the facebook game. If one interchanged the sizes, the stones would easily fall, and any member of the team would have to start arranging them over again. What was the other team doing while one was arranging the seven stones? They would try to hit someone with the ball. Any member of the team that was hit would have to leave and sit on the side. I was always known to be the one staying to the end of the game in whichever team I was in because I knew how to dodge the ball very much. This earned me the nickname “corner corner” because I would try my best to dodge the ball from corner to corner. I liked arranging the stones, as much as I liked arranging the jewels in this game. The only thing missing for me here was teamwork.  I will try and recruit others into playing “Lost Jewels” with me! I wish I could also show them how to play “seven stones!”