I started swearing out loud when I read this announcement this morning.  Sid Meier plans on tapping into 300 million free accounts by giving them all a taste of what real games are made of.  None of that Farmtown or Mafia Wars nonsense: let’s see how Harriet the Housewife does against raising an empire against Genghis Khan or Napoleon.

If you haven’t played Civilization 4: run, don’t walk, to your nearest video game retailer and get a copy.  It is the be-all-end-all of turn based strategy games.  If you like turn based and have never played it, then you ain’t played nothing yet.  I just recently played through Civilization: Revolution on the 360, the streamlined console version of the same game, and had just as much fun in a less “Oh, crap, it’s 3 PM Tuesday and I started playing Sunday morning” feeling.

Initial reaction: excitement!  Oh, boy, another Civ game!  Awesome!  And on Facebook?  It’s like mixing chocolate and peanut butter, then adding a little sprinkle of crack cocaine!  My wife is now a level 300 Mafia Wars mafia boss (she loves Facebook).  You think that would make for an easy transition to real games, but the browser based click-fest is all she wants to do.

However, having second thoughts, I’m not sure how excited about the announcement I am.  More quality games on teh Facebookz means more over-time converts to the Church of Gaming.  I don’t think I’ll ever get my wife fragging along side with me in Modern Warfare, but she certainly understands the video gaming/time displacement principle, where six hours can go by and you haven’t moved anything but your mouse.

It will just be interesting to see how they handle it.  Is it going to be where you are a Civilization, and your friends and family become your workers or soldiers?  Billy from Oregon is a city defending spearman, while Julie from Louisiana is currently building you a granary?  Might be interesting, but easily exploitable by having massive numbers of Facebook friends.

In general, Facebook game players don’t like a lot of challenge, or they’d be playing real games.  You slap a full on intense civilization builder on them like Civilization….you’ll get the hardcore and the fans, but the casual crowd will bumble off back to Vampire Wars.

But I’m not worried.  This is Sid Meier we’re talking about here, one of the grandfathers of modern video gaming.  He’ll figure something awesome out.

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