Bunchball Games on Facebook are the new procrastination tool of choice for undergrads—at least at NYU’s Stern School of Business. N-blox, the most popular game, is basically competitive Tetris between two people. Once you add the game application, it will search for a player within one of your Facebook networks. After you choose the network, you can opt for an age-match or specify the gender of your competitor. A player earns “Karma points” by winning games, which can be used to clothe and accessorize a “tofoo” avatar. Bunchball attracts over 8,000 active users daily—about 3% of the Facebook population. Unfortunately, this made finding a game partner rather hard when I signed on all by my lonesome (I grew impatient after 10 minutes of waiting and gave up). Sternies generally take over an entire computer lab, so they can continuously trade partners and gain points. This form of social gaming (the future of the industry: just look at MMOGs, theater games, CGS, the Wii) resembles LAN parties where people network their computers together and play complicated strategy games. With N-blox, “like 20 computers [are] going at once,” says Kim Wong, a marketing and management double-major, “and when you play you just have to play for like at least 15 games in a row. Metaphorically speaking, it’s like crack.”
—Sherrie Hui
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