还在玩农场? 你已经out啦!

还在玩农场？你已经凹凸啦。现在流行Bejewel！

ROBERT SIEGEL, host: Online games connected to social networking sites like Facebook are going viral. Games like FarmVille, a game in which you cultivate an online farm. FarmVille went from 10 million users when it was introduced last August to now more than 80 million. And it's not your typical 30-year-old male behind the computer screen.

Reporter Kaomi Goetz has the story.

KAOMI GOETZ: Kerry Ann King is 41, a mother of four and a part-time fitness instructor. She unwinds during a rare break between work and family responsibilities inside her Manhattan apartment. Reading or watching TV? No, she's playing an online game called Bejeweled.

Ms. KERRY ANN KING: And the goal is to get rows of a minimum of three, a maximum of five together, and that's how you get points.

GOETZ: Kind of like Tetris, Bejeweled is a puzzle game of blinking jewels arranged in a grid. The game is found on the social networking site Facebook, which already links players to their friends. King can play against her friends' scores. She says there's a lot of trash-talk going on.

Ms. KING: The people who play are serious. Like, really, my competition are all people that I either went to high school or college with. My mom plays, but sorry, mom, you're not in the same league.

(Soundbite of game)

Unidentified Man: High score.

GOETZ: Even moms like TV's Kelly Ripa are getting in on it. She recently admitted her obsession to Jerry Seinfeld on her daytime TV show.

(Soundbite of TV show, "Live with Regis and Kelly")

Mr. JERRY SEINFELD (Comedian): You had a video game that you got hooked on?

Ms. KELLY RIPA (Host): It was called, what's it called?

Mr. SEINFELD: Blocker?

Ms. RIPA: It's not Brick Breaker. It's called jewels, bejewel, Bedazzle...

(Soundbite of audience)

Ms. RIPA: Yeah. Yes. Yes. You know the game. Ladies, put your hands together for Bejeweled.

(Soundbite of laughter)

(Soundbite of cheering)

Mr. DAVID ROBERTS (CEO, PopCap): I'm still barely sort of at the tip of the iceberg for people who could play games but don't think they can. With Bejeweled, 70 percent of our customers are women. And that astounds almost everybody.

GOETZ: That's David Roberts, CEO of game company PopCap. It created Bejeweled and other online games. Though not new, the game is discovering a whole new market by finding players where they are now on mobile phones, iPods and on Facebook.

The games are free, but its creators make money off of advertising and added features. A hundred million sessions of Bejeweled are played each day.

Mr. ROBERTS: Even on a place like Facebook where everybody thought, including us, thought, okay, it'll skew younger, it'll skew more male because it's competitive, it's a one-minute game, it's not our traditional audience. We were wrong.

GOETZ: Misiek Piskorski teaches about online social networking at the Harvard Business School.

Professor MISIEK PISKORSKI (Harvard Business School): What you find is that a lot of women who are both working and raising children just have no time for relationships. But it's not like they wouldn't want to spend more time having these relationships. It's just really, really hard. And this allows them to sustain these relationships.

GOETZ: Piskorski says the games aren't taking away from face-to-face interactions. They're just replacing time these women would've spent watching TV or some other media. And for busy Kerry Ann King, that's good enough, especially in New York City.

Ms. KING: For the most part, you don't just wander over to someone's house, knock on their back door and say, do you want to have lunch? So, this is the back door.

GOETZ: And you don't have to borrow sugar.

For NPR News, I'm Kaomi Goetz in New York.

SIEGEL: For more stories about gaming, social media and tech gadgets, check out the All Tech Considered blog. That's NPR.org/alltech.