Four things that drive me crazy about Facebook games

For the record, I love social games. I love that they're free to play and accessible to all types of people. I love that their popularity has exploded over the past two years, and that they've been turning all of game-dom on its head.

But, after playing FarmVille, Mafia Wars and the rest for just over a year now, there are a few things in these games that have really started to gnaw on my nerves -- four in particular. They don't actually make me want to chop down a door with an axe like Jack Nicholson in The Shining, but they make me go, ya know, something, something.

Bugs, bugs, bugs

My biggest gripe about social gaming is the bugs. I'm talking about all of the little glitches in games that never really seem to go away. Examples of this include items that mysteriously disappear, buttons that don't work or losing connection to a game. It's like Whack-A-Mole, once one bug is bopped in the head, another one pops up somewhere else.

For instance, I was tending my FarmVille crops this weekend and got the ever annoying 'Game out of sync with server' message, which means you have to reload the game and re-do everything you just did again. So after spending five minutes harvesting and planting crops, then I had to do it again. Then I had to reload the game again. Then harvest the same crops again. Ugh.

This has happened to me several times in Mafia Wars as well. After promising that a more stable game experience was on its way, Mafia Wars rolled out a special event, San Juan, and then had to roll it back again. Then it launched again. This had also happened a few weeks before with the similar Beat the Feds event. FrontierVille, lately, has also been a big reloader.