I learnt something new yesterday – that millions of women are huge fans of Facebook’s social games with FarmVille toping the list with 62 million followers. It includes forums where you can report bugs and show off your landscaping, with the most addicted followers getting up in the night to “feed” their animals or “water” their crops.

I must admit this is a virtual world I know little about.  I learnt about it yesterday from Gilles Storme (pic) from the award winning company RockYou, described as “the leading innovator, creator and distributor of social experiences, reaching 280 million people across all major social networks”.

Gilles was speaking at a social media advertising conference organised by influencepeople and told us that over 50% of social network users play social games, that they involve a high level of engagement, and offer marketers new effective communication opportunities.

Clearly monetizing games is big business for advertisers and the key to its success involves working on the human psychology – “if you work on those triggers, people will spend money”, said Gilles. Have you noticed those carefully placed adverts when you chat to friends on Facebook? They didn’t end up there by chance, but after social advertisers analysed the kind of person you are in the hope you will be interested in buying the product. It works too, because I plan to see the play Onassis after an advert was cunningly placed on my Facebook site as I am half Greek.

My ears pricked up when Gilles described their typical game user as a mum aged 35-40 with kids at school; not the geeky spotty teenager you might have imagined.  How does he know this? Because it’s the business of game developers and advertisers to know every detail about consumers, and it’s easy for them to learn this by using tracking tools to gather their data.

I have no idea why millions of women prefer to spend their day on FarmVille rather than interacting with real people in the real world and enjoying the fresh air. It seems a tragedy to me that the social world has become a real world for so many women, that they prefer this kind of life instead of being a real mum, wife, daughter and friend. Gilles wouldn’t be drawn into the class structure these women come from when asked if they were from “lower” classes, but said his data provided clear demographics about their ages, interests and where they lived.

All this seems particular relevant today after reading the Daily Mail story about a 33-year-old woman who spent up to 22 hours playing an interactive computer game, neglecting her home and three children.  She fitted Gilles stereotype perfectly. The headline asked: “Can online games be as addictive as heroin?”

While this woman spent six months shut off from the outside world playing a computer game with thousands of other players around the world, her two dogs starved to death and her three kids resorted to eating cold baked beans straight from the tin.  As a result her kids were taken into care and she pleaded guilty in court to three charges of child cruelty and two of animal neglect. She was given a suspended sentence and banned from using her computer again. Is this the first time this sentence ever been passed? We are told that she has since given up her computer.

This might be an extreme case, but it is still worrying, particularly as the use of social games and their relationship with advertisers will increase and they will target women such as this mother from Kent. Game companies need to accept that there is a risk of addiction for some of its users and develop a CSR strategy to support them.

Gilles believes we are just on the tip of the iceberg, that Facebook has vast potential to develop its credits – a virtual currency used for buying virtual goods for games and applications. We know that more internet users log on to Facebook than Google, providing tremendous potential for major retailers to develop a presence there, such as Tesco who could also buy into the Facebook credit system.

At the end of the d ay, the only winners will be advertisers, the companies who use social sites and the game developers.

I think I will log off and pick some blackberries in the real world. They taste much better than those on FarmVille...