By Jessica Ramirez and Ryan Tracy
Just when you thought you'd had enough of that "games are addictive" talk, the growing social-gaming sector shows we're heading toward new levels of gaming dependence. Of America's 160 million gamers, 41 percent are playing games online against or with other people. That's not counting the droves of us who got turned on to social gaming shortly after we got turned on to social networks. As a result, social games are more popular than massive multiplayer online games, PC or Mac games, and games on mobile devices.
But what exactly are social gamers experiencing that's so hard to resist? Cumulatively, they spend millions of hours milking cows, building new frontiers, creating entire restaurants, becoming gangsters (in Mafia Wars, above), and pampering pets. To get a better sense of all this fun, NEWSWEEK takes a look at the numbers to uncover just how habit-forming the most popular social games on the most popular social network are.