Plenty 
of celebrities have lent their name or talents to video games, but few seem as odd a fit as Oprah Winfrey.
Nevertheless, the talk show queen and media maven has teamed with Jane McGonigal, the leader in the ‘gamification’ movement, to create Oprah’s Thank You Game, a Facebook game that lets players, well, thank people.
Really.
“FarmVille” has sure grown a lot of gamers. A new study by The NPD Group 
finds that 20 percent of the U.S. population has played a game on a social network at one point or another. That works out to 56.8 million Americans.
Thirty-five percent of those players are new to gaming, having never previously experimented with any form of video game.
Following several days of rumors, The Walt Disney Company 
has confirmed that it has bought social game developer Playdom, a move that dramatically expands the company’s footprint in one of the fastest growing segments of the video game world.
Disney is paying $563.2 million for the company – as well as a performance-linked earn out for investors of up to $200 million. That’s a substantial premium over the $400 million Electronic Arts paid for Playfish, a larger company in the space, last November.
“FarmVille” seems an unlikely competitor to games 
like “Grand Theft Auto” and “Modern Warfare 2,” but start counting the number of regular players, and the unassuming Facebook game might surprise you.
More than 32 million people tend their virtual crops each day, and the game has a total user base of 80 million. That’s roughly seven times the number of people who play the online smash “World of Warcraft.”
Chris Morris: Journalist 