What's in your toolbox?

[JonO]

If you're talking about a static page, then Flash is definitely not the way to go. Adds bulk and a layer of interface unnecessarily. As such, something like Mafia Wars would NOT benefit from a Flash front-end.

Farmville, on the other hand, uses it (or something like it), because the interaction is dynamic - a graphic interchange between user and database.

I am imagining a game where, for example, you are piloting your spaceship around, live. You pull up coordinates on your computer, you access status reports, you press the hyper jump button, you find the asteroids to mine, etc. And you attack freighters that other players have put on automated shipping runs (with defensive tactics preprogrammed.)

Or you have a simcity style view of a section of a planet surface, where you can lay out your colony components, monitor production statistics, or drop invading space commandos.

These could be games within a larger game, in which you run an interstellar company that continues to earn money while you're offline, the same way your "city blocks" do in Mafia Wars. This would meld turn-based with real-time to create a casual gaming platform that still offers compelling interaction that impacts your long-term game.

My point was that Flash takes time to load. Whether its a game within a game, or the game, or anything else, it takes time to load. Now, once loaded, it's as responsive as anything else that we've got, but still, Flash takes time to load.

If I were to start designing any of the games you described, I would be calling for a client app that handled most of the presentation layer and dl'd the data.