Cultivated Play: Farmville
April 19th, 2010Related: The Future Where Soda Cans Have Screens
Via: Future of the Book:
Farmville is a free, browser-based video game that is played through one’s Facebook account. Users harvest crops, decorate their farms, and interact with one another, in what is ostensibly a game about farming. While this may sound like a relatively banal game, over seventy-three million people play Farmville.[7] Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.[8] This popularity is not surprising per se; even in the current recession, video game revenues reached nearly twenty billion dollars in America last year.[9] The video games industry is a vibrant one, and there is certainly room in it for more good games.
Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?
One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest. This seems plausible enough: people work over time to develop something, and take pride in the fruits of their labor. Farmville allows users to spend their in-game profits on decorations, animals, buildings, and even bigger plots of land. So users are rewarded for their work. Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions.[10] Clearly, even people who play Farmville want to avoid playing Farmville.
If people don’t play Farmville because of the play itself, perhaps they play because of the rewards. Users can customize their farms with ponds, fences, statues, houses, and even Christmas trees, and compare their farms with those of their friends. It’s important to note that Farmville is a public game, shared with friends across the largest social networking site in America. It makes sense that some people would enjoy the aesthetics of Farmville, of designing and arranging their farms. No doubt some users want to show off their handiwork, and impress and compete with their virtual neighbors. Nevertheless, it is difficult to imagine seventy-three million people playing a game that isn’t fun to play, just to keep up with the Joneses. After all, we have real life for that sort of thing.
Even Zynga’s designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow. As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks. In other words, the more you play Farmville the less you have to play Farmville. For such a popular game, this seems suspicious. Meanwhile, Zynga is constantly adding new items and giveaways to Farmville, often at the suggestion of their users. Hardly a week goes by that a new color of cat isn’t available for purchase. What fun.
This is a fascinating topic from a psychological/game-theory perspective.
Contrast Farmville with the likes of SimCity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimCity_(series) (The series has been around for over 21 years now – I feel very old).
(To the uninitiated: SimCity is a city simulator in which the player acts as mayor and has to build a settlement up from bare fields to a metropolis, while balancing taxes and spending, making sure infrastructure is in place and that the population is happy. It’s quite educational, although most real-life mayors wouldn’t conjure up a volcano or meteor strike when stuck in a debt-spiral)
You could say that the same points about aesthetics apply to SimCity as well. The most efficient cities in terms of population are very dense and ugly. Most players build a city that is pleasing to the eye, or conforms to what we think a city should look like.
SimCity also contains responsibilities: In order to have a well-running city, you have to make sure you don’t spend more than you tax, or if you take on debt that it is paid back. You have to ensure that services such as police and fire are sufficiently funded, otherwise crime and untamed fires will take their toll. The nature of these responsibilities is constantly changing as your city evolves, unlike the responsibilities in Farmville which seem to be “do this or your previous actions will be wasted”.
The main difference however is that SimCity runs on its own clock, meaning you can save your game and walk away without penalty. Farmville’s game clock is on the server, meaning that there’s no escape from its schedule. This is the key to the mindless grind: As soon as you perform an action, you have to commit to another action at a set time in the future in order to make the initial action worthwhile.
Wow. I have seen people playing this from passing by and glancing over the random shoulder here and there, but I had no idea it had reached such massive proportions.
Pretty creepy, good article though.
Ok. Now go to http://www.southparkstudios.com/ and watch the episode S14E04. I am not on Facebook for exactly this and the privacy reason (others view me as themselves regarding the internet, i noticed).
Oh yeah…and then, when I reference The Simpsons or Southpark those ppl complain about what a time wasting habit TV-Series are and that the Internet is much better. I gave up asking what they do specifically. I worry about the black time hole certain services came to be lately.
Sad, that Southpark analyses as good as alternative sites on the internet. No wonder that Southpark isn’t as widely accepted as it should, you have to be truly non-conformist to estimate the series and not being offended by the messages SP propagates… 😀
Being of the “older than dirt” demographic, I can’t say I know anything first hand about farmville – don’t have a facebook account either, but Max Keiser was talking about farmville as training for the coming of the new virtual economy. The way Max explains it, once the fiat based economy we’re currently living in collapses, the reset will be a virtual economy. No paper, just credits on a card that will be earned in places like farmville, harvesting virtual crops.
As good an explanation as any other of the popularity of farmville to me.
I wonder what percentage of users are male and what percentage are female?