On the theme of Farmville, I read this interesting article about it the other day, courtesy of Vlad Dolezal. As an avid player of Farmville, I was intrigued to read it.

I thought it was quite a good article because on the face of it, it is indeed quite difficult to understand why so many people are attracted to playing Farmville; it can definitely be repetitive and boring. On the other hand, at least in the early stages, I think more skill is required than the article gives it credit for. You start off with a very limited number of coins which are not at all sufficient for all the exciting things you see in the market and want to buy. Every time you plough a square of land or plant a crop in it, you have to spend precious coins, and you have to ensure that you have enough coins to perform these activities on a regular basis, else you won’t gain enough experience (XP) to progress in the game. There are a wide range of crops available to choose from, and each have different attributes; some take longer to grow than others, some are much more expensive to buy, whilst others will gain you more XP. It is crucial to choose the right mix of crops to ensure that a) they only become fully grown at a time convenient for you to come back and harvest them (otherwise they will wither and die, thereby losing you all the money you invested in them) and b) you make as much money with as little effort as possible. If you haven’t figured it out yet, Soya is the way to go!

As you progress further in the game, these considerations become much less important and you suddenly have a huge pile of coins which you don’t know what to do with. This gives you the freedom to choose different crops which may not make you as much profit but are far more interesting than field after field of soya. I currently have somewhere in the region of £1m unspent coins, and I am currently growing purple peas for no other reason than I think they’re quite pretty

Once you have invested a lot of time and effort in your farm, the thought of abandoning it all and never logging in again seems quite difficult. I’m not very attached to my farmer, but I would be sad to leave behind my new pet dog Snowy, who I’ve just finished training to harvest sheep. Of course, the creators of Farmville are very adept at introducing new features to stages of the game where they correctly calculate that people’s interest will be starting to wane. Beehives are the latest craze to be launched this week. Despite my better judgement, I have become engaged in the frantic sending of nails and wooden boards between friends and neighbours in an attempt to get my own beehive fully built and functional so that I can start acquiring bees…

I understand that Farmville isn’t everyone’s cup of tea, and I fully appreciate why many people would view it as a complete waste of time. I (hopefully) have my Facebook settings organised so that only those people who I know play Farmville themselves get to see the Farmville-related updates that I post. I too get bored when I have to scroll past update after update about Cafe World of Mafia Wars in my newsfeed. But honestly, I don’t see that Farmville is any more of a waste of time than watching tv or playing a more conventional video game. Obviously if it were to take over your entire life and you were to start spending real money on it, I could see that that could become a problem, along the same lines as an online gambling addiction. But for me it’s just a mindless way of relaxing in the evening, in the same sort of way that I used to watch soaps when I was younger.

In any case, Farmville is currently the nearest I am able to get to looking after my own ducks Need I say more?!

Tags: Facebook, farmville

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 18th, 2010 at 2:14 pm and is filed under Random rambling. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.