Yawn and Gasp (aka: I spent more time writing this post than I did playing Farmville)

I yawn because it's boring and I gasp because it's scary. That more or less sums up my experience with playing Farmville.

Nothing about Farmville really struck me as being all that engaging or interesting. I felt little motivation to continue playing other than to learn more about it for this class, and tomorrow I will leave the game behind without any pangs of loss. I tried to motivate myself by trying to get to the next level, but was quickly deterred because there was little noticeable benefit to doing so (I got a wider variety of crops, but few of them presented any notable advantages), and because it required such a time investment - crops are grown only in real time and once you run out of coins there isn't much more you can do for exp. One of the draws of the game is that it's a way to interact with friends, but it's created a false cycle of interaction where the only additional interaction the game allows is directly relevant to the game - i.e. you give your friend an in-game gift - rather than personal interaction. I can think of other ways I'd rather spend time with friends - perhaps something that involves more direct communication. I don't really care about ribbons or character accessories or anything else the game has had to offer me, and it has given me no compelling reason to do so. The only reason I've managed to glean that these rewards are supposed to be rewarding is that they exist in the first place. There's nothing here I'd really want to spend money on, and the level system is the aspect that came the closest to making me want to play more. I can achieve the same effect by solving puzzles in Professor Layton (increasing my completed puzzle count), which provides the fun of a mental challenge, or leveling my Golden Sun team, which rewards me by progressing a story, or staring at this website, which gives roughly the same "watch the number go up" satisfaction. If I sound somewhat cynical, it's probably because I'm not the type of person to be enticed by sparkles and shiny purples. I rather prefer meaningful content to empty (and relentless) praise. I realize that I could progress in the game more easily by paying money for coins/cash, but this introduces its own problems. For one, it cheapens the goods I buy with that money - I would feel like I cheated to get it. For another, if I'm going to pour money into this game on any sort of consistent basis, I'd rather use that same money to buy a completely new game. I'll talk about that more later, though.

In addition to being uninspired by Farmville, I also found the experience a bit frightening, because the game seems to focus its every aspect on pure virulent infectiousness. It would not be a poor analogy to say that Farmville is to Facebook as the flu is to most people. Let's start with the part that everyone knows about: this game is designed to make you make your friends play. Every minor in-game accomplishment pops up a notifier to your friends' news feeds, inviting them to play the game to celebrate with you. Sometimes it's not even accomplishment based: the "wandering animal" events are entirely random! This sort of pester marketing is disturbingly similar to a pyramid scheme, in which a con artist convinces people to convince people to sign on to a false program, with the promise of additional program benefits for those who recruit more members. Farmville is not a pyramid scheme, but the notification aspect of the game certainly reminds me of one. Also, I mentioned before that crop-growing takes place in real time. The sole obstacle to level progression and reward-gaining in Farmville is time. Banking on this, Zynga has allowed players to bypass this obstacle by paying real money for the virtual goods they would have otherwise earned by waiting long enough for their crops to grow. Yes, it's ingenious - marketing virtually no-cost goods for real money with a driving factor of two very human traits (impatience and greed) - but it's that level of business-end genius that makes it scary. Why? Because it's manipulative. And it's working - Zynga has made a crapload of money solely from virtual, in-game goods. This is made even more relevant by the fact that there will be an occasional pop-up advertisement (which are somewhat intrusive and annoying while playing) for one of Zynga's other games, which offer a similarly passive experience in a different setting and encourage people to spend more money on different virtual goods. This is what completes the one-two sucker punch that has made Zynga so successful - the people who are spending money on Farmville are encouraged to start playing Mafia Wars or Frontierville as well, and in turn pay for content in these games. I can understand that virtual items have value to some people (my music library, a collection of merely data, has great value to me), but I personally see little worth in these particular items. Farmville is also designed to keep people playing forever - just like World of Warcraft, there's always something more to do, and designers keep creating new content, and if you're not like me and actually care about planting certain crops or decorating your farm for the holidays, you're sure to keep coming back for more. Which is fine, if you enjoy that, but the whole thing strikes me as a bit too engineered. It reminds me of Connor's work in For the Win, discovering ways to take advantage of human behavior to coerce people into continued play - gaming as a chore rather than entertainment. Finally, there's the issue I have with many "casual" games: it all feels FAKE. Everything is too shiny and "juicy" and the game is much too quick to praise. It feels as though the game is trying much, much too hard to get on my good side, and when a game does this, I begin to question whether it does so to cover up the fact that it cannot stand on its own merits; that it cannot provide something I can legitimately care about. And that is exactly what is happening, at least to me.

Oh, right, one more thing that scares me about this game: I made a new Facebook account so I didn't have to give it any personal information, and it STILL wants to know my email address. I have refused to offer it to them, and as a result am given a persistent reminder to do so, to the point where I have even been given an item that I cannot activate until I give them my email. This strikes me as kind of creepy and more than a little intrusive.

Now, the articles. The main points they seem to bring up are the success of selling virtual goods for real money, and how ingenious Zynga's marketing strategy is in this regard. As I mentioned in my "scary" paragraph, I agree entirely. Enhancing their future prospects is the fact that they are no longer limiting themselves to Facebook apps, spreading Farmville and other games to various additional platforms such as the iPhone. They are already leading the way in number of players, with four times the playerbase of even the enormous gaming conglomerate EA. What is most interesting, though, is the testimonials from players who have paid money for virtual goods. One mother mentions that she buys items for her kids in Farmville because it's cheaper than taking them to Target for a toy. Another player recounts spending $20-$40 each week on Zynga's virtual goods. It is, admittedly, pretty darn cool that a company has managed to basically single-handedly create such a large new market for consumers that can serve as a replacement for some peoples' money-spending outlets. Zynga is definitely on to something here. I do take a bit of issue with these particular uses of money, though, if you'll pardon my self-aggrandizing here for a minute longer. I know that, given $20-$40 per week, I'd rather buy myself a completely new video game for my DS every week, as opposed to additional content for a game that I can continue to play for no charge (especially if continued play allows me to unlock that same content). It comes down to getting more for my money - I can either get an additional full game, or I can get less than a complete game for the same price. If I had a kid, I'd also rather buy him Legos (which have creative and educational properties) than Farmville accessories (which don't). But again, all of these are just my own personal preferences with regards to how I would like to spend my money.

Seeing as how this whole blog post has basically been me spouting my (admittedly very harsh and one-sided) opinion of Farmville and how I'd rather spend my time and money elsewhere, here's my question to you: Am I just completely crazy? (it's okay to say yes) More specifically: you already know where I stand on the subject, but do YOU see any value in virtual goods of the variety that Farmville offers?