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I hate Facebook applications. I hate receiving “Vampire Bites,” and “We’re Related!” requests from family members that I don’t even let see my profile out of guilt.
I think Facebook should stick to its original simplicity. I find it anticlimactic to click on a notification only to have it to be a marketing plug for some silly new application.
Why is it then that I just wasted half an hour re-arranging my sheep on Farmville?
I had been ignoring Farmville requests for so long I think I developed a blind spot for that little corn icon. I didn’t want to be anyone’s neighbor and I didn’t want to accept a free acorn tree from the guy in my econ class. But Farmville jargon began appearing around me more and more, and when I overheard two people discussing their crop progress around closing time at Kate’s, my curiosity finally got the best of me.
There is nothing terribly exciting about the Farmville game itself. It’s basically a more cartoonish version of The Sims, with your avatar placed on a plot of land instead of in a house.
The point of the game is to plant and harvest crops which gain experience points and coins to expand your farm and buy new supplies. If you don’t feel like waiting for your crops to grow to get cash, you can buy Farmville coins with real money via Paypal.
While this deeply disturbed me, what I found the most surprising about Farmville was the amount of my friends that were using it. My mouth literally dropped to see how many of my friends had virtual farms.
The friends I speak of weren’t the usual suspects of Facebook applications,either. Sure that annoying girl from high school that clogs my newsfeed with her quiz results of what Disney character she resembles was there, but there were some real shockers thrown into the mix as well. The people I would put on the bottom of my “most likely to use Farmville” list were the ones at the highest level.
It was just this confusion that intrigued me. To me, the original lure of Farmville was the mixing of genres. It killed me that friends who bought me drinks by night were sending me cows as gifts during the day. I loved seeing my friend Dave’s elaborate farm and picturing him muting Kanye on his iTunes so he could hear the quaint banjo music of Farmville play as he “plowed.” It amused me seeing my guy friends talk trash to each other, calling each other’s farms “weak” and saying their sheep and other livestock looked “frail.”
Farmville works in “real time,” and some crops take a few days to finish growing. This means anyone over level 2 has made a pretty serious time commitment. It boggled my mind to see friends up on Level 32. I felt like they were living some kind of farming double lives – where did they find the time to play this game in between school, work and a social life? And even if they do have free time, what do they get out of it? But then again, I was guilty too. I had been an official farmer for two days, telling myself I only joined to find out why it was “cool” and I was already on Level 5. I felt a strange mixture of pride and self-hatred whenever I harvested enough strawberries to buy a new farm animal.
Fifty six of my friends currently use Farmville. According to the application’s page, there are a grand total of 53,699,607 monthly active users, roughly 18 percent of Facebook’s total population of 300 million. It has an average rating of 4.2 out of 5 stars, based on 4,058 user reviews.
Why is it so popular? Is it some digital age desire to channel a more simplistic life? Or have we become so lazy that we have to pretend to do work and get virtual ribbons to feel good about ourselves? Perhaps there are a lot like me simply falling victim to the virus…everybody’s doing it because everyone is doing it, and no one knows why anyone started doing it in the first place?
The real irony is that while the number of Farmville farmers continues to grow daily, the population of actual farmers in the world is rapidly declining. Farmland is being lost to development and damaged by climate change. A gallon of milk now costs more than a gallon of gas. The happy music and non-existent problems of Farmville don’t seem to accurately reflect true conditions down on the farm.
I’m retiring my plow since I can’t stand the notifications, but my two-day stint in Farmville raised some interesting questions for me. People are always going to play games and there are plenty of worse things they could be doing than pretending to plow a field. As farfetched a version as it is, maybe this virtual world will spark some interest in real world farming. At the very least, I hope that before players whip out their credit cards to gain enough coins to score that pixilated plow, they consider instead putting that money towards buying locally grown produce to support the real farmers that could really use it.
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