As someone who spent many hours playing the
original title in the Harvest Moon series for the Super Nintendo, I can
vouch second-hand that the life of a farmer is a tough one. In addition to
selling turnips at the local fair, petting your pixel-based cow and naming your
chickens, you’d have to find a wife by proposing with a ‘Blue Feather’ and hold
regular meetings with the local fairy goddess (yes, it’s a Japanese video
game).
After a long day of
farming – whether real or on your games console – surely, there’s nothing
better than logging into Facebook and seeing what your friends and family have
been getting up to? After all, that’s what ‘social’ networks are for, right?
Yet for millions upon
millions of Facebook users, those friends are little more than recipients of
spam emails to guilt trip them into visiting your land in the hugely popular
Zynga social title FarmVille. As of this writing the game (or rather its
sequel FarmVille 2) is the most popular game on Facebook (two spots
above the nearly-identical CityVille) and at one point boasted over 70
million monthly users.
The idea that people
would visit the world’s biggest social network to shun their friends and plant
virtual crops all day (or spend real money on gifts within the game) would be
inconceivable to any sensible person five years ago, yet Facebook farmers are
countless and each of them sees you not as a loving, cherished friend, but
rather an ideal opportunity to entice a gullible fool into signing up and
handing over your beloved cherry trees.
Unlike the aforementioned
Harvest Moon series, which is a curiously satisfying yet solitary
experience, the bulk of FarmVille’s compulsive appeal to its fans is the
game’s hugely cynical approach. Within minutes of your first playthrough you’re
likely to be bombarded with adverts or begging long lost relatives for a
virtual pig. Who has time for narrative anyway, eh?
For those of you sick and
tired of seeing your friends get sucked into the world of Facebook farming,
there is good news, however. Not that your friends are ever likely to drop
their addiction, but at least it appears you’ll be seeing a lot less of them.
In March 2012, developers
Zynga announced that they would create their own social network, Zynga.com,
leaving the rest of Facebook farmers to head to pastures new. The idea behind
the move was that since Zynga develop four of Facebook’s most popular social
games – giving the social network 30 percent of the profits in the process– why
not just go it alone in the hope that a loyal fan base would follow?
It’s the first sign that
Facebook omnipotence over the sphere of social gaming is beginning to crack,
and while Zynga.com doesn’t encourage devotees to (rather crucially) get an
actual life, it’ll hopefully keep them at an arm’s distance from our own
soon-to-be blissful lives in the process. We’ve given away a lot of virtual pigs
to reach this momentous occasion, so let’s hope it isn’t spoiled.
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