It’s been seven days of my trip into Farmville, the insanely popular Facebook game by Zynga. Not only did I learn why someone may or may not like it, but I also learned how people can become incredibly addicted. This article covers my final two days and closes with my overall impressions.
When I started Day 6, I was unsure of what the next steps would be for me. Should I buy more stuff, plant more stuff, or… wait, I think that’s pretty much it. I harvested any remaining crops I had and planted as many raspberries as possible. I figured that 4 hours would be a terrifically quick amount of time for me to grow my cash reserves. The unfortunate part of planting the berries is that they don’t give any experience points; they are purely designed to amass quick bursts of gold coins in short periods of time. Planting them in the morning before I went to work, I was hoping to come home to a great stash.
I was wrong. When I got home, the raspberries had wilted. So, not only did I lose my fruits but also the money that went into buying them and the money to plow the fields again. Farmville makes it clear: this is a game about speed and about being active. The more I lounge around throughout the day, the more I need to spend money to make up for it.
Once I re-planted everything (the 12-hour rice plants and 8-hour pumpkins would work best, I thought) I let the game sit overnight.
My Day 7 was a hectic one filled with a great amount of ups and downs. The ups: waking up to an incredible amount of veggies and crops that were ready to harvest. With about 5 minutes of clicking around in the morning before I headed off for work, I had gained a level and had created a virtual fortune. The downs: I found myself without much of a purpose. None of my friends were really fertilizing my farm, and I was unable to gain any Farmville dollars no matter how hard I tried (outside of leveling up) — I refuse to pay money for any virtual item on Facebook. Until the platform becomes accessible to some “core” games (action games, adventure, 3D, RPGs, etc) I can’t take it seriously enough to plunk down any money… especially when I have to fill out a survey or subscribe to an email list to gain that item. My buildings will never be built, and my horse will have to be sold.
Day 7 was also where I really fixated myself on the graphical and backend issues of the game. The visuals, although purposefully simplistic, are not dynamically accessing the ginormous Farmville database. That is, when I zoom out enough over my farm I expect to see my neighbor’s farms. Instead, all I see is green. It’s very solitary, to the point where I feel as though I’m building up an island instead of a farm. Oh great, I just gave Zynga a new game idea.
I also realized that no matter how much I try to grow my farm, I will always be behind those who have been playing longer than me. It’d be impossible to catch up. Browsing my neighbors’ farms I was becoming jealous of their chicken coops and mansions, white picket fences and trees. All I can buy is veggies and the occasional snow-blanketed field. Now, it may seem that I am asking a lot to receive these things right away since the main principle behind the game is “waiting”, but with Mafia Wars I was able to advance at a pretty quick pace and see a considerable return on my investment. In Farmville, I don’t get that. I don’t get instant gratification. I get the option to wait even more.
The opposite is also apparent. As many of my friends that had massive farms, double hadn’t gone past the first log in, or were at levels even lower than me. Farmville is polarizing.
Day 7 came to a close with a bad taste left in my mouth about the game. I was beginning to like it, but its superficiality was showing through. This game is trumped by Animal Crossing, which has more gratification for me as a player. Farmville seems to treat me as a web surfer, not a gamer.
That is the big turn-off of this game. I don’t feel that connection that I get with other experiences. Mafia Wars at least made me feel like I was dropped in the middle of an on-going event, with my mafia having the power to wipe out others. Farmville is so incredibly casual that it doesn’t need me to function. It doesn’t need me to grow crops or harvest them. It doesn’t need my farm. That forced interaction made me, a typically single-player gamer, feel like I had to go out of my way to make my neighbors happy before I could make myself happy. I relate it to grinding in a JRPG: it’s not required to advance the game in any way exciting yet takes up the majority of my time. At least with Dragon Quest the grinds are expected and I earn unique spells or increased strength.
Then something happened. As I was about to put my farm out of its misery and block the app, I reached Level 10.
Level 10 opened up a slew of new features, notably the ability to improve my crops by earning stars and advancing their own levels. Suddenly, the game became interesting again. Suddenly, I could have that individual experience that I wanted. I could get hooked reaching for that proverbial (and literal, in this case) carrot of trying to get everything in the game at my own pace. The only problem? I had to wait 7 days to get to this point. Farmville‘s slow pace doesn’t permit the “core” gamer to start enjoying the game until this point. Whether this is by design or not — to weed out the aggressive players — is unknown. The game should have introduced those aspects to me at the beginning, like in Mafia Wars. The plant ratings are similar to the ratings of missions in MW, with the missions keeping me hooked for well over a year. In fact, I still find myself coming back to the game once in a while to check my stash and pull off a hit or bank heist or two.
Growing the plant ratings in Farmville may keep me slightly interested, but that still wasn’t enough to get me to come back on a regular basis. It isn’t so much that the game isn’t addictive, but because I’ve played games like this to death already and I can’t see myself investing time in yet another casual experience like this. I guess I’m Zynga-ed out. The Facebook casual gaming genre is massively popular, but I think that popularity is waning. I more and more see my friends post negative comments about the game (especially the Wall spam that Facebook apps are known for) and I can’t help but agree with them.
Zynga and Farmville are huge, but they already feel like dinosaurs when I compare them to other modern games.
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