For Kira Greer, FarmVille became a virtual obsession.
Photo: Jon Snyder/Wired.com
Kira Greer was sitting in a meeting one afternoon when she suddenly remembered an urgent deadline. The San Francisco instructional designer knew there was no time to waste.
She excused herself, saying she had to go to the bathroom, then rushed back to her desk. Quickly opening Facebook, she began furiously clicking on rows of virtual vegetables, harvesting her FarmVille crops before they withered and died.
“I realized I was hooked when I was planning my day around when I knew crops needed to be harvested,” says Greer, 39.
Leaving a meeting to tend to her videogame of choice was Greer’s wake-up call. “Once I realized I’d done that, I told my husband and I just came home and had a moment — d’oh! And I realized, OK, I’m taking it a little bit too far.”
“If there’s any way to explain it, it’s that I’m playing it right now, because you reminded me that I had crops,” she tells me over the phone.
Here a Farm, There a Farm
We may live in a post-agrarian society, but that isn’t stopping millions of Americans from heading back to the farm. They’re not working real farms, with dirt, crops and diesel-belching tractors. Instead, these back-to-the-land pioneers are plowing the back 40 on their Facebook homesteads. Budding virtual farmers stake their claims in free games like FarmVille, Farm Town, Happy Farm, Country Story, Barn Buddy and Sunshine Ranch, each of which draws millions of players on the social network.
The farming games have become so successful that they’ve even spawned parodies and hybrid knockoffs like Jungle Extreme and Farm Villain, which let you steal other people’s crops or raise Wookies.
Zynga’s FarmVille, the biggest Facebook game of all, pulls in more than 75 million players who log in each month to plant, tend and harvest virtual crops, over and over. The attraction is less about the game itself, say players and designers, and more about the social experience: Fields adjacent to your farm belong to family members and friends pulled from your Facebook profile. You can visit their acreage, help them complete farm chores and exchange gifts of in-game items.
The appeal is natural. “I was raised around farms,” says Leslie Nautiyal, a 64-year-old from Rockford, Illinois, who says she’s hooked on FarmVille. “I spent a lot of time on my aunt and uncle’s farm. So it’s kind of fun to have your own crop, go in and harvest them, feel like you’re doing something.”
By utilizing the simplest action-reward gameplay mechanic — borrowed from a Chinese game, which was itself inspired by a Japanese RPG — Facebook’s farm games have quietly turned millions of people into constant gardeners (and consistent gamers).
“What these games give me is a sense of control over my life.” — FarmVille player Cheri Van Hoover
Cheri Van Hoover, 56, tends a real 11-acre farm in Washington state, but she’s glued to her virtual fields, too. “What these games give me is a sense of control over my life,” she says. “It is a neat, orderly place that I can escape to, and where things unfold in a relatively predictable fashion, and I can work out all of my needs for domination and power and control in a safe environment.”
Such “social games” on Facebook have quietly turned time-waster appeal into big business: Close to 100 of them boast more than a million active users each, and Facebook says 100 million unique people play just the top 10 games on the site every month.
And this is just the beginning: After some very public turmoil, Facebook and Zynga announced Tuesday they have entered into a five-year strategic relationship. Zynga is currently testing Facebook Credits in some games and will expand use of the social network’s virtual currency to more titles in coming months.
As social games explode in popularity, the videogame industry’s big players, faced with slumping sales of traditional games, have a hungry eye on the fresh produce: Electronic Arts recently acquired Country Story maker Playfish for $300 million in cash and another potential $100 million in performance bonuses, and plans to bring its Madden football franchise to Facebook.
“The game industry’s going mainstream,” says Gareth Davis, head of Facebook’s game division. “A lot of people who built traditional games for a long time are starting to build social games.”
Companies like Playfish and Zynga say their free games are profitable “many times over.” How? Through the sale of virtual goods. While the vast majority of users put in the hours to build their own little slices of nature for free, a small percentage pony up real-world cash to buy the best decorations, seeds, fertilizer and farm animals.
In other words: Why get the milk for free when you can buy the cow?
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: You gotta love Woz.
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the past couple of weeks, you’ve heard that Intel and Nokia have announced strategic relationship to shape next era of mobile computing innovation.
