Why is farmville so addictive

I kept waiting for something to "happen" to make it fun, but it never did. Why was this such a popular game? Also, as the game progressed, a bizarre social network effect came into play, where achieving many goals required the presence of friends playing the game. So I found myself in the position of asking around to see who else was playing this boring game, so I could get ahead. In a game that I was not enjoying, but was addicted to.

To make things even worse , to advance in the game you can pay real-world money to get in-game benefits that save time and effort, allowing you to acquire virtual items like animals and buildings and stuff. It's an amazing system: these game designers have devised a way to addict the player, then monetize that addiction by encouraging the player to bring in friends and hopefully pay real money to get ahead. Is this the best we can do with social gaming? How can this be, literally, the most popular videogame in America?

Most of the other game mechanics can only work because of this value that is installed into the mind of players. With a new base of value established, FarmVille then gets the player glued onto the idea of ownership and the insatiable need to possess more. You now have a farm, and its your responsibility to take care of it and grow it. You would grow it by possessing more things on your property, which will then require more responsibility to maintain. The concept of ownership is very important in the work place and education as well.

If you are constantly forcing employees or students to do something, they will lack motivation and only do the bare minimum of what you will accept which sometimes end up being good enough. But if you give them ownership of what they do, they often go above and beyond their responsibilities.

Everyone needs to feel that they are growing and getting somewhere. In FarmVille, even though every single day players are engaged in the same monotonous tasks of clicking endlessly on their crops, they feel a sense of progress as their Farm Coins go up, and more importantly, when they can spend their hard-earned Farm Coins to expand their land or buy an expensive mansion.

A feel for progress and development is essential for any product or project. When the player plants a crop, he needs to wait a few hours to a few days before he can reap the goods.

The required waiting, or so-called appointment dynamics creates eagerness and impatience from the player. And as a result, the player feels anxious to check up on his crops regularly and see if the waiting period is over or not, even if he intellectually understands that the appointed time has not passed yet. On a bigger scale, Farmville will dangle something even more grand, perhaps a larger farm, or a big mansion, which will require another hours of gameplay to obtain. Players stare at those amazing virtual pixels, and they need to have it.

Oh actually, there are other ways. He is spending money to save the time and work required to get that silly picture of a house. And of course, his time is much more valuable than the silly house itself right? So now we see the bizarre phenomenon of people playing games for free, and then paying real money in order to skip much of the required playing. Ours is a time of confusion, of unprecedented changes that outpace our perceptions.

As Zinn might have said, the wheel keeps spinning faster, and the faster it spins the harder it is to see. Perhaps it seems a waste of time to discuss video games at a moment like this.

After all, this is a serious discussion, and games are supposedly frivolous things. If games are essential to citizenship, then this could be a promising time for our democracy. According to a recent survey, over half of American adults play video games, and one in five play everyday or almost everyday.

Does this mean we are becoming better citizens? Ninety-seven percent of American teenagers play video games. Before you dismiss these questions, keep in mind that in October , then-Senator Barack Obama became the first U. He utilized the internet extensively in organizing and raising funds for his campaign, and has maintained an active presence on popular social media sites, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Flickr.

With this in mind, it seems appropriate to examine the most popular video game in America. Users harvest crops, decorate their farms, and interact with one another, in what is ostensibly a game about farming. While this may sound like a relatively banal game, over seventy-three million people play Farmville.

One might speculate that people play Farmville precisely because they invest physical effort and in-game profit into each harvest. This seems plausible enough: people work over time to develop something, and take pride in the fruits of their labor. Farmville allows users to spend their in-game profits on decorations, animals, buildings, and even bigger plots of land.

So users are rewarded for their work. Of course, people can sidestep the harvesting process entirely by spending real money to purchase in-game items. This is the major source of revenue for Zynga, the company that produces Farmville. Zynga is currently on pace to make over three hundred million dollars in revenue this year, largely off of in-game micro-transactions. Users can customize their farms with ponds, fences, statues, houses, and even Christmas trees, and compare their farms with those of their friends.

Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville —takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again.

Indeed, it is so pointless and tedious that that is the business model. Farmville is addictive. But it is not the game itself that is so unlike Tetris in another day as evidenced by the payments to Zynga.

The problem is that it is perhaps the first game to tie into social networks and, indeed, require them. You can advance much faster if as a user of Farmville you turn into a dealer. As this insightful post points out, it tugs every social heart-string.

There is gifting, scoreboards and even collective efforts to raise a barn! If you opt out, you are letting the team down. By the way, a retired politician who shall remain nameless here you know who you are! And they all know it is addicting. It has to be a collective effort — something far harder to achieve than mere substance abuse.