Farmville Scares the Crap Out of Me
At some point during a faculty discussion Farmville was brought up and it was immediately dismissed since it is not something that our students would want to play since the graphics looked like they were meant for small children. That really scares me. Farmville, when I think about it, is much more destructive (and much less constructive) than games like World of Warcraft or Modern Warfare 2, which many of our students do play. And when you think about it it is so much easier to dismiss Farmville since it doesn’t look like a game that so many people over the world—and so many students in our school—would play.
In four years (from 2004 to 2008), World of Warcraft managed to gather 11 million subscribers (according to the Wikipedia article and some math). The New York Times claims that Farmville has 22 million players playing daily four months after launch. I don’t have the hard numbers to prove it (yet) but I’m pretty sure many more of our students play Farmville over World of Warcraft. For one, we block WoW access on campus but since we do not block Facebook (many day schools do, but we are a boarding school and do not) Farmville is easily accessible. Also, Farmville is free and World of Warcraft involves money, therefore (possibly) parental approval and a credit card.
I can argue that many games our students play regularly (anecdotal evidence, since I haven’t had time to collect hard data) have educational “redeeming” qualities. World of Warcraft teaches teamwork. Call of Duty trains reflexes and hand-eye coordination. The Sims, if you consider it as a simulation in which your actions have determinable consequences on a closed system, teach programming and perhaps ethics. Starcraft (we have a lot of Oriental international students) does all three to a varying degree. Maybe I’m a video game apologist. But no matter how hard I try I can’t really say that Farmville teaches anything of significance.
Being billed as a social game Farmville sure has very few “social” features. The two main social aspects of Farmville is “bother other people to get things” and “visit others’ farms to get things”. The former makes Farmville something of a pyramid scheme (like almost all Facebook games) and the latter, until a recent update, did not actually accomplish anything cooperatively. Even now visiting another person’s farm does not provide actual “interaction” and “teamwork” means “if you click on my farm five times we both get a very, very, very small amount of extra stuff”. Farmville also allows you to “gift” others with trees, items and animals but once again there is no actual social interaction in the gifting process.
What annoys me is not that Farmville’s social features are lacking but that it is marginally more popular than other, similar games that encourage actual social interaction. For example, Farmtown is a similar game that allows you to hire others to plow your fields or harvest your crops and by going to a central chat room and hiring people the player spends less time clicking monotonously and possibly even learn something about labor supply and demand. In essence, Farmville’s teamwork component asks players to put in more time playing to obtain small amounts of in-game resource reward (which, I must add, is actually not worth the time) or put in time to send unsolicited mail to other people so those others can spend more time playing. Games like Farmtown (and World of Warcraft) reward players in both a reduced time necessary to reach a goal and in-game resources when they work as teams.
Do I really have to go into why clicking on rhombuses to plant crops repeatedly is not an exercise in hand-eye coordination for young people without disabilities and is more likely to help them develop health issues instead? I look forward to the day when someone posts an article or paper on using Farmville as a physical therapy tool but I’m not holding my breath.
You could argue that Farmville is a simulation of farming and is a modern iteration of old educational simulation games like SimFarm with new graphics. That would be true except that Farmville has almost no risk involved. This is the main reason why I think Farmville doesn’t actually teach anything. A real farmer has to gauge what to plant crops and when to plant crops or what animals to raise (a local farm sends out chicken pre-order forms so they can decide how many chickens to raise each season) and planning a farm is a real, complicated economics problem. Since there are no weather, no supply and no demand there are only two factors involved in choosing what to plant: which crop makes me the most money/experience points and will I be able to log in to harvest it when it is ready. The only possibility of failure in Farmville is to forget to log in to harvest your crops before they go bad. Basically, if you log in everyday (which many people do) you cannot lose.
Maybe that’s why my students are obsessed with Farmville. If you haven’t noticed from the top corner of this blog I teach at a school on a big ol’ farm. I’ve asked students why they don’t just walk over to the barn and milk real cows instead of milking fake ones on their computer screen and the answer has generally been “but I did that this morning!”. You can in fact screw up real farming really easily; and it’s hard! Farmville is an idealized form of farming that involves no risk, no physical work beyond sitting there and clicking on boxes. And it still gives the simulated satisfaction of producing “food”. Of course, it doesn’t actually produce anything of value; I’ll excuse a student who needs to go feed real cows from work, but I don’t think I’ll ever let “I needed to harvest my raspberries so I couldn’t do my math homework” be a valid excuse in the classroom.
Farmville is a much bigger problem, I feel, than any other game out there right now. And it really scares the crap out of me.
Postscript: There is one somewhat possible redeeming factor to Farmville: using Farmville as a medium for visual art. Just like real farmers cropping their crops to resemble a picture of someone and taking an aerial photo of it Farmville players are using the decorative items and crops in Farmville to make pictures. Decorating a farm is a real draw to Farmville and is an outlet for lots of creativity; it is also a steady revenue stream since buying decorative items cost money and one quick way to get all that in-game money is by spending real money.
Thanks for writing this. I’ve been really curious about what the draw for Farmville is but I dislike Facebook too much (and distrust Facebook apps too much) to go try it.
I still wonder what their revenue model is.
Thank you so very much for writing this article.
I was looking on the web for something on Farmville and why it takes so much resources on my mother’s in law laptop and fell on your article.
I hit submit before finishing what I wanted to write… sticky fingers ;)
Can understand why Farmville scares the crap out of you, it concerns both me and the husband on how many hours a day the mother in law (his mother) spend on this game from hell. Taxing the laptop resources and practically overheating the laptop’s cpu is one thing when we try to explain this to her which is highly irritating in itself but it is the other aspects that comes with her playing the game.
At first, it was something she started playing for she was invited by one of her Facebook friend. She used to have a normal need for Facebook to keep in touch with the family but now, she plays farmville more than 4 hours a day… we have timed her play time. Sometimes, it exceed 6 hours a day.
Both the hubby and I are gamers, me to a lesser extent but we have seen how farmville is psychologically addicting. She gets in one hell of a foul mood when she cannot access either my computer or the laptop when it comes time to harvest her Farmville crops. Standing beside a tornado seems more pleasant high risk activity and telling her that we are both busy on both computers. she really gets mad when she cannot harvest her crops, virtual crops no less! She has centered her time around harvest times too i.e. practically rearranged her daily schedule to make sure that she will be there in time, morning and night time, to harvest her crops before the time is up.
This game is having a serious impact on her moods. We both have seen her anxious when she couldn’t log on close to her harvest times. We have seen her almost erupt when she cannot log.
Now about the daily life of living with someone who is addicted to Farmville.
She cannot stop talking about Farmville, harvest this, plant that, fertilize this, it never ends. It seems that this household conversation mostly revolves about that damned virtual game. The hubby and I try our best to listen to her, we nod and say ooooo, aaaaa, good for you but these days, for my own mental sanity, I just block her off and nods agreeably when she goes on about the “Farmville talk”
So that is one thing amongst others.
She started to spam our friends to know if she could befriend them on Farmville. All that she cares these days is getting more gifts, more friends (even tho they are complete strangers she couldn’t care less about) and achieving that “super plantation” Farmville status.
You are so right when you are comparing Farmville to a pyramid scheme because that is mostly what it is. There is also the spam that comes with it on Facebook. Having accepted the mother in law on Facebook as a friend, I am spammed on what she needs as Farmville goes. I was personally flabbergasted to see that I could not see my own friends comments anymore so much I was getting Farmville messages on what her farmville needs were. It is a good thing that Facebook has an option to block the farmville crap from littering your account for if it hadn’t been the case, I would have had to block my own mother in law.
SO for what it is worth, you are right in every aspect of this game, it is a very good article you have written down. I just wanted to add my personal experience living with an avid farmville player.