7 Reasons You Shouldn’t Play FarmVille
If you use the social networking site Facebook, you’ll doubtless be familiar with FarmVille, the most successful Facebook game there is. Here are seven reasons that you shouldn’t play it.
1. Imagination. When you’re playing FarmVille, you’re pretending that you’re a farmer. Farming is not exciting. It’s essentially portly, ruddy-faced people and mud, or portly, ruddy-faced people and blood, depending on which type of farming it is. If you’re going to pretend to be something, pretend to be something interesting; a pirate, an astronaut, a mermaid, a flying horse, a rock star, an oculus, an aardvark, a many-headed warrior-beast, the Archbishop of Canterbury…anything, it’s all better than pretending you’re a farmer.
2. Spam. Your friends want to log onto Facebook without being inundated with updates on the progress of your pretend farm. Tell us about something that does exist instead. How are your children? How is your husband? How is your pet? Step away from the “farm” for a moment and check that they’re all still there and in good health, then tell us about it. Perform a head-count if you need to.
3. Reality. Instead of pretending to grow vegetables on your computer, why don’t you actually grow some vegetables? It’s not difficult. All you need are some seeds and some mud. Just weed and water them occasionally (this takes less time than tending your suppositious crops) and eventually you’ll be able to pull them up and eat them. You can’t eat your computer can you? No, no matter how much the rest of us wish you would.
4. It’s not sociable. My Facebook friends that play FarmVille assist each other on their imaginary farms that don’t exist. I know this from my news feed. Yet these people don’t come and help out in my garden, which is real. I grow real things there (badly). If you came to help me grow my real plants, I’d share them with you and ply you with beer. This is how people really interact and bond. When FarmVille tells the world, via Facebook, that “David helped Rachel harvest her plums”, you haven’t really interacted with each other – unless it’s a euphemism, in which case, well done David, I never knew you had it in you.
5. Swastika. Okay, I’m not going to pretend that I don’t find it funny, but it obviously took a lot of time and effort to grow your swastika. That’s time you could have spent being a real Nazi, goose-stepping about in a fetching uniform, annexing the Sudetenland and shouting things in German…or not, no, that’s a bad idea. You could surely have done something better with that time though: Read a book; go for a walk; climb a mountain – no – climb every mountain; ford every stream; follow every rainbow; till you find your dream. Or perhaps do something unrelated to The Sound of Music, your choice.
6. Grow up. This may come as a blow to some of the 7 Reasons team, but it’s not socially acceptable to have an imaginary friend after the age of nine. So why is it deemed acceptable to have an imaginary farm? A farm is bigger than a friend – unless your friend is American – so surely it’s a bigger no-no?
7. AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHH! It’s come to this: I’m actually writing about real people growing imaginary plants and tending non-existent animals on their pretend farms which only exist in cyberspace, and you’re reading what I’ve written about actual people cultivating fabricated crops and make-believe livestock on fictitious farms which aren’t real. What has become of us? Death to FarmVille! Stupid bloody fucking FarmVille.
What was your imaginary friend’s name Marc?
.-= Jon´s last blog ..Male Lesbianism: An Insight. =-.
Main problem is that its faulty, and I spent hours and hours on my farm and then it wouldn’t load, and even though I contacted their customer service a number of times. They haven’t been able to fix it, and all my crops will have died. Noooooooooo!!!!!!!!!
Don’t worry Paul … it’s just a game. You really should relax.
I simply upped and stopped playing when the gameplay alterations started to take the mickey, and you know what … no change to my life at all except an extra 20 minutes per day. It was a wierd addiction that had very little reward left in it.
Twas a nice enough, vaguely Harvest Moon-ish game at first, but unfortunately it’s far too open ended, focussed on making money through ads and small (not micro!) payments by the users for top-up cash IE Itchy And Scratchy Dollars, rather than you buying the cartridge for your games console … so there’s no real goal you’re working towards. It’s endless. There’s no proper sense of achievement ever. Just an endless grind – maybe that’s the grand joke of it all, they make you feel just what a normal farmer does, except without the heartache when crops randomly fail.
But because of that, they’ve had to pile new feature after new feature into it to try and hold longterm attention, and it’s become a big old bloated incomprehensible mess. No fun any more. Not a good game. Screw it – don’t waste your time trying to convince Zynga to bring your game back from probably-nonexistent backups. Just do something else more productive instead. Even playing a more limited-length free game would probably be better.
(and don’t just decamp to WoW, jeez…)
Unfortunately I’m starting to see the same effect with another “little” game on FB, Battle Stations, which had a sort of closed-end feel to it (a finite spread of unlockable, chained missions as you go up the levels) and some kind of cohesion and reason to keep going, to uncover more of the storyline behind it all. But once again, some of the earlier players have reached the “end”, got bored and started to decamp, so the gameplay for EVERYONE is being buggered about with in order to make it a never ending cyclical slog. Missions are going out the window to be replaced with endless “exploring” where you can “discover” “expeditions” (which are simply trophies, rather than things to do) and eventually unlock pretty much unbeatable boss battles that – of course – you have to drag all your friends into if you want to have any chance of winning. And each daily turn on there now takes about 25 minutes, instead of the 5 or so previously. Think this one may soon be for the electronic bin as well.
Yknow. Honestly. Just give me a java Master System emulator with a ROM of Sonic 1 plugged into it and a save-state feature I’ll be perfectly happy blowing a week of coffeebreaks on it. Totally missing the target, guys.