Connective Visions

In an excellent bit of questioning, a friend remarked to me that most of my Facebook postings seemed to be about “imaginary farm animals” and professed that she didn’t understand the penchant of so many for “electronic farming.” A day later, four more friends joined the Facebook group “I dont care about your farm, or your fish, or your park, or your mafia.”

They were hardly the first.  About three months after I took on Farmville as my second Zynga game challenge (the first being the less-absorbing Scramble), one of my Scandinavian friends signed up to the Swedish group “Vi som ger fullständigt faaan i Mafia Wars och Farmville och annen skit.”  (That “sk” is pronounced “sh,” by the way.  I won’t bother to translate the rest.)

He was asking to be my neighbor on Farmville a little over a month later.

So why do so many people – 76 million per month on Facebook alone, according to BusinessWeek – regularly log on to a very slow-loading game to build digital horse stables, harvest imaginary artichokes, and petition one another for everything from Valentines to building materials?

At the base is the social nature of Facebook and gaming. They’re a natural combination. Community, after all, develops around discussion and shared activity, and what social-networking sites such as Facebook, MySpace, Digg, and Delicious are aiming for is more than a list of contacts for your holiday and birthday greetings. They exist for the interaction.

A social game boosts these online communities, and in a pace that’s manageable. You don’t have to play for hours straight; the crops take time to grow, after all. You have freedom of choice as to whether you want to fertilize your friends’ farms or send them gifts on any given day. And you can design your farm largely as you please. Thus it also is, as VentureBeat’s GamesBeat section noted in August 2009, a medium for self-expression.

The common activity gives you something to talk about with people you may not know how to approach. All you may say to a friend during the week is “I need a Durian tree” (yes, that is one of your gift options, and no, I’d never heard of it before Farmville), but you’ve made contact. And if your friend is paying attention, you get your tree.

Feeling like you’re helping out is a very basic form of human gratification. Having someone respond to your need is another. And these gratifications grow greater as players encounter the frustrations of the game. You are, in essence, combating a common enemy: the crazy developers.

See, the game is also ridiculous. The arrival of reindeer to go next to my banana trees had me in a coughing fit. Farmville neighbors with whom I make actual face-to-face contact when we play darts together have another topic for discussion besides our lousy play, the weather, jobs, and other people’s love lives. We wonder why we can’t get bacon from our pigs, instead of truffles. We ponder what we’re going to do with all the cat, horse, reindeer, and cow hair. We banter back and forth, online and offline, over how penguins got onto our farms, why a circus elephant would “give” peanuts, how the cows and horses get up and down the stairs in their respective buildings, and what to do about the eternal flood of chickens.

It’s the chickens that have developed my community the most. Tyson does not have as many chickens as Farmville. And in their eternal wisdom, the programmers have put chickens not only in the “mystery eggs” but also in the mystery gifts, all the while restricting gamers to one 20-hen coop. Today’s expansion option for the coop roused everyone: we’ve been there, all of us, overrun by chickens. Everyone will help each other expand those coops.

In this sense, Farmville is not unlike a neighborhood getting together to shovel out from a snowstorm.

But.

There is a “but,” the shadow side to Farmville. I think of the neighbor who said to me, “I won’t be a millionaire in real life, but at least I can be one on Farmville.” That gave me pause, as had Zynga’s baiting of its players with items that require real money. It’s amazing how the allure of consumer goods translates so easily to an imaginary environment. Some people will pay real dollars to get that latest-release 52FV cash Forbidden City or 42FV cash French Quarter II in order to express themselves online.

And there is the posting. It clogs up pages. It drives friends crazy. That, however, has an upside: these friends join other communities, where they can decry Zynga and its marketing and our obsession with it. While manners make me hate to bug my friends with my petitions for horseshoes, I feel rather content when they find a place to vent it out.

Finally, Farmville has a too-competitive aspect to it. When one begins demanding Christmas gifts and Valentines and running comparisons with others, the community line becomes blurry. Even the horse stables and barn expansions have raised such a frenzy as to make me wonder: what’s the hurry?

There is, after all, an end to Farmville. You can only go so high. The allure of a new crop a month or an impossible-to-construct building does die.

In the meantime, though … I really need five more neighbors to help with my chicken coop expansion.