I Don’t Care About Your Virtual Cow

Do not laugh but my first online gaming experience was FarmVille. I wish I could tell you that my first online gaming experience was World of Warcraft or League of Legends or some game more like those. I have always been more into single player console games than PC or online games. However, around 12 years ago, a friend of my cousin messaged me on Facebook and encouraged me to start playing FarmVille. So I decided I would give it a try and started playing the game through the Facebook website.

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Initial Reactions

I immediately found the idea of the game to be very interesting and soon I was hooked. It felt like digital Legos where you could imagine what you wanted your farm to look like in your mind. Then you could build it using individual items. You could buy all sorts of items for your farm including decorative items like fencing and bundles of hay as well as barns and houses. There were also items you could buy that could be used to earn coins. These included fruit trees and farm animals. In order to earn coins to buy items you would do digital farm chores. These included growing and harvesting crops as well as picking fruit and milking cows and getting eggs from hens.

Fun with Friends

Several of my Facebook friends played the game as well. I could visit their farms and see what they had done on their farm and help them out at the same time by fertilizing their crops. Some of my friends had great taste in the design of their farm and others had farms that were pretty strange looking to me. I put a lot of effort into the design of my farm because I wanted my farm to stand out when people visited it.

One bottleneck of the game was that you could only interact and play with other Farmville players if you were Facebook friends with them. I did not have a whole lot of Facebook friends who played, so I started sending friend requests to people that I barely knew just so I would have more people to play with. I even sent a friend request to a cute girl from my high school that I did not really know after I noticed that she played the game. I justified it by telling myself “ I’m not a creep, I’m just looking for more people to play with”.

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Addicting

A couple aspects of the game made it a lot more addictive than your typical single player game. First, there was the social factor which brought out a fun sense of competition. It was an enjoyable challenge trying to increase your rank(XP) relative to your friends and trying to have an impressive farm for your friends to visit. Second, the game existed in real time. You needed to return to the game to harvest your crops within a certain time period and if you came back too late they would wither. You also needed to visit your friend’s farms within a certain time period if you wanted to help them out by fertilizing their crops.

Spamming your Friends News Feed

The somewhat spam-like posts generated by the game annoyed many Facebook users who did not play the game and were not interested in games in general. My aunt once said on Facebook, “If I get one more post in my feed asking me to help someone’s virtual farm animal I’m going to scream”.

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Progressing

Over time you would earn coins and build up your XP. As you earned coins and leveled up you could buy more and more expensive items for your farm. You could also increase the size of the plot of land that you had. Some people had gigantic farms with an unbelievable number of items stuffed onto it. So much so that the Flash intensive graphics would bog down my non-gaming computer. You could speed up your progress in the game by using real money to buy an in game currency known as FarmVille Cash. However, I chose to earn all the items on my farm simply by playing the game rather than also making use of outside money.

Saying Goodbye

I was in college during the period of time that I was playing FarmVille. At a certain point I felt like I was spending too much time on my farm as well as thinking about my farm when I should be putting more energy into school work. In addition, the game play itself was fairly monotonous and not very challenging. I decided to walk away from FarmVille and I have not looked back since. After FarmVille, I did not play any online games until about 3 years ago when I was first introduced to Splinterlands. I still play Splinterlands to this day and imagine I will still be playing it years from now.


Thanks for reading
NinjaMike