As 2009 winds down, the world of Facebook has fragmented into two camps: the people who are pretending to be farmers, and the rest, who are busy wishing a plague of locusts upon them.
The last few months have witnessed the meteoric rise of a new kind of online time-waster: Facebook games with names such as FarmVille, FishVille, Island Paradise and Cafe World that are calibrated not toward fun, but toward the recruiting of friends and the disgorging of credit card numbers. They propagate with an almost organic zeal – and they have tens of millions of customers to show for it. The question is: How can something so dreary have become so popular?
Really, the gameplay is so dull, it would be easy to write them off as diversions for the mildly concussed if it weren't for the fact that 60 million people are playing FarmVille alone. That's twice the population of Canada. I know kids who play. I know parents who play. I tried to order a beer last weekend, and the guy behind the bar was playing on the joint's laptop.
The object of these games is to build something, be it a farm, a fish tank, or a crime family. This takes virtual money, and to get it players must perform repetitive tasks over a period of days. In FarmVille, by far the most popular of the lot, players must click and click to plow land, click and click to plant crops, and then, a day later, click and click and click to harvest the crops – and start again. It's about as much fun as mowing the lawn.
All of this effort leads to the purchase of virtual goods. The ultimate goal of FarmVille is to buy virtual shrubs, virtual barns and virtual animals to adorn your virtual land.
It's a lucky coincidence, then, that there's another way to get ahead in imaginary farming. Instead of working the fields, players can pull out their credit cards – or, perhaps more to the point, wheedle access to their parents' credit cards – and simply buy some virtual dollars in exchange for real ones. (Players are encouraged to part with $40 a pop.) Now, you might ask why anyone would want to buy a virtual pig.
First, remember that the act of shopping is its own reward. Second, consider that real pigs are oftentimes impractical. Third, and most important: When everyone else on the block has a virtual pig, you want one too.
In fact, these games make a lot more sense if you don't think of them as games at all. They're more like simple virtual worlds, where the fun part isn't playing, but buying and selling. FarmVille and its clones aren't video games, they're toys: one part dollhouse and one part consumer fantasy.
And consumer fantasies are always better shared. FarmVille encourages players to check out their friends' farms, making it an exercise in show and tell. Moreover, in order to progress to certain stages, players are actually required to have a certain number of Facebook friends who are also playing – effectively turning gamers into recruiters.
The company behind FarmVille (an immensely profitable outfit called Zynga) has made several games that all follow this formula; others have made their own knockoffs. In FishVille, the idea is to trick out a tank with ever-more exotic fish and corals. MafiaWars, a dude-oriented crime game, is more intricate and less visual, but the basic dynamic is the same.
To rope more people in, these games generate an astounding amount of noise in the social medium. Three or four times each session, they automatically attempt to post a message on the player's Facebook feed.
The messages read like this: “Ivor has been rewarded for loving their fish!”
“Ivor and their mafia completed the Mugging job in Mafia Wars.”
“Ivor attained the level of Fancy Farmer in FarmVille!”
First off, nobody should ever be called a “Fancy Farmer.” Second, imagine these announcements pushed into someone else's Facebook inbox, several times a day, times 60 million. It's word-of-mouth, insofar as every player gets a tape deck shoved into their maw.
Zynga hasn't resorted just to weapons of mass irritation. Earlier this year, its founder was infamously caught on tape at a conference explaining, that as an entrepreneur, he'd done “every horrible thing in the book, just to get revenues right away.” This included encouraging users to download hard-to-remove adware toolbars.
Until recently, his games also promised virtual cash in exchange for completing third-party bogus “IQ tests” and surveys that asked for players' phone numbers – and then left charges on their phone bills. Zynga stopped these offers after a leading blog blew the whistle on what it called “ScamVille,” but the same entrepreneurial spirit is still at work.
So it is that, down home on the farm, we're reminded that if you want to achieve success and popularity in this world, just work hard, get your hands dirty, and design an irritating product that will separate people from their friends and their money as expeditiously as possible. People will come flocking. A hailstorm might be too much to hope for.
Listen to Ivor Tossell's podcast at globetechnology.com and follow him on Twitter at @ivortossell.
