FarmVille

FarmVille

(Another from @JayTay‘s incredibly long selection of topics)

FarmVille

Great. Choose a game I’ve never played, or even had any interest in playing. Consider at least 75% of this post entirely made up.

FarmVille was an early Facebook/iPhone “building” game, where you constantly pester friends and family to play it too in order to progress in the game yourself. I think. Never having a Facebook account nor the want to play one of these types of games (I poked at We Rule for a few days when that was a thing and it was tedious and stupid), that’s as much as I know. I say “FarmVille was”, but in fact it probably still is, although I expect these days it’s full of adverts, has a load of product placement for Taco Bell and sanitary towels, and costs a fortune in in-app purchases to do anything more than open it up, as is the way of things these days. I have lamented on this before.

FarmVille casts you as a new farm (that is, an actual personification of a farm), arriving with your family of farms on the back of a golf cart in a town full of other farms. Big farms who own banks, little farms who steal apples and chase cats, bad farms that shank you while you sleep, and farms of the night where you can get the sort of treatment your ladyfarm neglects to give you because you’re drunk again and you forgot to put the bins out.

The aim is to unite the entire town, by building an empire in your name. This is achieved by performing good deeds like taking dogs for walks and helping old farms across the road, as well as assisting the local vigilante farms in taking down farm gang members with cricket bats before dragging their still twitching farm corpses out of town and dumping them in a river.

As you make a name for yourself, your tasks become more difficult, requiring help from your real-life Facebook chums (hence the pestering them). You can’t build a prison without 20 Facebook likes. You can’t buy an ice-cream van without five of your friends sharing your request on their wall. You can’t even get a new cricket bat unless you convince two of your acquaintances to change their relationship status to “It’s complicated”.

Just like other world building games of this type, there’s no real achievable goal. Your town just gets larger and larger, tasks require more and more crowd involvement to complete, and by the time you’ve managed to create your personal farm mafia, you need to play it in 28 hour stints and post screenshots on Facebook over 400 times an hour.

’tis a stupid game.

(Featured image is from here, is unmodified, and used under this licence.)

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