Mental Floss clues us into an interesting article on MediaCommons about why we play Farmville — basically, because we've been trained to not be able to ignore social obligations.
The secret to Farmville's popularity is neither gameplay nor aesthetics. Farmville is popular because in entangles users in a web of social obligations. When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others' farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies. As the French sociologist Marcel Mauss tells us, gifts are never free: they bind the giver and receiver in a loop of reciprocity. It is rude to refuse a gift, and ruder still to not return the kindness.[11] We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.
I don't play Farmville, but I do keep my Facebook page pretty app-free because I fear getting entangled in such obligations.
Cultivated Play: Farmville
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Maybe we play ’cause there ain’t nothing else to do. This not being the big city, and all.
Besides, life is good, down on the farm:
Ditto, Lisa. I killed my original FB account and recreated a new one with a fake name. I do not use ANY apps on the new account. I don’t even use the “like” button.
The second I see a new invitation to or gift from App X, I immediately hide the app. If someone gets their feelings hurt about it, boo hoo.
If they were really nice, and really good people, they wouldn’t send me “gifts” they know I’ll never use or give back.
So am I a rude jerk? I don’t play it but do have a FB account.
anyone who prompts me to play farmville or mafia wars or any of that bullshit is de-friended after a single warning. same with people who send group suggestions and ‘likes’.
“hey come play this game that isn’t fun that has no purpose or end!”
i mean of all the games in the world one could spend time on, why would anyone pick farmville? do these people also own tamagachi’s??? virtual gifts? really? what the fuck is that? that’s FUN? that’s COOL? some shitty jpeg icon that looks like clipart from 1994? acquiring those is something to aspire to? it’s rewarding? engrossing? i refer you to the banana stickers from that episode of metalocalypse.
It grows on you.
oh like leeches and ticks. got it.
lol calm down buster
no ones forcing u to play farmvile
I’ve seen posts were people were getting downright pissy about the fact that they were “spending an enormous amount of their precious time” helping out on other people’s farms, yet noone helped out on hers…was threatening to “un-neighbor” or de-friend people if they didn’t start returning the favor.
It’s crazy how weird people get about those games.
I wouldn’t even know how to go about playing Farmville. I find the UI on Facebook mindboggling. My ‘homepage’ is not stuff I’ve created, my ‘profile’ is not my personal info, but rather what I would call my homepage and I really don’t care what my friends are writing to strangers, especially if I’m only seeing half the conversation. I use it as an email link to people I actually know and I certainly don’t put anything personal on it, like my real name. Since the Scrabble app is virtually non-functioning, I’m not paying too much attention to anything else they come up with. I wish someone would come up with a FB-like site that doesn’t make steam come out of my ears.
i mean im pretty laissez faire when it comes to how other people spend their time, but I simply have to denounce things like farmville and fantasy baseball. watching TV is more constructive than playing farmville. farmville is an affront to the sanctity of life and the short time we have on the planet.
it holds this status because there are very few things in the world that could defeat it in terms of time wasting vs. return. rule out any physical activity as its return is always going to be higher than a pointless, chore-like video game. also rule out any hand-eye coordination based games (as H-E skills have value) every book ever written and every movie or television show ever made.
im looking for suggestions: things one can spend time on with even less return on time invested than farmville.
Masters degree in Anthropology.
que?
oh ok gotcha. agreed.
“i mean im pretty laissez faire when it comes to how other people spend their time, but I simply have to denounce things like farmville and fantasy baseball. watching TV is more constructive than playing farmville. farmville is an affront to the sanctity of life and the short time we have on the planet.”
Just for fun of argument, how is this any different from watching TV or playing games, or even reading a magazine? Actually I would say it’s as valid.
I think it’s funny that people watch a sports game and have an affinity for a certain team just because of geography. If you dropped dead that minute it’s not going to make a damn difference in the outcome. At least with a game like Farmville you are actually influencing a friend’s enjoyment of a game by helping them out.
“Rule out any physical activity as its return is always going to be higher than a pointless, chore-like video game.”
I would say that walking blindly into high speed traffic, putting your hand into a turned on blender or hitting your head repeatedly against a brick wall is going to have a negative return on investment. Don’t you love absolutes!
“also rule out any hand-eye coordination based games (as H-E skills have value) every book ever written and every movie or television show ever made.”
Really? I’ll have you watch Salvador Dali’s “Un chien andalou” on repeat for a week in a locked room and we’ll see where you are at by then.
im looking for suggestions: things one can spend time on with even less return on time invested than farmville.
“See above: Since I would imagine cracking open your skull, getting run over, brain damage, or a real loss of a limb, will get you less return on time invested.”
I think South Park already covered this pretty well.
Farmville behavior is specific to people known by and often related to and liked by an individual, and it takes place in a safe, unambiguous environment. Extrapolating these behaviors to global, stable character traits (“polite”) strikes me as problematic. Plenty of people are great friends or family members, but awful human beings outside of that social sphere.
Now, I’m not saying the author should have done more rigorous social science research to come up with a more definitive and realistic conclusion; but the author’s interpretation is simply one among many possible others.
Yeah, that’s a cute theory but doesn’t really hold much universal water. The farmville addicts I know don’t really care about what their “neighbors” are doing other than a) as competition (my farm is cooler than your farm) or b) because they’re actually in their real-life social circles and it’s something for them to talk about later (which are among the most moronic conversations i’ve ever witnessed.) From my vantage point, I’d say people play farmville because it makes them feel like they’re accomplishing something; in their little farm worlds, they are God and get to witness the exciting consequences of their decision-making, keeping their farm “healthy” and “productive”. Pretty pathetic, but that’s the real human traits at work here, our never-ending desire for more control over our lives.
I only know five people who play Farmville. All five are post-or-near-menopausal women.
They are using this garbage to sell slurpees and hotdogs at 7-11… I had to go there yesterday and everything was mafia wars, farmville… What happened to the good old days, real farms,real mafia wars…
I must be one rude, asocial jerk: I like keeping my FB short and simple, so I’ve been ignoring every single game invitation I’ve been getting since day 1. The worst one to fend off was the zombie- or werefolf?- one: I must have gotten ‘bitten’ 5 times a day for a few months! I was glad to see the trend finally die off.
I don’t have anything against friends who play the games, I just really don’t have the time or interest. I think keeping up with all these games and apps would stress me out.
Nobody has ever been bent out of shape about it.
Oy, I hide ALL of these things. Not nearly enough explosions per minute to keep me interested.
I read once that Sudoku grew in popularity compared to crossword puzzles because it can be accomplished with pure process, without relying on one’s trivia or ability to make word associations to solve tricky clues. I’d guess the same mechanism is at work here. “Playing” these “games” appears to me to be nothing more than clicking in the right place at the correct frequency. That could be said of a real time strategy game, but to play an RTS well requires the ability to manage large amounts of complexity and strategize quickly given sometimes rapidly changing circumstances. In Farmville and its ilk there is no decision making (at least that I’ve been able to tell from watching my wife click for hours on end), but rather an always straightforward linear progression from one level to the next. The “cooperative” aspect is taken from other, more interesting online games, but as stated here it’s done less for its strategic addition to the gameplay than for its ability to advertise the game and get people to keep playing. Massively multiplayer game designers have known for some time now that the social aspect will keep people involved well past the point at which it grows old to them.
I won’t chide anyone for the choice in how they spend their leisure time though. If you’re really enjoying it, go for it I say.
I would say people join Facebook for the same reason. Seriously, is it hard to email or call somebody when you want to talk to them? There are many easy and free ways to share pictures online too. People are on facebook because “people are on facebook.” I’m sure people will jump on another bandwagon soon, or at least we can hope…
I’m on Facebook because it’s an effortless aggregation of the activities of my friends and family. They all write their little blogs about things going on in their lives and I can spend 5 minutes in the morning while drinking my coffee getting a quick snapshot about what’s going on in their lives, and I can comment on it if I feel moved to do so. It’s convenient.
As for the MafiaFarmvilleSpam stuff, I visually leap over it just like I ignore ads on web pages. Why even waste a single brain cycle complaining about it. Just ignore it and move on. I wish more people could discipline themselves this way. I work for a company that makes spam filters for email. We do a pretty good job I think with greylisting and keyword analysis. But we still get the occasional kook who endlessly complains about one piece of spam sneaking through the filter. They forward these to us with a vehement diatribe, YOUR SERVICE IS WORTHLESS MAKE THIS SPAM STOP. Our usual response is to calmly tell them, “well, turn off our spam filter for a day and see what we’re protecting you from.” Then once they really see a sustained spam deluge they turn the filter back on and shut up about it.
So really, is it that hard to simply ignore FarmMafiaVilleWarSpam? It’s in the same category as internet trolls, don’t feed them and they go back under their bridges.
There was a very convincing article recently 9dammit, cant find the link) that said in no uncertain terms that most facebook games are sociopathic.
They show in incredible disregard for others, force people into obligations, and consistently and irrepressibly force themselves on people.
No wonder I deal with Facebook games like I deal with crazy people.
I played Farmville because it was a fun, cute little experience to share with my wife. I never felt obligated to return gifts, although I didn’t mind doing so. When I felt I was done with the game (after about a month), I stopped playing it. For the games I’m not interested in, I hide them on my Facebook page.
It would seem that there are people on both sides of the fence that take these games too seriously.
My mom almost got sucked into this mess until I berated her about the real garden outside that’s full of weeds.
The only time I’ve ever had anybody confront me about one of these games (can’t remember which one) the girl came up to me in a bar (I barely knew her from highschool) and point blank demanded to know why I never accept invites. I just simply stated to her that I’d rather play a real game with real goals, and if she wanted I would even let her borrow one of my old pokemon games (and it’s even PORTABLE). She just looked at me and walked off.
Unlike cellphones I have never found a facebook app that was worth any use (except Graffiti). I’d be free to suggestions because the BB knows what’s up.
This is why I’m glad that in my circle of friends we never even started remembering each others birthdays and giving obligatory gifts. Life is so much less stressful that way.
I did like harvest moon though.
I was so happy when they made that Hide button for these dumb apps! nothing makes me quite as cheerful as making that stuff vanish.
“We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.”
Just like the people in real Farmvilles, everywhere. Except playing the video version is a simulacrum. Meaning “watered-down version”. Considering that most real-world Farmvilles are already snoozers I don’t see the point.
Oh please. I used to love Farmville. It was fun to plant, wait and then harvest crops and then use that money to buy stuff for the farm. It’s when everything started relying on having other Farmville friends that I quit playing. For instance, you couldn’t expand your farm until you had a certain number of Farmville friends. That was lousy. I never felt obligated to play Farmville, it’s when the game MADE ME obligated on Others that I quit playing it.
Polite != obsessive/compulsive.
When users log into Facebook, they are reminded that their neighbors have sent them gifts, posted bonuses on their walls, and helped with each others’ farms. In turn, they are obligated to return the courtesies.
WRONG (in my case, anyway)… I log in and see that people have sent me gifts & bonuses before thinking to myself “What a fucking joker! Why would I waste my time on such a pointless excuse for facebook to show me more ads?”. I then promptly revise-down my level of respect for whoever has done whatever on farmville for wasting the 1 second it took for me to read their update.
Boing Boing’s pages are too fat now. They take too long to load and there are too many dynamically fetched elements on each page, greatly increasing the chance that one of these blocks will fail to load and thus leave the page hanging in that annoying half-loaded, ever-spinning-indicator state.
Maybe it’s just me, but this never used to happen, and I now perceive visiting Boing Boing as something akin to treading lightly around soft sand.
Since I grew up on a real farm, which my family had to sell off in bits and pieces during the fabulous late 20th Century Farm Crisis, “playing” at farming is about as horrible and offensive a thing I could imagine. Think “Company Town” or “Sweatshop Land” as equivalents. What fun!
Zynga makes pretty games, but I object to their basic game model. I have tried out a few of their games and there is no way to move forward in most of them unless you are willing to constantly pester your friends or spend real money; usually both. It’s brilliant from a marketing standpoint. I’m sure they are making money hand over fist. But from a game-play perspective, it sucks a$$. I would much rather spend real money up-front for a complete game than be forced to pester friends or constantly bleed money. It’s like a slot machine without the slightest chance of a payoff.
By the way, Facebook has a “Hide” button which will allow you to hide posts from a specific app. It makes for a much cleaner feed. :)