In a fascinating essay, A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz argues that we do, indeed, play Farmville because we’re polite. More people in the U.S. play Farmville than any other video game.
…over seventy-three million people play Farmville. Twenty-six million people play Farmville every day. More people play Farmville than World of Warcraft, and Farmville users outnumber those who own a Nintendo Wii.
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The game isn’t popular, he argues, because it’s a good game. In fact, Liszkiewicz thinks it’s a decidedly bad game.
…games offer a break from responsibility and routine, yet Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop. Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times: once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again…
Farmville is so laborious and tedious, that one of the rewards of playing Farmville is playing less Farmville:
As you advance through Farmville, you begin earning rewards that allow you to play Farmville less. Harvesting machines let you click four squares at once, and barns and coops let you manage groups of animals simultaneously, saving you hundreds of tedious mouse-clicks.
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So why the heck is Farmville the most popular video game in America? Liszkiewicz says, “people are playing Farmville because people are playing Farmville.”
(source)
In other words:
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. We play Farmville, then, because we are trying to be good to one another. We play Farmville because we are polite, cultivated people.
(source)
* Title borrowed from BoingBoing.
Lisa Wade, PhD is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of American Hookup, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender; and a forthcoming introductory text: Terrible Magnificent Sociology. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram.
Comments 56
Lukeroelofs — September 7, 2010
This is probably partially true, but part of it may also be that this kind of tedious, unpleasant game is skilfully designed to addict people. At least according to the scientific authorities at cracked.com
http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-trying-to-get-you-addicted.html
T — September 7, 2010
This is pretty awesome.
Zach — September 7, 2010
FarmVille has taken a lot of flack from "traditional gamers" (IE males from 15-30) because it "isn't a good game" - at a recent "social games" panel at a gaming convention, the first three questions posed to the panel were all attacks on farmville (This is how virulent they were: "Skinner-ville", "it's (f-word)ing (r-word)ed", and "isn't making people into true gamers" - spit out with as much venom as could be mustered, to general applause of the audience ). I can't say I'm surprised to see academics jumping on it as well. A space newly dominated by 30-50 year old women is receiving attacks from men for being a waste of time and pointless? Good thing the author has plenty of objective evidence to support his position!
How is this any different than talking about about how romance novels and rom-com movies are rotting piles of nothingness women only consume out of a malformed sense of citizenship?
I could get into game design and argue that the rewards of playing farmville are no different from the rewards of *any* other well-designed game (World of Warcraft, The Sims, Harvest Moon). But I'm so sick of people jumping on this "latest technology turning people into lazy slobs" thing. It's bad enough watching gamers attack non-gamers, but to watch this turn into ammunition for another installment of "gender/age/technology wars" makes me sick.
finette — September 7, 2010
I take great pleasure in making all games, stupid polls, etc disappear from my feed forever. :) (Click the X on the left and it will give you the option to hide the app instead of your friend who's using it.) I am a 29-year-old female and I do play casual games from Big Fish and the like, including time management games which is the genre I think Farmville more or less fits in, but I've never had any interest whatsoever in interacting with real people in games, whether I know them offline or not. I think there are lots of people like me who don't feel they need to succumb to the pressure.
pg — September 7, 2010
I play WoW rather than Farmville but it has lots of similar features. It isn't all that polite, but it is chock-full of repetitive, tedious tasks, and rewards that you can only get by logging in frequently to earn reputation points, honor points, token doo-dads, gold, etc. (It's called "grinding" because it's a grind!) There are events you can only participate in if you log in at certain times of day or days of the month.
There are also rewards that exist solely to make the game less tedious. For instance, you can invest a lot of game money to buy a mount that will let you move faster and relieve the completely artificial tedium of having to run from place to place on foot. (They could easily programmed more teleportation features, letting players zap from place to place instantly.) And, it's highly addictive!
Erin Leigh — September 7, 2010
As an admitted Farmville-player myself, I'd say the politeness argument is both true and false.
Among my youngish crowd, it's certainly not seen as "cool" to play Farmville (I've created a gamers list/filter so that when I make my game posts, only those people can see those posts). Thus, among my Farmville neighbors, only a handful are actual real-life friends or people that I know somehow. The rest are "fake friends" added expressly for the purpose of upping my number of neighbors (to access certain areas of the game).
So to those "fake" friends, I typically feel no politeness compunction whatsoever - many of them have hundreds of neighbors (at least one that I know has the maximum number allowed) and wouldn't notice if I don't send a gift back. Also, sometimes the timing of gifts means you *can't* send a gift back, so people don't always expect it. Of course, after a while, if you are not reciprocating in any way (returning gifts, posting free items on the wall, etc.), you run the risk of being defriended. But...it's a silly game with little to no real consequences, so I'm not sure how much the politeness factors into it.
I specifically sought out a group of queer/LGBT farmers because some of my other fake friends turned out to be horrible bigots that I had to delete. The gay factor has only partially allieviated this problem - I've had to delete a few Rainbow Farmers for racists comments. I kinda wish there were a group of progressive/radical/anti-racist/queer farmers, but um, I'm pretty sure most of them aren't even on the interwebs, let alone playing Farmville.
For me, part of it is definitely the "I'm sucked in/addicted" part at this point. But it is a bit of an escapist fantasy for me. My little farm sometimes seems like a place I wish were real. It's easy to romanticize farming and rural life in a game like this.
I think Zach's point is a very apt one, especially in the context of sexism in the gaming industry at large.
A — September 7, 2010
Jesus, your "friends" can bother you to participate in this crap? Ugh. I've never been on Facebook and think it should be banned at all workplaces because so many people waste their time there when they should be working.
Mickey — September 7, 2010
The games industry has been talking about Farmville for quite a while, now. This post is really only repeating things that have been discussed with mounting concern by game designers for a couple of years.
SaintPeter — September 7, 2010
I am a "Hardcore Gamer" (hence my handle) - I've played various MMOs for years. Once I had a child, though, I didn't have the time to play anymore. When I first go on Facebook I ended up playing Farmville for 2-3 months. It wasn't a great substitute, mostly since it lacked depth, but it was pretty entertaining. There are lots of "Achievements" and levels to unlock . . gave me something to shoot for. There are other people who play it as a decorating game . . and it is very well suited for that. Think of it as a dollhouse, but less expensive and taking up less room.
I also really enjoyed interacting with many of my female friends and relations through the game. This was not from a sense of social obligation, but because it was a fun way to connect beyond posting pictures of my kid. I suppose there were some elements of obligation for some - a desire to return "gifts" and such - but it was not a major factor for me.
The main reason I stopped had more to do with the time/click intensiveness of the game. When you have a 22x22 plot it can take upwards of 20 minutes to harvest, plow, and plant and thee were dependencies on "fuel" and such. I just didn't want to spend the time anymore. It actually became stressful for me to play. I did end up leaving my farm "in-tact" for friends to "use", but I stopped cold turkey.
Of course, I've moved on to other, similar games which have slightly less time commitment.
When you get right down to it, though, most RPGs can be boiled down to the parody game "Progress Quest":
http://progressquest.com/
paul — September 7, 2010
The argument being advanced in the original article is patently ridiculous.
First and foremost, the 6 requirements for what is a game, as far as I can tell, stop working after childhood for a large swath of people. If suspension of belief is literally a requirement then I would argue that most adults no longer play games. I've played WoW before, did I really think I was an Orc? No. I also played Farmville for a short period. As someone who grew up around and engaged with agriculture (both by dealing with farming as well as raising animals for 4H), the pigs I bought in Farmville TOTALLY require exactly the same kind of work as they did in real life, except for all the actual work and daily routine that were required of me; petting my pigs never satiated their hunger or thirst in real life. Though when I play Monopoly on my phone, I totes own Park Place. I now enjoy the security of property ownership, apologies to Marx and Engels.
Moreover, the idea that it is routine and therefore not a game is a weird argument, especially when the original article uncritically uses WoW as a comparison of popularity. I'd assume the author has never played WoW and knows no one who does play. There is literally a routine to leveling up and beating certain milestones within the game (a quick viewing of the South Park episode on WoW highlights how routine the end goals and the means to them actually are).
Additionally, WoW is entirely built on responsibility to others. The amount of people who have canceled plans because their guild has a raid that evening would signify to me that there are responsibilities which people are expected to follow. The classed nature of characters requires the responsibility, especially when guilds explicitly build themselves based on one's level, their times to play (or willingness to make time), their character's strengths.
The critique about money is also oddly suspect considering the mass amounts of money that are required to play such games as WoW (monthly subscription) or The Sims (the expansion packs). As if the social capital that one may obtain via WoW or Sims or SecondLife isn't also being directly levied to the economic benefit of the game designers.
The arrogance of referring to Farmville as a "bad game" makes the entire post worthless. What, then, qualifies as a good game? From what I gather, the author thinks it's a bad game because it's simple (in both aesthetics and goals). A new color of cat is obviously a stupid goal, but killing an unknown number of boars to get to level ##? Yeah, that's a good goal. Since when is a simple game inherently bad? This reeks of the false divisions that exist in the broader cultural sector, stratifying based on some socially constructed idea of when simplicity is good in some cases but in others it is simply laziness/incompleteness/amateur/uneducated.
I seriously think that the author needs to critically engage with Farmville, not as someone who was horrified when he joined. This would allow the author to thoroughly understand the dynamics of the game and the way(s) in which users engage with it and with others. A reference to Mauss does not make the original article socially aware, mostly because it should be utilized in the actual engagement of the gift economy with games, not as simply some way to argue that Farmville is not a game because it utilizes an approximation of a gift economy (plus, the gift economy doesn't work because, when I quit playing Farmville, I also didn't return gifts in kind and yet suffered no consequences).
/rant
tree — September 7, 2010
hmm, guess i'm not a polite or cultivated person.
Miriam — September 7, 2010
I kind of think the arguments for why it's a bad game are a fail for reasons stated repeatedly above. I also think that "politeness" would *keep* people from playing farmville or at least advancing quickly in it, because it requires you to spam people with farmville bullshit and that tends not to be appreciated by most people. The way the game involves other players does make the game more popular, probably, but only because it is using the players as advertising instead of simply plastering ads all over the place. (Not that the game doesn't do that too). So, the kind of person who might like it is more likely to play if invited by a friend than if they just see a banner on the side of their facebook screen.
In conclusion, farmville is successful and (it used to be) unique because it repeatedly advantages people who do the advertising for the company, which is inherently more effective than other forms of advertising. This is not because of politeness but rather because it is a more effective way of getting people's attention. What keeps people playing is the game itself, its rewards, and its addictiveness, NOT social obligation.
Jennifer — September 7, 2010
Interesting post and replies. I'm not a gamer, though FB scrabble just transferred from real play.
An interesting presentation about gaming from the DICE 2010 might be of interest to a few of you, http://vodpod.com/watch/3082518-dice-2010-design-outside-the-box-presentation-videos-g4tv-com .
Charlotte — September 7, 2010
Because we all have the spare cash to play WoW or own a Wii. I mean I know I do. I have like, 5 Wiis.
syd — September 7, 2010
Pretty much. I had to start blocking things like Farmville, Fishville, Plantville, Werewolfville, Go-To-Work-As-A-Waitress-Like-You-Don't-Do-That-Already-Ville, etc. My cousins are fans and every day I'd be asked to add this and help them that. It feels bad to constantly click the 'no, I won't help you' button. But half of these facebook games are basically drudgery in chibi-cartoon form that take over your life. When you see 20 year old men leaving class or parties because 'I have to harvest my strawberries,' that's an issue.
Niki — September 8, 2010
You know, this concept of "playing for politeness" could even be extended to Facebook itself. Among my age group - I'm 26 - there are very few people who don't have a Facebook profile, and some people seem to think that those who don't are actively choosing elitism over social behaviour; like, if you are in your 20's and don't have a Facebook page, you must be an elitist who thinks you're better than everyone else. To not have a Facebook page is more of a social statement than to have one, and according to many people, that's not a positive social statement.
Kira — September 8, 2010
I never liked FaceBook but I signed up because all of my friends and family kept bugging me about it. Then when I did I kept getting Fishville "gifts" and requests. So now I was supposed to tend fake fish and exchange them as well. I liked FB even less at this point. When the ever-increasing privacy issues came to light I bowed out, glad to be rid of it all.
If I want to play a game I'll play it--on my own terms and schedule. I don't want to be roped in by the demands of a "social network" or other people.
Amanda — September 9, 2010
I think it's funny the author just flat out states it's not an enjoyable game at all, period. How does he decide that it's not fun for anyone at all? I don't enjoy sports based video games, but I wouldn't say nobody ever enjoys them. Obviously they are enjoyable for lots of people.
I like arranging my Farmville decorations and animals. I like seeing new decorations and rearranging. There are crop mastery signs you can earn, new businesses where you get bushels to craft goods, pig pens where your pigs hunt for different kinds of truffles, etc.
Sometimes I don't want a super competitive, complicated game.
Sam R — September 15, 2010
I play it because I wanted to make a hedge maze. In the end itt turned out that Farmville wasnt suited for it. Now I play it to amuse myself with the irony of playing it.
nina — January 11, 2011
Really? I played Farmville because it was fun. And I didn't engage in the social parts because it was tedious and a distraction from what I rally wanted to do- build a beautiful farm.
Farmville is fun because it is addictive.It is colorful, you get regular rewards for your actions and they come with nice bright colors and sounds.It makes you feel as if you are accomplishing something and it lets you be a little creative.
Elizabeth — February 9, 2011
I am a dedicated FarmVille player who has just reached level 56 (approximately half way through. I am a female between 25-30 and am happy to spend a few hours a week (yes week not day) clicking on cartoons of crops, trees and buildings and I do feel a sense of acheivement earning ribbons and such. I have tried other games and do not enjoy them as much because I do not play a game to try to kill people, for me FarmVille is relaxing and funny. Where else can you see a Cupid's Castle or own a Chocolate Milk Cow, Bovine-59 Cow, Poncho Llama, or a Golden Chicken? Also, I think the people who work on the artwork for FarmVille do better than most other Facebook games. Many of them are just pixelated cartoons, but not FarmVille.