Thoughts on Farmville, an addictive but flawed Facebook game
I quit Farmville yesterday, after 3.5 weeks of pushing it up to level 20. In the first week, I wanted to write a review of how awesome it was and how it changed the social dynamic of Facebook. Now after a few weeks of wintery downtime, my gaming habit is back in the closet where it belongs, and my opinion is somewhat different.
What attracted me to Farmville in the first place? Well, in true Web3.0 spirit, it was someone raving about it on Twitter (Fidji Simo, I believe). It made me check it out and when I found out that some of my friends were on it, it made me give it a chance. I also remember SimFarm being one of the first games I played on my first PC and there was the nostalgia factor.
Farmville = FunVille?
The fun part of Farmville was to me truly the social dynamic. You build experience by doing different activities, such as growing fruit and vegetables, herding animals, and also helping out your friends. You can also give gifts to friends who in turn gift you back. All of that leads to two ways of measuring progress: experience points, which leads to new levels and abilities, and achievements, which you get after doing certain activities enough. While helping friends fuels my socialist—we are all equal, blablabla—self, the latter fuels my competitive—I am better, haha—self. As such, Farmville gives me complex feelings of satisfaction that can’t be found in every activity or game.
Now, while I admit that the latter statement is a little weird, but hopefully sufficient to explain why I liked the game, let me get to the parts that made me quit Farmville. They are, simply put: money, Adobe’s Flash, and boredom.
Farmville = CashVille
Farmville was admittedly the biggest blockbuster on the Facebook platform in 2009 and I have no doubt it will do well in 2010 also. The reason it is what it is, is because of its way of making money. Yes, if you want the easy way to winning, which is measured by how beautiful your farm is, you have to pay! There are three ways to pay for stuff in Farmville: achievements, such as having many neighbours or growing many tomatoes, which gets you free stuff; fake money, which buys you stuff; and Farmville money, which you get by either levelling up or by buying it for real dollars.
You can do pretty much everything you want without spending Farmville cash. Except for two things: expanding your farm, which would lead to having more real-estate and thus more “fun.” And, buying fuel. You can buy vehicles that make farming an easier chore, but using those vehicles requires fuel, which is expensive to buy and slow to recharge. The fact that I couldn’t sustainably earn income and spend it (without spending real cash) was a real downer in terms of gameplay.
Farmville = FlashVille
Flash made headlines these last few years mostly because of three things. It got bought by Adobe, its Air-platform and the sheer ubiquity of Flash as a development platform on sites such as Facebook. And, its lack of support on the iPhone / iPod Touch OS. And the latter is the case because Flash really sucks! It’s bloated, it’s not as good as pretty much any other interfacing technology (for lack of a better term), and it reminds us all of badly designed Myspace sites.
For me, the lack of iPhone OS support was a real factor as I got a Touch this Christmas, which became my nr. 1 Facebook interface, minus the reason* why I mainly visited Facebook these last few weeks (*: yes, yes, I really did mean it when I wished my friends a Merry Xmas and Happy New Year, but that just wasn’t getting me the experience points to get me ahead on Farmville…).
The second factor was that Flash is simply a bad technology. 1. it was incredibly slow and I had to reload the page several times, also losing my progress. 2. the Farmville interface is split up into blocks, on which you can farm, build, plant trees, or herd animals. Doing stuff on these chunks required actual movement of my avatar/farmer, who wasn’t moving to swiftly because of “Flashville’s bloatyness,” and I also couldn’t drag actions across the screen, which I would have been able to do even in the 16 years older SimFarm! Flash sucks and was the no. 2 reason for quitting Farmville.
I think Farmville would make the perfect iPhone App, but I really think Flash needs a major overhaul and/or be killed of.
Farmville = FrustrationVille
I already mentioned how repetitive the actual playing part became, going from one block to the next to plant or harvest. Every level felt slower and more frustrating, which was mostly due to Flash, but also perhaps due to Farmville making it harder to get to the next level. In the end, I kind of started wondering why I was playing this game and if I was even playing and not just doing manual labour. The only real reward seemed to be Farmcash, which you could either earn by levelling up (1 Farmcash per level, while buying more farmland costs like 20-30 farm-dollars, seems frustrating) or by paying real money (and that would just be sad). I could also spam my friends to join Farmville and become my neighbours, but come on!
I did get some satisfaction out of reading the several strategy guides that exist for Farmville and there really is no shortage of community support. But in the end it seems like Farmville emulates actual farming too closely, by making it tedious manual labour to grow stuff on your farm (mostly due to Flash sucking!) and it also makes it feel like serfdom, by having to buy Farmcash from your “masters,” in order to have a great-looking farm.
Well, that’s all I have to say on Farmville. It was a fun experience during the holidays and I don’t regret trying it. But while I think social gaming has a strong future, I really don’t like business models that rely on making its users’ lives more frustrating. I know World of Warcraft has a similar model and is the most successful multiplayer game ever made, but that doesn’t mean that it makes it the best game ever made. I can name a dozen single player and half a dozen multiplayer games that aren’t as successful financially, but just work well in terms of gameplay. And games like Farmville have a long way to go before they get there.
End review.
Vincent
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Tags: Addiction, Facebook, Farmville, Social gaming, social networking
Apple, Consumer electronics, Design, Economics, Entertainment, Facebook, Friends, Gaming, Internet, Review, Software, Web-services, mobile internet, user-generated content, video games, web2.0, web3.0
Vince, does that mean I won’t receive those awesome Farmville gifts from you anymore?
): I was saying that on my first visit, I did not see the point in Farmville until I got to see the awesome farms that my friends were putting together.
Personally, my addiction profile is very low (it’s very tough to get me hooked on something), but the one thing I like about Farmville is the “artistic” piece: you said it in your post, it’s all about having the prettiest farm. And somehow it encourages creativity in terms of placing stuff, buying nice items, growing nice flowers etc. As artistic forms become more and more and mashup and repurposing of existing pieces of art, I see Farmville as a good example of this trend.
That was actually the topic of the tweet that got you started (sorry for that
So I see Farmville as an interesting experiment in that sense… but in the end I’m like you: after playing for 10 minutes, I always wonder what I have accomplished and if there would be a better use of my time, and the next thing I do is just close Famville and go get a life
You comment sort of got lost in our spam folder for half a day, but we are completely on the same wavelength!
Great post, Vince.
I share many of your frustrations about the FarmVille. I also have fond memories of SimFarm, but comparing FarmVille to it doesn't make any justice. SimFarm actually had depth. Also, I'm really worried about people who think these are "social" games.
One of the major problems with this kind of RPGs – yes, I categorize FarmVille as a role-playing game. Mostly because of the game mechanics. – is that everyone gets the same experience and there's no difficulty. By playing FarmVille, you don't get any skills and you the only thing that makes you better in the game is the time you use (leveling up and thus getting access to better equipment). Even Doom 2 and Need for Speed 2 were more social when I was growing up, because you could share your scores and experiences. Not so in FarmVille, where it always takes exactly 24 hours to grow grapes and that's about it.
Vince, how much communication or social interactions we had playing that game? Except for the parts that felt like laboratory tests for game theoretical reciprocity behaviour on humans (ie. gifts and fertilizing crops). If those are someone's idea of "social interaction", they're pretty isolated and sad persons indeed. Those actions have zero to do with altruistic "helping" as there are incentives set that you benefit from helping anyone. See the many groups where people friend others solely to advance faster in FarmVille and how people will fertilize your "I quit" crops indefinitely.
Oh well, this comment is getting way too long… I think I need to write a companion post to yours =)
In response to your question of how much communication occurred between us, I respond that not all communication happens via text or pictures, but there is tremendous depth in non-verbal communication such as gift-giving. Especially considering the current season, it seems relevant.
By playing a game with your friends, especially one that allows you to create something like a farming landscape, you get an insight into what those friends value. One of my female friends was at level 35, had a gigantic farm, with a gigantic mansion, and many of those signs that visitors can leave. I hadn't seen her in 10 years, but I remember that she was always very social and status orientated, which is actually something I value in her. Another friend had a lot of animals, sheltered away elegantly, which gave me the idea that she cared for those kind of things. Since I didn't know her that well, it added value which a status or picture might not have. That's what I mean with the 'social dynamic' that Farmville gave me over regular Facebook. …But perhaps I'm also reading more into it than there was.
To me Farmville seemed more like Gardenville, where you would actually create nice landscapes for your friend to visit. And, as any garden lover will tell you, their work (or lack of) is also a way of communicating with the outside world, just like any "welcome" or "keep out" sign.
My 2 cents, though I still think that on all other dimensions the game had flaws.
Great article – regards comments on Flash, what would you recommend as a better way to have done this type of app? and why?
I think Flash is fine, more or less. It has its flaws, but it's (seems) easy to develop for and is obviously ubiquitous when talking about webapps. So, from a business perspective it makes sense. That said, I'd love a lighter iPhone version, as it really would make for a great mobile app. As it is now, it's super-bloated and not that great in terms of the technical features of the game (may be a development shortcoming, I don't know).
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I never really thought about the farms as a form of self-expression, but now that you mentioned it, it does make sense. It probably does tell something about me (that I'm boring?) that my field is filled to the brim with just the most ROI-yielding crops (I confess, I did some investment calculations…)
What I find worrying, however, is the tendency in these games that they limit your ability express yourself unless you're willing to pay. This of course is the business logic behind these games, but I do find it somewhat depressing.
There are some literature in different player types in multiplayer games (achievers, etc), but they escape me know.
Actually I also noticed your ROI-calculated field, which also told me something (good) about you.
I did the same, though tried to make it a somewhat nice place also. All the way to my flowery "I QUIT."
And your point 2: 200% agreed. It's a sign of the times I think. Hard to make money with a flash game and thus annoy your users to pay?