As I argued in the comments in Vincent’s post about FarmVille, FarmVille is a role playing game (RPG). And pretty bad one at that. Like most RPGs, you don’t actually need any skills or develop any skill playing it yourself as your success is solely dependent on the amount of time you sink into it. You can get pretty good at FreeCell, but no matter how much time you spend in FarmVille, you won’t get “better” in it. But what most RPGs have at least is a story – even if most these days have left the ending pretty open. Contrast this to FarmVille which isn’t trying to tell you any story. In this sense it resembles a simulation, but that genre is usually characterized by depth and strategy which are nowhere to be seen in FarmVille, unlike, say, in SimFarm from 1993.

Free range animal farming at FarmVille

It is way too easy to categorise FarmVille as a “casual” game, but “casual” doesn’t need to mean games where you can’t lose, games which have zero learning curve and games that don’t offer challenge. A good example of “casual” game that always ends in the player “losing” and (hence?) offers a lot of challenge is Bejeweled. If I remember correctly, Bejeweled was the previous title holder to the biggest casual game ever.

The only challenges are achievements – and now collections. But there’s little, if any, social value in achieving them – unless you count boasting about them on your Facebook wall. And, unfortunately, the game doesn’t have level 13 Pig Warlocks.

There’s some irony that the main reason people play FarmVille, boredom, is also a main reason why people quit it. This boredom kicks in at about level 20 or so, where you start to realize that you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer. The only thing left is the grind.

There are, of course, shortcuts to simple grinding. You can use farm machinery to do your activities faster, but they consume fuel (that, until recently, you could only refill by real money). Also, spending money allows you to get many benefits before non-paying players. And this is a problem, because many people don’t consider this “fair”. Offering players to pay to save time, however, is pretty crucial from business logic. The trap here is that the players who don’t feel comfortable paying start to feel that the only way to progress in the game is to spend real money.

FarmVille follows the RPG formula that the higher you have leveled, the more effort (= experience points) you need to reach next level. Granted, you have access to new things that might increase your “productivity”, but the mean time between levels is increasing. However, and this is the problem, the reward of leveling up remains pretty much the same. At some point, the perceieved benefit/effort ratio falls short. The trick is that at this point, the player has invested so much into the game that they might be more willing to pay real money to make advancing easier… if the rewards of leveling up are worth it.

The business logic of FarmVille dictates that the more you play, the better player you are for Zynga. It’s the curious logic of taxing your good customers, the discrimination for the information age. This is most evident if you look at how the experience points you get from crops depends on their harvest time. The shorter the harvest time (and so, how many times the player “needs” to play FarmVille), the more experience the player can gain in given time. As you can see, the relationship between these two variables follows an exponential distribution with pretty high correlation.

Harvest time is strongly correlated with experience points you can get in FarmVille

There's not much correlation between profits and harvest time, though.

As an interesting side note, the correlation between Harvest time and profit isn’t nearly as high and there’s a lot of variation. This neatly illustrates how the main metric in the game (from game designer’s perspective) is not profit, but experience points which are tightly tied to player retention. This also means that while there’s a wide variety of different kind of crops, there’s only a handful that makes any sense to use as the rest are strongly dominated. Oh, and the trees and the animals don’t make any sense given how scarce the land is and how much more profitable the crops are. The only reason to have either is for achieving ribbons – or self-expression (which you might have already guessed was pretty low on my priority list).

The other thing in FarmVille is that your game progress is also aided somewhat by the amount of friends you have. Whether these friends help you or not, is not necessasry, as only retaining a certain friend amount gives you benefits. The most important of these is access to larger farms. The social aspects of FarmVille can be divided into self-expression (how one designs one’s farm) and a coordination game of sharing gifts and other “loot”. The game design trick of “free gifts” is pretty clear after the player realizes that he or she needs a bigger farm to accommodate all the gifts. Contrast this “social gaming” to the title-holder of “most anti-social game ever”, World of Warcraft, in which (as far as I’ve understood) it is possible to “complete” the game alone, but playing with others is a key element to enjoy the game. In WoW the higher level players can help out lower level players, but in FarmVille the higher level players can gift some items to lower level players that lower player level players can’t gift. So, for some time the reciprocity logic didn’t really work in gifting, but this was recently fixed by introduction of “Mystery gifts” that are pretty much the only thing that makes sense for lower level players to send to higher level players.

So, what you are left in a more competitive sense of “social gaming” is the amount of ribbons you have collected, the level you have achieved and how pimped out your farm is. The element of achievements that you can accomplish as a group is zero.

I’m not entirely sure that Facebook is the most fertily grounds for games, as the dominating functionality seems to be “the social” and exploiting one’s userbase. Game mechanics and social dynamics come second. This is why I believe that to experience “true” social gaming, one needs to invest some real money to buy a game. The “free” gaming model seems to denigrate too quickly into nickel-and-diming, see for example what happened with EA’s Battlefield Heroes – where again some of the players didn’t see the real money elements as “fair” after certain point.

The problem with FarmVille, in short, is that the business logic dictates the game design too much. The revenue incentives of Zynga make the game experience worse for the players, who are looking for more than killing time.

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