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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NY Times writes that teens don’t dominate the Twitter-sphere, thus proving that kids don’t always drive innovation.

I’m not going to go into what sad individuals do like Twitter (small gulp), but I am pretty certain that teens are major drivers in terms of Facebook or Myspace (as, from personal experience, I don’t really see teens stopping being teens until their 21, I classify most undergraduate university students as teens also).

The major driver in teen-life is not exposure. It is in fact privacy. For every teen version of Paris Hilton in highschool, ca. 20 students in fact feel uncomfortable about all this exposure. It’s a hormonal thing and I don’t think technology change can change biological factors, at least not for a very long time.

Just my 2 cents, derived mostly from growing up in a large family. Feel free to disagree, but I think privacy is a much better marketing strategy for teens than “let’s expose everything.”

Vincent

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On Friendfeed, we were discussing the hate that Micheal Arrington has been receiving and what caused it all. My stance was that, while I really have nothing against Arrington and think he’s an intelligent human being, the fact that he writes often opinionated posts on Techcrunch, one of the most well-read blogs on the internet, means that he will be exposed to much criticism.

I called it “many little needles can make for a sharp object,” and it made me wonder about whether it is even possible to avoid doing this to people. Some of use have gotten used to posting much of our thoughts and opinions online, so much so that we may eventually and unconsciously be provoking a powerful reaction that we are not expecting.

In a way, it’s very easy to distance yourself from other people online. On Twitter, you can unsubscribe from people who tweet too much or the wrong content. Same on other social networks. On blogs, you can easily insult other bloggers, or post an insulting comment anonymously. People are, by their nature imperfect, but to manage information overload (my excuse) we seek to find the perfect individual, who will only post interesting content. No such person exists, except maybe as an organisation, but those are few and far between.

On the other side of the fence, I wonder about Arrington’s words today, where he notes that people are starting to become more open about their insults, using their own name (ironic, since his own post could be construed as such). And how a few well-placed insults can quickly lead to a mob-like movement.

Will we eventually reach a threshold? Will something drastic happen that will make us all just shut up? Will the “social” internet implode at some point because someone got fired, or worse, dies? Who is watching the watchmen—the watchmen being you and me, who are supposedly, by our clicks, diggs, comments, and “voices,” regulating who is being read or not; is someone regulating us?

OK, enough insidious posting for one evening, which is, incidentally, not my style at all. I kind of fear getting an answer to these questions.
Vincent

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…We haven’t exchanged a single word with each other. I’m trying a new thing and my inspiration for this is a picture I took from the latest Wired “Mystery” edition.

Apart from it being a smart picture, what I found more interesting is how the effect was achieved. Note the amount of people that Mr. sampotts is following, ca. 50. Having previously followed over 200 (now shrunk down to ca. 35), it was impossible for me to “listen” to a single word people were saying. My only two pieces of salvation were if you @vincentvw’d me (in which case an rss-feed would catch it) or if I added you to Friendfeed, where you can set up friendlists and place (imaginary) friends from Twitter inside.

Twitter is badly designed for this kind of collaborative effort, unless you minimise the amount of people you follow or find workarounds. Even so, those workarounds mean that you cheat 80% of your “friends” as you just push them into a corner where you listen to them less or not at all. E.g. on Friendfeed, I “follow” ca. 300 people, but really only read about 5. I’m sure 90% of Friendfeed users do the same.

My method, for now, is to restrict myself to people whose blog I read or with whom I chat (hopefully) on a regular basis. In the future, perhaps I’ll add a few people that I want to talk to, we’ll see. But the ultimate aim is to get the same effect that sampotts has, that I can ask a question and get answers from the hive mind.

If you remember, that was my vision of Twitter the first time I wrote about it on Tech IT Easy, nearly two years ago. I hope I can regain some of that innocent utopian vision.

For now, the best way to get me to follow you, is to say (smart) things to me, via Twitter, mail, this blog, or in real life!

Vincent

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Arguably, my case is one in a million. Being the man with “no nationality” (that’s the way Jeremy introduced me on this blog), I’ve spent the larger part of my childhood being in international schools. There’s a funny aspect to those kinds of schools, something I’ve only seen reproduced in certain multinational companies and when going on an exchange year at uni. It’s that a type of island forms around a community and regardless of the class or social circle you’re in, you start forming deep bonds with people. I’ve considered many of high school classmates family members, even now, many years after graduation, but those bonds have to carry across national boundaries, continents, and different time zones.

Facebook has been an amazing tool in this process of re-discovering past bonds with classmates and, to some degree, continuing my more recent relationships. It doesn’t strengthen that which was never there—people in my contact-list, who I’ve not exchanged more than a few words with in the past, don’t automatically become better friends on Facebook. Instead, it’s little things, like seeing someone’s holiday pictures, the status update of a friend buying a hat (is that a mid-life thing?), wishing someone a happy birthday and back, and writing long, reminiscing private messages, all of which create a series of anecdotes, which, when you actually meet your friends physically again, bring much laughter to those moments.

When I started coming on Facebook, we used it to set up two groups for Tech IT Easy, one internal, one external, neither of which worked very well. Why, when we already have this blog + an effective email system?

Now, more than a year later, I use it to set up a reunion for people I haven’t seen in over 10 years. The group isn’t seeing much activity, apart from the membership-numbers, instead we use Facebook’s messaging system, Google’s free survey-tool, as well as Skype and email for the organisers, to manage this medium-sized event of ca. 100 people coming from all over the world, at, so far, zero cost and minimal effort!

This truly is an amazing innovation, perhaps best appreciated by someone coming from a time where we didn’t have personal computers (until I was 15), the internet (until I came to uni), or mobile phones (until I was 20). Whatever the case is and whatever negative things people have to say about Facebook, I am very glad it has come to my and my friends’ life.

Vincent

P.S. My next post: envisioning a science-fiction like future for Facebook.

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Relevant, useful, has a business-model. Enough said!

(Picture links to the app in Facebook. Facebook-account required)

What’s your favourite app on Facebook (or other social networks) and why?

Vincent

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