Glenn's blog

Joanne's gotten me playing this "Farmville" game on Facebook. It's apparently one of the most popular games on Facebook. Basically, you are given a square of "land" on which you can "plant" crops and then harvest them for game money. You can also go around and visit your friends' farms and do little tasks for them like scaring away crows or raccoons.

All in all, it's an ok game. I've heard that some people are quite addicted to it and I even saw that one guy had worked up a spreadsheet to help him calculate the best planting/harvesting strategy to get to higher levels faster.

To be honest, I'd probably forget about the game if someone didn't remind me to check my crops every day. I'm not a big fan of video games to begin with, though. I played video games when I was a kid, and can almost always think of something better to do.

There are some things about the game that I find creepy. One is that you can go around and fertilize your friends' crops for them. Not sure what this does, but the fertilizer is a little bag labeled "Super Grow." Is it chemical fertilizer?

Another thing is the "harvesting" of animals. The animals are super cute and some people have them as animals on a sanctuary. But the animals are eventually ready to be "harvested." I'm not sure what this looks like since I've never tried it. (I also only just got my first animals for my farm today, so I haven't had a chance to experiment.) I wonder what harvesting a rabbit looks like in the game?

What's really creepy to me is that the best way to get more points more quickly with the least effort is to create an intensive farm with one or two crops and animals packed in tightly. With single crops you can harvest a lot at one time and the more animals you can pack into a tighter space, the more lucrative they are.

I was so creeped out by the whole idea that this farm game is a thinly disguised agribusiness marketing tool that I googled for a while last night to see if I could find any connections between the game developer's investors and agribusiness interests, but I couldn't. I'm still not convinced.

The game abides by the conventions of farming, and animals are displayed as commodities. You buy and sell and harvest them just like plants or other objects. The dairy barn is extra creepy too. The presentation of these farms as idealized plots of land that never turn ugly, no matter how tightly packed with "things," can really serve to perpetuate the illusion that this is what farms look like, no matter how intensive.

That said, I'll keep my little sanctuary going for a while.

See you on the farm!