Social Networking Buzz
Review: FarmVille
What is it?
So if you’re on Facebook (who isn’t these days?), you’ve probably noticed how many of your friends play that stupid game FarmVille. It’s quite annoying when half of your news feed is filled up with notifications on how someone has found a lost brown cow on their farm.
If this hasn’t happened to you or you just don’t know what FarmVille is, here’s a brief overview:
“FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available on the social networking website Facebook. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees, and livestock.”
Source: Wikipedia
So from what I get out of this, FarmVille is basically a stripped down version of Harvest Moon on Facebook.
I’d rather not piss off my friends/be mercilessly teased, but an application that somehow managed to have 63.7 million active users when it was only launched in June is worth checking out.
My Review
10:39 am: The first thing they ask you is for your gender; makes sense. Just when I was going to click on the blue silhouette of a boy, a window popped up notifying me that a friend of mine needed a hand on their farm and the only option is to press the accept button. Something tells me this is going to be a recurring thing…
10:41 am: After clicking the male silhouette, the window pops up asking if I’d like to publish this story to my wall and friends’ news feeds:
Tristan gave up city livin' to become a farmer!
Tristan is the first city slicker in the area to become a farmer in FarmVille, where you can grow delicious fruits and vegetables and raise adorable animals on your very own farm!
There should be a “GOD NO!!!” button.
10:42 am: My character is standing in a patch of eggplants. I am being told to “harvest my crops”. I think this is the tutorial.
10:45 am: I have harvested eggplants and strawberries. I gain “coins”. I am told to “plow two plots”.
10:46 am: I have planted my seeds. The tutorial is over.
10:47 am: “Add some neighbours!” No thanks, I’d rather be the anti-social farmer type.
10:48 am: Standing on a plot of dirt on my farm. Nothing to do, or maybe I just don’t know what to do. Either way, I don’t care.
10:50 am: I remove FarmVille from my applications.
So in just over 10 minutes, I fail to see what the big deal is about it. I assume that had I continued, my “crops” would have grown and I would have somehow got an actual farm? Unfortunately (or fortunately), I got to a point where I had no idea what to do and decided to get rid of it.
At least Harvest Moon was easy to figure out.
So in conclusion, FarmVille…not for me. I just don’t get how it is for 63.7 million people.
Images source: Google Images