Farmville, the virtual farming game from Zynga, now has over 44 million active users and has become the most popular (and I believe, the fastest-growing) social game ever.
I do not have much of a green thumb, and I have never been a major fan of simulation games, however, I wanted to get a better understanding of what makes FV so popular and why it is growing so quickly. I am a big believer there is no substitute for using a product yourself–so the past few days I have been diligently building my farm and interacting with friends to help them grow theirs. I am still in the early stages, at level 7 now, although I believe I am starting to see some of the appeal and notice what to me are some significant issues not only with FV but also with the Facebook platform in general for this type of game.
Here are a few thoughts…
- The music, in particular, is excellent. It repeats continuously without being annoying and the tune is quite catchy. I find myself humming it throughout the day when I am not at the computer, reminding me of the game. Until Farmville, I had not realized the power of game music to get “stuck in your head” to continue the experience and stickiness of the game.
- The first-use experience and viral elements are also outstanding. When you launch the game you immediately have a good idea how to get started. The sharing revolves around recruiting your friends to be your neighbors, then helping them both by gifting them crops and animals and also helping maintain their farms. As a user, you get a sense of fulfillment as well as more points for sharing and helping your friends. Another key, which is similar to other social games, is that in order to grow in the game, you must continue to share with your friends, and gradually grow your circle of friends, on a daily basis. This reinforces users to continue using the game as they get daily reminders/requests from all of their friends who are playing the game.
- Compared to a shooting/skill game like Bejeweled Blitz, the competitive nature of leveling up in Farmville is less intense. In FV, I see my friends and their levels, but because the game is so collaborative, I feel less motivation to “beat them” by achieving a higher level.
- From a UI perspective, the Facebook/browser platform gets in the way–a lot. Because FV is running on Facebook (at least this is where I play it), whenever you move to a different area of functionality, for example, managing your neighbors vs. working on your farm, you have to load a new web page each time–this takes several seconds and is quite disruptive to the experience. Often you need to scroll the whole page up and down in the browser itself (as opposed to scrolling the map of your farm), this is also disjointed and takes away from the experience.
- As I said above, I am not a big fan of simulation games, but after a few days of playing FV, I am left wondering what is the point? Okay, so I continue to build up my farm, and the objects, crops, trees, and animals get a bit more interesting, and there is some satisfaction from seeing my farm grow, but in my case at least, it is not enough to keep me engaged. Again, this is not a criticism of the game per se, I do not expect every game to be compelling for me. However, it is a bit surprising this game is the most popular social game of all time with 44 million users, when there is no obvious point, or even increasingly satisfying user interaction, that comes from continuing play.
Those are my impressions. I know some of you have strong feelings about this. I would be interested to hear what are your favorite social games and what you feel are the best aspects of them.
Mark, it’s interesting. I started playing Farmville last week at my brother’s request. It wasn’t particularly interesting to me, but now I’ve come to a point where I can play just once a day and manage the crops, and it’s now much easier than in the past to grow crops in an organized fashion, since I’ve now got enough money to not have to decide between selecting crops or tilling soil. Odd, that. I keep telling friends that I’ll quit just as this last crop comes in.
Still, I’d like to see a little more challenge, which is both a compliment and complaint. Sure, it’s easy to play with nice bits of reward, but also there’s just not much … much to it. You said this, I’m just reiterating.
I’d love to find an out. Maybe when I see my brother tonight he’ll convince me to quit. Happy New Year and all that.
Hi Robert,
Funny, I am just getting to the point now where I was considering creating a system for managing the crops better. I can see where once you do that it becomes even harder to let it go. As I said, I do not have much experience playing simulation games so I do not have a basis for comparison–I thought I would be interacting with other players more directly to build something greater than a single farm. It’s not that FV is not a good game, it is a nice concept and well executed, I am just a bit surprised this is something 44 million people are actively working on.
Re: leaving the game, maybe someone should make a new app called “Leaving Farmville” that makes it easier to get away from the game. Maybe a Burning Man type bonfire. That’s a bit subversive, although it could be fun. Merry New Year!
While mowing my lawn this afternoon I thought about creating a parody game called lawnville where all you do is mow your lawn, every damn week, and what do you get? Not much.
Sounds good, there could be a companion game where you pay the neighborhood kid to mow your lawn instead… then you don’t have to do any work at all.