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Farmville: My, You Have Nice Melons. Did I Say Something Wrong?

It is frightening to see youngsters wake up at midnight to water plants on Farmville. – A concerned parent on the Internet

I don’t know how comfortable I am with some strange guy I don’t know fertilizing my wife’s melons. – A friend

When the singularity happens, that moment when computers begin thinking for themselves, the machines will not send Terminator/Cylon-type robots to enslave us. Why waste the resources? They will just use Farmville. The game WOPR (War Operation Plan Response computer, pronounced "Whopper") will want to play with us is not Global Thermonuclear War, or Chess, but Farmville. HAL will understand that we are basically highly developed monkeys who gladly spend our days pushing a button that gives us a reward, no matter how lame the reward. Colossus, The Forbin Project, will not offer us women and companionship, but digital turkeys and ducks. The writer of Ecclesiastes might think all is vanity, but he never got bonus points for achieving the Valentine’s Day farming tasks. Our future masters know what makes us tick. Every second 100,000 chemical reactions happen in our brains. Like rats learning to run a maze with the promise of sugar water, or a food pellet, those endorphins released when playing games with the promise of meaningless rewards are, …what is the word?? …addicting. We have met Pavlov's dog, and he is us. So when Farmville rings its bell, we salivate. Truly, I have seen the best minds of my generation destroyed by Farmville.

For those of you who have never played Farmville, it is the most popular game on Facebook with between 70 to 80 million people playing it. The best part of Farmville is that it might be the only game that offers no socially redeeming value except to slow office productivity to a crawl and keeps the creators of Facebook rolling in the money. Games like Minesweeper, Halo, or Tetris can improve hand/eye coordination. Sporkle, Scrabble, or even Solitaire can be justified by keeping a person mentally alert. Screw it, because you cannot afford to pay the electric bill. You just earned 50 points because you know the top ten songs on the Billboard Charts in 1982. You are not a loser. You can be a champion in these games! I’ll bet Bob, with the six pack abs, the perfect wife complete with boob job, and a nice little red sports car in the drive, does not know the five most popular John Hughes’ films ever made. You da man. You are now #112,123 on the board. Two more weeks of playing day and night, and you might just crack the top one hundred thousand. These games become so important to the gamer, that one almost expects their obituary to state, that even though he was a mindless drone for an insurance company before falling dead of a heart attack at the breakfast table, his main claim to fame is he ranked in the top 100 in Cubs trivia and had five fantasy league football championships in the ESPN zone. Still, Farmville, is valuable… ahem, give me time, I will come up with something.

In Farmville, as long as your finger can click the mouse, you can be a virtual farmer. While less than two percent of Americans are “real” farmers, we all want to be one because the agricultural lifestyle is so awesome and entertaining. (There are reasons every generation’s children flee the farm like there is leprosy in the soil and tetanus on the tractor seats. At the time the Constitution was written eighty percent of Americans made their livings on the farm.) The Jeffersonian noble yeoman has long and deep roots in the American psyche. Farmers, as a whole, die earlier from cancers, lung aliments, and fatal exposures to toxic chemicals. It is one of the most dangerous professions in America. If one survives being crushed by an overturned tractor, losing an arm in a combine or baler, getting trapped in the silo, or trampled and kicked by your livestock, it is a pretty good life. Oh, to be an independent, self-reliant farmer… especially after big government stepped in to electrify the rural countryside with the REA, and stabilized agricultural prices with the various farm bills since the New Deal. It is little wonder that Americans, sitting in their comfy air conditioned/heated offices, with their Diet Coke and Cheetos sitting nearby, dream of living off the land, of being closer to nature, especially during an Iowa winter or summer.

In Farmville, the mouse clicker, the term “gamer” is too proactive, is offered a wide range of crops to plant - potatoes, corn, peas, cotton candy, nachos, almost whatever food item one can think of. He or she can plant fruit trees, buy tractors and combines or purchase livestock such as chickens, cows or bees. I know, I know, throw the lampshade on the head, and let’s get this party started. The gamer then has to come back in a certain amount of time to harvest the crop or risk them withering in the field. When a person does the harvesting, they are given rewards, points, mastery signs, or maybe moved up to a new level. The more you play, the more possibilities the game offers. Want to plant orange gladiolas, the player has to harvest 10,000 gladiolas first, because nothings says masculinity like a field full of gladiolas. There are beauty salons, turkey sheds and barns to build, crop dusters, cows in football jerseys and tie-dye, and complete strangers to add as friends, so you can have neighbors’ farms to visit, or find yourself able to qualify for a Tuscan cow, and have them snoop through your personal photos. Click, click, click that pleasure switch.

It is as addictive as hell. How can I say this? People will spend real money to purchase digital houses, trees and clothes. I actually had a friend say to me, “Please don’t tell [my girlfriend] that I am buying virtual gas in the game to run my plows, she will make fun of me.” Well, duh. Who could not live without a pizza tree when they are only $1.25, cold hard American cash, apiece? Another time my friend said, “I would love to stay out but I got to get home because I have square melons I need to harvest.” I told him to run, run home as fast as his legs would carry him because the world might end if digital melons are allowed to go bad or a dog made of pixels is allowed to run away because he was not fed on time. You never know.

Do I have some issues with Farmville? Yep. So far, it will not let me buy a whole bunch of geese and force feed them until they are ready to burst, so that their livers are nice and creamy (Foie Gras), or let me own a herd of calves that I have chained in a darkened barn, unable to move, so that their digital flesh becomes soft and delicious (Veal). I would settle with just being able to build a huge chicken confinement so that my waste pond could break, discharging animal waste into rivers and lakes, or maybe into the air poisoning my neighbors’ farms. For the love of God, at least let me grow a little virtual pot so I can survive the boredom of the game, and maybe have pixel DEA agents raid my farm from time to time.

Being a farmer not your thing? How about a knight, a mobster, a restaurant owner, a frontiersman, a dean of a university, or a superhero? There is a game where one has virtual fish tanks to take care of. Okay, I have owned real fish, the kind that hated their existence so much that they tried to commit suicide by jumping out of the tank. Fish eat, they poop, you clean the tank, they eat, they poop, you clean the tank, the cycle continues until they are floating on the surface of the water or the cat gets to them, that is basically it, but there is something much more exciting about fish made of 0s and 1s. I don’t know what it is, but it is much more exciting I am told. Somewhere out there is a mindless, skill-less game with your name on it.

Roughly a quarter of Americans play one of these social networking games and they take up hours of the day. I would make some profound point about how these games are bad for work productivity and the social fabric of this nation… but I have a field of purple carrots that needs to be harvested in the next ten minutes… Open the pod bay doors, please, HAL.