If You Play Farmville, You Need To Get A Life

I just read the other day on Digg that a company called Zynga has been appraised at $5 billion dollars.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the name, Zynga is the company responsible for Farmville and Mafia Wars, two Facebook applications that do as much to lower the IQ of America’s population than booze and weed combined.

My only experience with these games is as follows: I know people who have played them religiously, I watched people play them religiously during lectures at college, and I used to get about a thousand Facebook updates every five minutes from people who needed my help to build a barn, harvest their corn, or donate materials to help them build another barn. It was annoying at best, pitiful at worst.

I’m bringing this up because of the fact that Google (yes, Google, the hand controlling the puppet strings of America) gave Zynga $200 million dollars to launch these travesties that masquerade as video games. I mean, yeah, I played Harvest Moon too, but there’s a time and a place for that kind of game.

The time was eighth grade. The place was the Nintendo 64 (ah, memories).

A game that involves farming shouldn’t be the mainstay source of entertainment for so many people. Especially when it’s so mindlessly addictive that people aren’t afraid to harass their friends over a couple of imaginary pieces of wood, or let others know that they’ve found a sick calf that doesn’t exist in some corner of a farm that’s only a figment of their boredom.

I’m all for online entertainment, folks. I spend a good amount of time on the Internet every day, but I’ve never indulged in such blatantly obvious forms of annoying addiction. To even read that these applications are considered by some to be legitimate video games disgusts me. These are time-wasters that have no business holding sway on human minds, and they’re getting funding that ranks suspiciously close to medical research grants. It’s probably just another drop in the bucket for Google (click the link above if you haven’t already), and that’s a scary thought. Think of how many other, better games could have been made with that kind of loot. That kind of money would finance at least one Final Fantasy entry, and that’s saying something.

To a casual observer, Farmville and real video games do have some stuff in common: They are both forms of electronic entertainment that require interactivity. They stimulate you visually, manually, optically, audiably (if you’re not at work, where in a place where video game sounds aren’t taboo), they require a commitment that some people find pointless and others find appalling (but the rest of us don’t even notice), and some of them are undeniably fun when you give them a chance.

Of course, social network games have no writers. They have no real sequels. They don’t have dozens of graphic artists trying to make every last detail of a scene flawless. They don’t have hundreds of people working  for hundreds of days to produce something that actually deserves attention. Social networking games are cashing in on the boredom of America, not their attention to a finely-tuned piece of entertainment. In this writer’s opinion, video games are as much a form of art as movies are; video games require voice actors, character models, computer graphics wizards, sound engineers, visual engineers, writers, and directors. Most movies these days do, too (especially with the amount of 3D and digitally-animated movies coming out recently).

Farmville requires a fraction of that same attention to detail, and it’s got more players than any other video game right now (63, 370,436 according to a survey that probably has no merit in the eyes of  the world). This is a shame, and a dangerous one at that. At this rate, social-network games are becoming more popular than console games, and console games make up an enormous facet of worldwide industry. Should we see them go broke, we’re in for an even bleaker future than Gears of War could have predicted (and that’s pretty damn bleak).

Final point: Farmville is a disgrace, and it deserves to be treated as such. Since most of America won’t agree with that statement, it’s up to us. Boycott it, encourage others to delete their accounts, and above all, make as much fun as you can of people who insist on continuing to play it (I suggest bringing up the person-in-question’s mother, then mentioning unmentionable acts involving farm animals). Trust me. You’ll be doing them a favor.

Max Pickering – MxSpartan