Confined Wisdom

“So-and-so needs new neighbors” said my friend’s Facebook status, and I was soon informed that it was a call out for “FarmVille” neighbors, not real ones.

This Facebook online role-playing game has users (mostly female, I’ve noticed) hooked into investing loads of their time into harvesting fruits and vegetables, buying pigs and sheep and generally building a “farm” online. Starting with an empty patch of land, some of my Facebook friends have expanded their farms to ridiculous levels, and many claim to be online for the sole purpose of checking whether their cornfields are ready, or they cows can be milked, and other such sick online fantasies. Plus, you can make FarmVille albums (B.I.O.N.) and upload them on Facebook, just to show off your obsession.

Eventually, my curiosity got the better of me and I decided to try it out. Proudly, I allowed the FarmVille application to access my Facebook account, and started sending out requests for neighbors to other friends using FarmVille. Oddly, most of my friends were female, and I figured I could be their one male “neighbor”, just to break the trend. I lasted 17 days. Here’s why.

1. You have to just keep working. I’m a lazy procrastinator. FarmVille requires you to invest time, thought and care into building an online farm, just for the satisfaction of building it. Which leads me to the second problem.

2. There’s no competition. It’s not if you win or lose, it’s how you play the game. But even when that saying applies, there is a chance of winning or losing. In FarmVille, however, the concept of competition does not exist. Sharing is caring, apparently. My farm was built on free goodwill gifts I received from my neighbors, like a banana tree, or a sheep, or a well! It was up to me to then return the favor and give them gifts they could use on their farm. Ha!

3. You eventually have to spend real money. Okay, so this isn’t necessary, but if you want to speed up the process of getting a pimped up farm, then spend real dollars (with money going to Zynga, the creators of FarmVille) to buy cool stuff for your farm. Either that, or you just sell enough milk from your cows, or harvest enough squashes from your farm to make up the virtual dollars to buy that stuff. Boring!

4. There’s no end. Yeah, the game doesn’t end. I mean, you can have a bad day where you planted strawberries, but forgot to harvest them and they ended up rotting, but you just keep on going. just keep getting your farm more stuff, expand the land and keep on going. Addicts of games like Command & Conquer will be frustrated, because you never really ever step on anyone else’s land, however much you expand.

5. No killing. I’ll be honest. When my FarmVille avatar got a scythe in his hand to harvest crops, I just walked onto a neighbor’s farm to kill them. Perhaps it’s too many of those games that did that for me, but I just wanted to kill her and take over her farm. Sorry, no can do. No wonder those crazy FarmVille characters are always smiling. Who wants that kind of niceness?

So I quit. Which wasn’t easy, because simply removing the application wasn’t enough. A long-drawn process (okay, not that long) was what it took to get me off their records, ‘cos people still kept sending me lawn chairs and stuff. Make me a FarmVille slash Mafia Wars game, with killing, stealing and threatening allowed, so I can walk into my neighbor’s farm, and buy out their farm, or kill them for it, and let’s make it a little more fun.