Farmville has been touted as being the most popular video game in America, though that may now be waining. Its arrival on facebook seemed to add the biggest boost to its already growing number of users. It’s a simple game that involves planting and harvesting crops. There are no grand heroes, no exciting battles, just simple quiet farm life. So why have so many people become avid players of this admittedly boring game? Here are five of the excuses people have given for their involvement in this online phenomenon.
- Easy time waster. It’s easy to play. You don’t need to learn a lot of complicated rules. There isn’t a crowd of characters to identify. It is very simple: plant your crops, care for your crops, harvest your crops. It also doesn’t require long periods of time. It can be managed in small bites of time. For people whose minds have stressed with worries or heavy work loads, it provides a very benign escape for those high stress levels.
- Compulsive gamer. It is addictive. Nobody seems to know exactly what it is that makes it so addictive, but they all agree that it is. There are plenty of compulsive gamers out there. When they saw a new game that everyone seemed to be playing, naturally they had to check it out for themselves. Once they got their own little patch of virtual earth, they were hooked. They kept clicking and clicking and clicking and…
- A sense of accomplishment. Some say it is the sense of accomplishment or reward that is built into the game. There are no unexpected droughts to destroy your crops; you are totally in control. If you do your part, and keep your plants and trees watered, you will get to see the fruit and vegetables ripen and be collected. You can continue to expand your farm and expand your sense of accomplishment as well. You can end your day with the feeling of a job well done, in the virtual Farmville world at least.
- Hooked by guilt. For others, it is their sense of responsibility combined with their underlying motivator of guilt that keeps them working at this patch of digital farmland. They’ve created this farm; they own it; they are responsible for it. The thought of not maintaining what they have started goes against every grain in their being. They can almost hear their father’s voice in the background, “Once you commit to something, follow through. Don’t be a quitter.” And Farmville makes sure that you can’t quit, at least not without letting some virtual plants experience a virtual death. And who wants to have that on their conscience?
- Competition. There is another aspect to the game though, and that is the competition. What do your friends have on their farms that you don’t have on yours? It seems to be part of the human nature to compare ourselves with those around us. So, if our friends have peach trees, we will want to have peach trees too. Better yet, we want to be the first one to have peach trees and have everyone else try to catch up with us. It becomes very easy to forget that none of it has any real value. We just want to be the best, biggest, smartest… at whatever it is we are doing.
So, there are plenty of reasons to play Farmville, to relax, to feed your addiction, to build up your self-esteem, to keep your guilt feelings under control and to keep your ego fed. Which one of these is your excuse?
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