Confessions of a FarmVille Addict

How work, leisure and aliens called Nofs get in the way of a cyberfarmer devoted to his land.

How work, leisure and aliens called Nofs get in the way of a cyberfarmer devoted to his land.

The editor caught me playing FarmVille (FV) in office. Well, not exactly. But, he knows that I play FV. And because I do it so well (I can make more money than the business editor—the only other journalist in office who plays it—by spending less time on the game), he asked me to write about it. “I’ll do a story,” I suggest. “No bring the ‘I’ into it. Why you play it and all that,” the boss rules. So, here I am, talking about it.

It’s like being back in school: caught at mischief, having to write ‘I won’t do it again’ a hundred times. Only this time, I have to write about a hundred odd sentences on why I do it.

For the uninitiated, FV is a virtual farming game on the social networking site Facebook. You own a virtual farm, complete with crops, fruit trees, animals, barns, coops and so on, and your aim is to make the most of it. Having been a cyber farmer since September (FV was launched only in June this year), I am on level 36 already, and by the time you get to read this, I should be on level 37, beyond which a cyber farmer’s life gets a bit monotonous. The game goes on, of course, but there is nothing I can buy or add to my farm. I might quit when that happens, and resign myself to life as a former FV addict.

It is not so simple to quit, though. This is just a claim I am making. FarmVille addiction comes much easier. Ask Rupa Bajwa, author of The Sari Shop, but first and foremost my neighbour on FV, who is now working on her second novel. She tells me that she divides her time between writing, taking care of her eight-month-old son, and of course, her virtual farm. ‘FarmVille is a writer’s worst enemy,’ reads Rupa’s status update on her Facebook page. So I contact her for my story.

We decide to chat on Facebook about this. ‘It is great for when you have writer’s block, but I need to put my farm aside for a while now,’ she says. ‘Does it help?’ ‘No, of course not. It just makes you lazy, gives you another reason not to work when you are already tired and frustrated. Feels good, though, like most vices.’ Later, she sends me a flag for my farm. I know she is not quitting anytime soon.

Sometimes, work does get in the way of virtual farming. And so does leisure. But dedicated virtual farmers would have none of that. Surabhi Sinha, who manages an NGO in Mumbai, recently accompanied her husband on a work trip to Singapore. “He left for his meetings and I had the laptop to myself in the hotel room. I had a field day,” she tells me proudly. Though Surabhi had planted crops with a longer ripening cycle to factor in the two-day trip, she got down to rearranging the farm instead of stepping out of the hotel to see Singapore. Others report similar urgencies. When deadlines at work are too much to handle, Manasvi Vohra, an editor with Vikas Publishers, outsources harvesting crops on her farm to her 12-year-old brother Akshit. “I leave it on the laptop for him,” she says, “He too enjoys it.” Indeed. Even my eight-year-old daughter Mehr, who thinks I should have married the computer and not her mom, helps me with harvesting. She likes the sounds the animals make when you pet them. It makes her giggle. Believe me, FV can be a part of parenting if you are up to it. Each time I say I am bored, Mehr offers to take over the farm.

Actually, I did quit two months ago and converted my farm into a junkyard of bicycles. My friends liked the mutation. It was a sylvan haven abuzz with activity: horses, baby elephants, cows and chicken running around in fields where you could grow just about anything without bothering about climate change or even the climate. (Where else in the world do luscious cherries and juicy dates grow on the same patch of land?) I turned the farm from a bunch of well laid out fields, stables and sties to a junk yard: it was like the beginning of industrialisation. What the heck, I thought. If you can be a cyber farmer, why can’t you be a cyber installation artist? My cyber art was appreciated by fellow Facebookworms, but rejected by my peer group of farmers. There was outrage. I dismantled the installation and went back to the sweat and toil of cyber farming.

Cyber farmers often do not realise that there are others in the world who do not play FV. So you often hear complaints about FV farmers flooding their walls (virtual, of course) with information about their farm acquisitions and landmarks. No surprises then that there are over 500 groups on Facebook about hating FV. A group called ‘Not Playing FarmVille’ has 1.7 million fans. People are actually joining groups to say they are not virtual farmers like us!

More or less anyone who is on Facebook knows of the existence of the virtual farming outgrowth. Many play it while others suffer the updates and news feeds about their virtual and real friends’ achievements in the world of virtual agriculture.

But many people are not on Facebook either. You can actually divide the world’s internet user population of about 1.7 billion into two categories now: Facebookers and Nofs (the not-on-Facebook kinds). The first category has more than 300 million people. If you are a Nof and don’t know what Facebook is, this is for you: it is a global social networking website operated and owned by Facebook Inc that Mark Zukerberg and his roommates founded as computer science students at Harvard. Anyone above 13 can sign up. You add friends and send them messages, build your ‘profile’ and keep friends posted about your life through status updates—which can range from something as important as a headache or hangover to an event as trivial as your own wedding. But in-between netcasting the finer details of their lives, every fifth Facebook user plays FV.

You start with a small farm, plant seeds, harvest crops, buy animals and trees—or other virtual farmers gift these to you—and with the ‘money’ you make, you expand your farm. There are a variety of decorations you can buy from the flourishing FarmVille market—coloured fences, hay bales, ponds and so on. I bought tombstones and a spooky tree, wasting thousands of FarmVille coins that were pressed into cyber circulation around Halloween. But less than a month later, I had grown bored of the dingy bats and the spooky tree. The stuff was bought dear and sold for a pittance—something that many virtual farmers say they hate about FV. You buy a red barn for 40,000 coins and when you want to sell it off, all you get for it is 2,000 coins. For a company that is rolling in money and has now become the largest developer of social games including FV, Zynga takes a rather simple—or perhaps post-bubble American—view of life on the farm: all buildings are sold at a loss. And then there are tricks in this virtual treat. That red barn costs you 40,000 coins and stores six items. But a pink one costs 27 units of FV cash and stores 22 items. And it is not easy to get FV cash. You start with five to begin with, and as you go up each level you add one more. So, imagine after three months of toiling hard all I can accumulate is 32 FV! But Zynga will let you use your credit card and buy FV cash. Spend $40 on your credit card and buy 240 FV.

“The best things are available for FV cash and that is where the scam is,” says journalist Prakash Patra. He wasn’t the first to spot the scam, but since he started playing FV after I did and is already at an impressive level 40, I call him and meet him for my story. The meeting takes place at his house over whisky. We talk about editors, reporters, riots, post-liberalisation journalism and mostly about FV. The scam has already been at the back of every virtual farmer’s mind but hogged headlines after blogger Michael Arrington of TechCrunch called it ‘scamville’ and wrote, ‘The games that scam the most, win.’ Zynga’s annual revenues are pegged at $200 million and Bloomberg has given it a $1 billion evaluation. Both Zynga and Facebook are facing a $5 million lawsuit for ‘misleading ads and offers’. While American courts settle that, we go back to the question that confronts us: why do I play FV?

Patra tells me that when he retires, he will go back to farming in his village. That is one reason why he loves FV. “It is a constructive game. You build things. In everybody’s mind it has a soothing effect. Mafia Wars (another Zynga game) is the other extreme. You destroy things,” he says. I offer my own whisky-aided analysis to him. “If in Delhi, you want to drive 5 km, there are so many variables. So much can go wrong. But FV is so linear. You sow, harvest and earn money. No droughts, no power cuts, no pests, no government control… It is the linear nature of the game that I love,” I tell him. We both agree.

And then we talk some more and agree that FV is becoming too dull now. So we finish and part ways. It is time to harvest the crop.

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