Why FarmVille is the New Heroin

One of the major trends in recent years has been the rise of casual and indie games, many of which have not only been huge commercial hits but enormous critical successes. These casual titles cover a wealth of different genres, subjects and platforms and are enjoyed by millions of players every day. What effect are these games having on the industry and is this sudden surge necessarily a good thing?

Perhaps the archetypal casual game company is Zynga, the developers behind over 20 Facebook games. These games are typically unoriginal and often similar to older titles, most notably FarmVille’s uncanny resemblance to Harvest Moon, a title that was initially released 13 years previously. Despite creating largely derivative material that could be seen as shameless rehashes of other developer’s original property, Zynga is an enormously successful company.

The statistics behind the developer are nothing less than astonishing, with many games boasting enormous player counts. Across the total of Zynga’s Facebook output alone there are in excess of 270,000,000 users each month. CityVille, the most popular game produced by Zynga, has over 16,000,000 users playing every day: a number greater than the population of Belgium. An even more staggering statistic is that 2.5% of the entire world’s population have, at some point in time, played an online farm simulator. Arguably the most popular of these, the infamous FarmVille generated profits of $500,000,000 in 2010.

Criticism of these Facebook titles has been significant. Many feel the games lack any challenge; that they are soporific, monotonous and unjustifiably dull. There’s rarely much gameplay, other than repetitive, tedious grinding that would put any MMORPG to shame. In order to gain in-game advantages you have two options. Firstly to literally buy into to a “pay-to-win” situation, to spend real money for in-game benefits, a feature that is increasingly common to “free” online titles.

Alternatively, you can rope your other friends into the game to help with certain tasks. These downright irritating notifications, which used to litter countless Facebook news feeds, were so sanitised and inoffensive that they make Cliff Richard seem like a Satanist. “X wants to thank you for helping their duckling grow up”, “Y was working on their farm and stumbled across an uncommon butterfly collectable...” and “Z found a cut-throat razor to slit his own wrists at the banal futility of life”.

This aspect of recruiting new players, via merciless social pressure and particularly weak emotional blackmail is nothing short of unscrupulous. It’s essentially an online pyramid scheme with virtual goods which most people dismiss as damaging or harmful as it is “only a game”. It is only in the past year that the especially aggressive marketing campaigns by Zynga across social networking sites have been reduced. Previously, it was almost impossible to avoid the endless barrage of requests to play one of these ultra generic casual games unless you deleted your account.

Perhaps these criticisms would be tolerable if most of these Facebook games were engaging and different. Most are indistinguishable aside from the cosmetic elements and their settings. Usually they are just endless grinds for resources, which once acquired are used to acquire yet more resources. The gameplay is so reminiscent of the companies behind the games, that it is surprising how blissfully unaware the players are. Developers treat users like their in-game farms and cities and simply extract as much as possible out of them. To use a FarmVille analogy the users are being milked like one of their “lost, unhappy cows” that frequently wander around news feeds trying to recruit more drones.

It is an interesting situation and many casual Facebook game players refuse to acknowledge they are gamers. Often they are perfectly happy to ridicule and attack others for having a late night Halo: Reach gaming spree. However, if you ask how many hours they pump into FarmVille, inevitably “that is a completely different situation”. In turn many players exhibit traits of “hardcore” gamers, who invest huge amounts of time in MMORPG or first-person shooters.

Addiction amongst gamers is not a new issue but it is one that has only really been viewed in relation to the biggest MMORPG titles. However, there are a growing number of high-profile cases where people are reported as becoming obsessed with Facebook titles. Recently a child spent almost a £1,000 on FarmVille, using up all his savings and even accessing his mother’s credit card account to pay for in-game content. When asked for a response, developer Zynga refused to refund the money and implied it was solely the parent’s responsibility. However, the pay-to-win scenario and the economisation of what are supposedly “free” titles, is particularly dangerous considering children are a target audience.

The development of “free to play” casual, social networking games is certainly a worrying trend in the industry. The very nature of the titles is somewhat underhand, by hooking people in with the appeal of a “free” experience and then constantly encouraging them to “enhance” their experience by paying for it. Some particularly vocal opponents have likened these business models to drug dealers, as there are uncanny similarities between “exploiting” their markets. Both get their customers addicted and then proceed to live from the benefits and the captive audience.

This growing trend for “premium” content is becoming more accepted within the videogame industry. Whereas previously developers were happy to release games with as many features incorporated as possible, in order to have advantages over their competitors, now this is seldom the case. Now, many companies will charge for anything that they conceivably can do. Activision is now infamous for their Call of Duty map packs, which are not only limited in content but very expensive in price. If you were to purchase all the map packs available you would end up paying more than the price of the original retail game, as is the case with Call of Duty: Black Ops.

While this can’t be directly attributed to the work of Facebook casual games, there seems to be a distinct link. Charging for content is now regarded as far more socially acceptable, a trend that has only become more prominent since the rise of so-called “free-mium” services. For long-term gamers, these developments are especially worrying and seem to go against the long term importance of community development. With the seemingly unstoppable rise of pay-to-play content the future is starting to look darker for older gamers. Some may say that it’s the fear of change in the business model of the videogame industry, but the problems are deeper than that.

The Facebook gaming trend is creating a new generation of gamers who are used to essentially primitive, basic games that exist purely to pacify and generate revenue. It’s overwhelmingly depressing to think that 270,000,000 people play these games each month when there are stimulating, different and engaging titles out there. People could be playing Red Dead Redemption, Plants vs. Zombies and Shadow of the Colossus. We cannot emphasise how much we are hoping for a catastrophic outbreak of bovine tuberculosis to occur in the world of FarmVille.