My girlfriend recently became obsessed with a Facebook game called Farmville, which has become the most popular game Facebook has over the last five months, and by way of strengthening our relationship and indulging her casual nerdiness as she does for my more intense variety, I decided to check it out. As a gamer I tend to engage primarily with engrossing long-form gaming experiences. I think of a long form gaming experience as something where you progress through increasing levels of difficulty tied together by a narrative, and in which very often your character or state in the game develops according to choices you make. And I think of an engrossing game as one that demands your full attention, you play the game when you're ready to sit down at home, turn off the lights, unplug your phone, de-wire your doorbell, load up on food for the weekend and hunker down to just play, rather than something you idly mess around with when you're bored.Farmville and Other Farming Games
Oddly enough, I am no stranger to the world of simulated farming games, I've played games in the Harvest Moon series for a while, which are designed to be played in a sort of "game real time" with no downtime between accomplishing things. You have many of the same features as Farmville, you plow fields, raise animals, make investments in seeds, harvest crops, and then re-buy more seeds to increase your capital, while sometimes investing in larger projects like houses. Farmville takes the farming theme a step further in letting you interact with nearby farms and show off your farms to your friends, while it also leaves out some features in terms of having a secondary system in the game for making friends with people while putting your crops and goods to a secondary purpose as gifts. Unlike the Harvest Moon games the social aspects of Farmville are largely independent of the core economy of the game. There's not a significant world to interact with outside your farm, and it also lacks the mechanics used by the Rune Factory spinoffs which introduce crafting and combat to the world to provide a further purpose for all the money raised and goods produced.
A few parallel elements are handled differently: Harvest Moon makes a big deal out of clearing your field so that you can reclaim all the space to plant crops, Farmville has all the space initially available, the way you increase your usable farmland is to buy more. In Harvest Moon (and a limited-round board game that involves farming called Agricola), a plowed field is plowed forever, you can keep re-using it to plant more crops of different types, while Farmville increases your clicking requirements by making you re-plow a field in between each crop you plant. In Harvest Moon, animals are a useful source of fixed income year-round since you have to deal with seasons when you can't grow certain crops, in Farmville animals seem like almost an afterthought since they provide nothing close to the money gained by crops, which require far more time and maintenance, which is what the game is built to reward. Quite a few features of Farmville simply end up as decorative, sometimes because they are intended as such, and sometimes because they're completely outpaced by other factors of the game in making money.Farmville and Optimization
A spreadsheet quickly (relative to the amount of time spent playing Farmville) showed that the lone 2 hour crop had the best profitability simply because of how often you could flip it and re-plant it, although later on in the game the margins of longer-running crops catch up, which also means that the game after a certain point no longer takes regular two hour obsessive re-checking to maximize profitability, you can be on an 8 or 10 hour schedule. We also noticed that some of the worst crops in the game were being heavily used by several players, and that in some cases the next 10 crops you could look forward to unlocking offered no improvements in profitability over the previous ones. Figuring out what crops to plant optimally is a calculation of the most profitable crop you have access to over the time interval at which you next expect to check the game.Farmville, Addiction and Money
Farmville and Casual Gaming
I think of a good game as something you go out of your way to spend some time on, Farmville is the kind of game you stumble your way into getting an addiction for, and use it to fill up internet-enabled downtime. I'm more comfortable with the incentives inherent to a game you pay for in advance in comparison with a game that's "free, unless you want to buy your way to the top", and I prefer attention-focusing experiences in general to attention-splitting ones. I'm very guilty of multi-tasking my day, but I recognize that focusing all your attention on a book, movie, or game will get you a lot more out of it than juggling it with a number of other activities.
Now granted, every game is ultimately a waste of time, the only real metrics of comparison are how enjoyably it wastes that time and how meaningful the challenges are. 64 million people are playing Farmville, which eclipses the entire sales of the Harvest Moon series and its spinoffs by more than a factor of 10. I think the perfect Facebook farming game would have a meaningful interactive economy where users could exchange and directly deal in the game's goods themselves, a better defined end-game with a purpose for all the wealth gained, include more meaningful incentives for specialization vs diversification, and allow for more complex strategy than the game currently affords. However, that may not be compatible with the financial incentives of the developer: allowing players to have an economy between them directly could allow players to "buy into" the system from each other rather than the developer, Farmville is already wildly popular with mechanics that involve a fairly simple grind, and the ultimate purpose of the game is to make spending money on it seem like a better deal than spending time.
Casual gaming has opened up the world of simulated entertainment to people who don't normally consider themselves gamers, and have never honed the reflexes, the three dimensional spatial awareness, or the drive for eternally optimizing strategies that the hardcore gamers possess. Ultimately I hope it ends up filling a niche as a gateway for people to dip their toes into what games are capable of, rather than eclipsing and replacing the existing world of games catered to dedicated obsessives. But until that day comes when I have to rally the troops, my girl and I will keep farming away.

One of the interesting features to Chrono Trigger is the extent to which your choices have actual consequences in the story. Video games are notorious for letting you get away with anything, it's assumed that anything in the world you can interact with you're supposed to. You can typically burst into people's houses and take anything that's not nailed down (or if it is, pry it loose), and help people or ignore them as you see fit. Early on in Chrono Trigger you're put on trial for "kidnapping" a princess when she simply ran off with you, and whether or not you're declared innocent or guilty depends upon a variety of actions you might have done or not done. If you tried to sell off the princess's pendant that's a strike against you, likewise if you stole someone's lunch, and the extent to which you're honest about the mistakes you made also affects the result. It puts you in a reflexive state of mind very early on in the game, the decisions you make very well could have consequences, you're not necessarily just going to watch the story play out for itself, your actions could conceivably change the course of events.




