In early 2009, when Facebook was still important in its efforts to swallow the Internet as much as possible, online games were not yet possible.
Then, that June, came Farmville. Even if you weren’t among the millions of people in the cartoon pitch land on Facebook every day, iling bho the endless stream of Qtsi collectors, you were getting snakes and cobras from your friends asking for help. The game either enthralled Facebook users or constantly reminded them that it was missing out on one.
A flash-based game created by Zynga, intended to be played inside Facebook, is closing on Thursday – yes, there were still people playing it – although a sequel that can be played via mobile apps will survive. But the original Farmville lives in the behaviors it has established in everyday Internet users and English-hacking techniques, now it focuses on virtually every site, service and application.
On top of that, the game has 32 million active users and about 85 million players every day. You helped transform Facebook from the place you went to check on updates – mostly in text form – to a time-consuming space from friends and family.
“We thought of it as a new dimension in your society, not just a way for people to get games,” said Mark Pinnacles, who was chief executive of Shrimp at the time and now chairman of its board of directors. “” I thought: ‘People are just hanging out on this social network like Facebook, and I want to give them something to do with it.’
It proved to be partially lished by drawing players in tight loops drawn by themselves. If you don’t check every day, your crop will die and die; Some players will set alarms so they can’t forget. If you need help, you can spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends – a cause for annoyance for nonplayers who are surrounded with notifications and updates in their news feeds.
Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, said the behavior that Farmville generalized made it a pace car for the 2010 Internet economy.
It was not meant as a compliment.
Mr Bogost said the game encourages people to draw friends as resources for themselves and the service they are using. It attracts attention and promotes interaction loops in a way that is now emulated by everything from Instagram to Quennon, he said.
“The Internet itself is a marketplace of the obsessive world where the goal is to get your attention and provide ads against it or bring you to it to gain value from that activity.” Said.
While many tricks were tried in other games – Mafia Wars was a shrimp top hit at the time – Farmville became a mainstream event. Mr Pinx said he frequently had dinner with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg, and in early 2009 he was notified in advance that the platform would soon allow games to be posted to a user’s news feed. He said Mr Zuckerberg told him the shrimp should flood the zone with new games and Facebook would echo it.
Although farming was far from a gorgeous genre of game at the time, Mr. Pincus saw it as a relaxing activity that would appeal to a wider audience, especially among adults and women who had never spent hundreds of dollars on a console Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Nintendo. Y. It will soon be a preview of the bursting market for mobile games, with casual gamers grabbing smartphones and moving away from the desktop.
The gaming industry, despite its success, has always been chilly for Farmville. A Zinga executive received a boom at the Game Developers Conference in 2010, and Mr. Pinnacles said he had difficulty recruiting developers who thought his colleagues would not respect him for working on the game.
In 2010, Time magazine named Farmville “The 50th Inventions”, acknowledging how unpredictable it was but calling it “barely a game”.
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For many, the game will be remembered more for its presence in people’s news feeds than for the game itself. Facebook was well aware of the complaints.
After hearing from nonplayers that the game is spam, Facebook restricts how many games can post on news feeds and send notifications. Vivek Sharma, Facebook’s vice president and head of gaming, said Facebook’s goal is to send fewer notifications only when they have an impact.
He credited Farmville for much of the emergence of social gaming and said the “saga” on excessive instructions taught Facebook some important lessons.
“I think people started looking for some deep behavioral things that needed to be tweaked to keep this app self-sustaining and healthy.” “And I think that’s part of the idea that people really have limits, and that changes over time.”
Even if people were offended by the instructions, there is little doubt that they worked. Scott Konigsberg, Zinga’s product director, noted that requests were sent by players who chose to send them.
“Everyone saw the ‘single cow’ suggestion sometime or other, but it was all shared by their friends playing the game.
Mia Consalvo, a professor of sports studies and design at Concordia University in Canada, was constantly watching Farmville in front of him.
“When you log in to Facebook, it feels like ‘Oh, my 12 friends need help.’
She questioned how social the game really is, arguing that it doesn’t have deep or constant interaction.
He said, “The game itself is not encouraging a conversation between you and your friends, or encouraging you to spend time together in the playground.” “It’s really just a mechanic clicking a button.”
But those who went back every day said that this kept them in touch with friends and acquaintances, with whom they would talk something.
Maury Sherman, a 42-year-old radio producer in Toronto, said he and the receptionist played together and went to his desk every day to chat about it. “She was telling me about the pink cow I got,” he said.
It gave him pleasure from escape, virtual stress ball and pleasant activity that let him wander in his mind. He said he spent more than $ 1000 over many years to improve the farm or save time – that’s real money.
He pleaded guilty to sending the instructions, but he always managed to get the help he wanted.
He said, “There are people who will silence you or love you because they were tired of hearing that you need your cow’s help.”
Jaime Tracy, 59, of Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania, said she was “one of those people” who made repeated requests for help until her friends and relatives told her to hit him hard.
But she loved the sport, which she saw as a form of meditation and had been playing for over five years. Her children grew up and being out of the house, “I had nothing else to do,” he said.
“You can just close your mind and plant some carrots,” he said.
