The Latest Addiction: Farmville

Now is an era, where people prefer to give away healthy gifts rather than chocolates and bouquets. So yesterday I received one too, and it was one of my favorite fruit, apple. But, to my surprise, it wasn't "an apple", or say "two apples" or three but it was an apple tree. Something more startling is that, it was sent to me, from a place 250 kms from here. Don't be surprised, this tree was sent to me on Facebook, amid pool of friends and through one of the most used application "Farmville". To accept the gift, I had to visit his farm and i was awestruck to see a big farm with a tractor, sheep, a cow, berries, house, mill etc on his farm. There are other friends too who are busy applying their managerial abilities and are well settled with their own private restaurants. Yet again, its a virtual thing I am talking about, "Cafe World". But lets talk of Farmville for now.

The game seems to have mesmerized people from all walks of life. There has been an astronomical increase in the number of Farmville users. Every night for the last two weeks, my flank mate, has set his alarm for 3:30 a.m., when he will wake up, roll over and harvest his blueberries. "I keep my laptop next to my bed," he explained to me. "The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is harvest, then I harvest again at 10 in the morning, then again in mid-afternoon, then in the evening, and then again right before going to bed."
Though I have an account on facebook, yet I don't love Farmville, the reason being that you are bombarded with numerous of invitations to join, be a neighbor or demands to give someone a tree. One person formed the group I Hate Farmville and its good to see that their are, though small number, people who hate it.

Do you send messages to your facebook friends asking them to help you out with fertilizers or by sending a cow? Bizarre! Yes, but true. Welcome to the world of FarmVille. I am very unlucky because most of my friends are into Farmville and hence every time I open my account and I can see my homepage clogged with updates about raspberries, fertilizer requests and cattle status updates!

I don’t find it worth spending 2 hours a day as a waste of time. People anyway spend lots of time tweeting or on facebook, so what is the problem if they spend some time growing raspberries and gifting cattle. Both tweeting and growing cattle are equally unproductive in my opinion. Now, if you believe that the whole social networking thing is a waste of time, it’s up to you alone to decide whether Farmville is a waste of time or not.

So, what is the whole point of Farmville? What is it that makes Farmville so interesting that so many people use it? They play this game for the only reason that they make virtual money to decorate their farm in an absurd attempt to make it bigger than their neighbours’ farms. The whole point here is that people like to do things in a virtual world that they can never do in the real world. That’s why games like Counter Strike; World of Warcraft etc are so popular, where you can do whatever you want unrestricted. This feeling of living a life that can be better, more fun or even better organized than their real life fuels this urge to come back again and again to these virtual worlds. Farmville is nothing but a unique way to while away your time in today’s networked world with the added satisfaction of watching your crops and cattle grow. Finally, a farm in Farmville reminds me of the old Onida tagline ‘neighbour’s envy, owner’s pride.’