Obviously it's not about "exploiting their friends". You can block Farmville or Mafia Wars if you don't want to see updates about them. There's a cooperative element that a lot of people enjoy there; they enjoy bartering with friends for items and sharing the wealth when they have it.
Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular and it appeals to the same demographic, but it is even more popular because Facebook has become a vector to involve _real-life_ friends and to allow people to get sucked into the game and play for a few minutes at a time.
It's a pretty simple formula, nothing really ground-breaking there. Some classic RPG elements + interior decoration + cooperation with friends + negligible chunks of time commitment to accomplish things = high appeal to certain groups. I find Farmville really annoying and don't play it (or any other Facebook games) but almost all females I spend time around do play it. It's more hit-and-miss with guys.
But is there something inherently immoral or wrong about this pattern? I don't see what it is. It's just a silly game; you might not find it fun to arrange animals and barns on virtual farmland, but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it.
>> but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it. <<
Except in the article it read:
"Gameplay in FarmVille, FishVille, or Café World is based almost exclusively on what social-game designers call a "compulsion loop." Players perform basic tasks — clicking on crops to harvest them, clicking on stoves in restaurants, clicking on fish to feed them — earn fake money, enhance their farm or restaurant or aquarium, and repeat. In Zynga's hands, the art of snaring users with such gimmickry has become, quite literally, a science: Pincus told Time magazine last year that Zynga employs a behavioral psychologist."
I think the absence of something in addition to the compulsion loop is what people are objecting to here. The loop itself is not value, it's exploitation.
Farmville is The Sims: Farm Life pared down to work in Flash on old computers. It is popular for the same reasons The Sims was popular and it appeals to the same demographic, but it is even more popular because Facebook has become a vector to involve _real-life_ friends and to allow people to get sucked into the game and play for a few minutes at a time.
It's a pretty simple formula, nothing really ground-breaking there. Some classic RPG elements + interior decoration + cooperation with friends + negligible chunks of time commitment to accomplish things = high appeal to certain groups. I find Farmville really annoying and don't play it (or any other Facebook games) but almost all females I spend time around do play it. It's more hit-and-miss with guys.
But is there something inherently immoral or wrong about this pattern? I don't see what it is. It's just a silly game; you might not find it fun to arrange animals and barns on virtual farmland, but that doesn't mean that there's something nefarious or bad about it.