Farmville Mania – Reasons I never owned a Giga Pet

I will admit to not being an avid Facebook user. I keep in contact with friends who do not live close by or who I have not seen since high school. I post a picture or two of my baby niece or myself at the top of a mountain. I have a measly 96 friends (*gasp*) and I am more likely to check Facebook from my iPhone than to ever log in on a computer.

But I have a confession. I HATE Farmville.

For all three of you who are not aware of the Farmville phenomena, Wikipedia describes Farmville as “a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social networking website Facebook.” In the past, I too have found myself in love with mindless gaming. I’ve played more hours of Tetris and Pong of all things (and I am only 28, not quite ancient yet) on my calculator in high school and had a love affair with Katamari (a game in which a little guy rolls up items to make a bigger ball) a few years back. I almost failed a semester of college because I wasn’t sleeping because of Snood!

Facebook Farmville Game

Even with all of that, I stand by my very strong dislike. Every time I log into Facebook I am attacked by found kittens, lost cows, and oversized potatoes. Sometimes there are so many of them I imagine I am in a room filling with small stuffed representations, like a full claw machine…and like the claw machine, I can never pull the information out of my news stream that I really want. I am drowning in a vat of people helpfully sharing imaginary fuel and watering imaginary plants while the farm owners are away.

Maybe I’m cynical and bitter, but I find Farmville just about as useful as the Tamagotchi Giga Pets that were insanely popular when I was a child. Cute, fuzzy graphics to go with inane and pointless actions. Nonetheless, I have to give mad props to whoever created this monstrosity and whatever gaming schools they went to. They seem to have inspired millions of individuals who would otherwise be hard at work, hanging out with friends, or even playing Snood instead invest their time in participating in online physical labor.

Written by Genevieve, a casual gamer who works in affiliation with Westwood College in their game design colleges.