Farmville

[mattbell]

The Facebook game Farmville apparently now has 69 million active users per month.

I've never played it, but I just read a review of it here.

The following paragraph caught my attention.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and "adopt" the adorable little self-promoter.

Sounds like my definition of gaming hell. It also reminded me of a thought I had around 10 years ago about how in the future, robotic toys would manipulate kids into buying accessories for them. For example, imagine a Barbie doll who sits around crying all the time because she had no new clothes to wear while all of her friends' Barbies had new outfits.

Comments

[maradydd.livejournal.com]

Is that why I keep seeing all those "so-and-so found a lost misfit animal" posts? Egad. I thought it was just people not suppressing the announcements.

[crasch.livejournal.com]

Hahaha! Genius. Evil, but genius.

Fredrich Pohl wrote about this kind of marketing

[longobord.livejournal.com]

In his book The Space Merchants, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Space_Merchants, just about every trick marketers use now, he illustrates for an impossibly dystopian future. Well, impossible until you stop to think about how easily we could progress to such a state given the current power marketing has over what we think and how we decide things. Addictive alkaloids in your cheap coffee substitute anyone?

Re: Fredrich Pohl wrote about this kind of marketing

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

I think the actual source of the problem is that many people have more discretionary income than they have self-induced desires to spend it on. Advertising is there to create desire so these excess dollars can go somewhere. It's certainly a complicated problem, but I think people overestimate/overstate the "control" marketing has on us.

Re: Fredrich Pohl wrote about this kind of marketing

[longobord.livejournal.com]

I disagree with that for two reasons. First, people don't have as much discretionary income as they did even 20 years ago. People are increasingly getting into deficit spending due to things like dramatic increases in housing costs as related to income. While advertising creates desire, it's a competitive market for those dollars. Discount outlets and other cut-rate sources have replaced the full retail sensibility that allows people to make money at new businesses, etc. etc.

The second reason I disagree is that the marketing that Matt was referring to did not include any actual spending on anyone's behalf except the advertisers to the content providers. While the scheme effects large numbers of people, only a tiny fraction of them will actually even 'click through' and of those, even a smaller fraction will actually spend money. But the marketing scheme is so cheap, it costs little to effect so many people's lives in such a manner.

Re: Fredrich Pohl wrote about this kind of marketing

[geheimnisnacht.livejournal.com]

Let me clarify that I was just referring to your comment "...given the current power marketing has over what we think and how we decide things."

I can only find numbers that support an increase in discretionary income over at least the last decade, averaging 1.8% a year. Where did you find that we have less?

Regardless, even if it has gone down, if we still have a certain level of available money at hand, my argument stands. I would guess credit card usage has given us extra "illusory" discretionary income as well, which my aunt can attest to. :)

[dixiemouse.livejournal.com]

And I resent Farmville for trying to use my soft spot to get me to play it's game... since that is the extent of my power on that level, I am exerting it.

[funcrunch.livejournal.com]

It's not really that bad. I only started playing it because my good friend and bass teacher wrote the music loop for it, but I kept with it because I found it kind of cute. It's easy for me to ignore the wall post spam and it's easy to block it entirely for people who don't play the game.

[plymouth.livejournal.com]

Yeah, same here except I don't play farmville but I play several other zynga games. I figure that by this point everyone who hates them has blocked them and people who want the bonuses will see my posts with stuff for them to do or get or help with or whatever.

[aaangyl.livejournal.com]

They all encourage you to bring your friends in, the thing that really makes zynga stand out is they were the first guys to get big on 'offer for points' scams, and turned most of that money back into lots of advertising and branding. Also, what they said about it's not so hard to hide app spam on one's feed anymore so the assumption is becoming that most people will hide them except your friends who are also playing. Too bad fb doesn't have LJ-esque 'filter groups'.

Farmville.. now with scamming...

[(Anonymous)]

Looks like you can even pay money and/or get scammed in the game if you want...

http://www.geeksaresexy.net/2009/12/08/has-just-been-scammed-in-farmville/