Critical Play: Farmville 2

The original Farmville, released in 2009, swept up the online world in a storm of virtual crops, fertilizer, and prolific in-app purchases. It quickly became Facebook’s most popular game, with more than 80 million monthly active users at its peak. Well aware of my proclivity for binge-playing, and associated vulnerability to the reaching hand of Zynga’s monetization apparatus, I tactfully evaded the first edition. Alas, I can now play under the guise of criticism.

What types of fun does Farmville 2 employ?

Farmville 2 primarily elicits three types of fun: fantasy, challenge, and fellowship. This, I believe, is a mutually reinforcing combination that is common to social sandbox games. Farmville 2, like many other social sandbox games, creates an immersive, extensible digital world in which the chief objectives of the individual player are to build, extend, and level up (and show this off to other players). The fantasy is simple: the player is a farmer. Starting with a basic plot of land, one grows and sells crops in order to extend their farm, level up, and acquire access to new objects within the game. Challenges — for example, “Sell X number of crops at market”––reinforce the overarching fantasy and provide a constant cycle of short-term satisfaction. And the game’s social dimension, comprising interactions with other players that range from forming co-operatives to comparing farms, produces the satisfaction of fellowship (or more aptly, competition).

Formal elements

A variety of formal elements are used to generate the sort of captivating engagement that Farmville manages to produce amongst its players.

• Layered rewards: First and foremost, Farmville layers reward-cycles of different lengths, providing players with (near) constant positive feedback during their gameplay. One notices the immediacy of click → ka’ching feedback for even basic actions: drop water on a field and it immediately sprouts; click on a chicken and it immediately lays an egg; sell your crops and hear the money roll into the bank. One layer higher (longer reward-cycle), completion of short challenges results in a celebratory influx of coins and experience. One layer further, expansions to one’s farm and aggregation of coins and experience reward the player with new crops and abilities. Finally, the long-term pursuit of agricultural excellence within Farmville rewards players with the age-old joy of greatness: having a bigger, better farm than your friends and co-players.
• Steady and reliable improvement: there is no way to lose in Farmville. One can only build and improve, build and improve, build and improve. This absolves the player of risk, for they can do nothing that will permanently undermine their farm, and concentrates players’ frustrations on the obstacles to their eventually-guaranteed success.
• Social competition: Players can view Farmville’s social dimensions harness peoples’ competitive instincts (pride and jealousy of achievement) to imbue the farm-building journey with even more emotion. Not only can one build a great farm; one must build a better farm than one’s friends, family, and most distant acquaintances.
• Disruption of fun: all this fun, and the guarantee of eventual success, is the foundation upon which the effectiveness of Farmville’s in-app purchases rests. Farmville produces a constant cycle of reward––except that we must wait for our crops to grow. The only obstacle between a meager plot of land and an agrarian empire, between past fun and more fun, is time. The central importance of time (disrupted fun) in prohibiting and accelerating one’s ability to play the game is perhaps the most fundamental formal element in Farmville, both because it drives engagement (one must come back after 10 minutes to harvest their newly-planted crops), and because it drives monetization (one can pay to make time go away).

What role do in-app purchases play?

As alluded to in the previous paragraph, in-app purchases leverage the human impulse towards short-term gratification to play a very straightforward role in Farmville: they prevent the disruption of fun by removing the obstacle of time. They are the lubricant to the wheels already in motion: if players want to build a bigger and better farm, bigger and better than their friends’ farms, in-app purchases allow them to do that quickly.