Farmville in the year 2010! Oil for everyone!

Now that my real anthropology essays are finished, I have time to post again on this blog. Not sure how “anthropological” my points will be today, but that’s okay

It’s 2010 now, and there are some big changes in Farmville. One of the most notable changes, for me anyway, is the fact that suddenly I have a s%$^load of gasoline! I’ve been playing this game for a while now, and I had already bought a seeder, tractor and harvester machines, but with the size of my farm, I didn’t used to be able to use them all at once, since I would run out of gas. But luckily for me, Santa saved the day! Thanks to all the presents I opened, I now have tons of gasoline at my disposal….I probably won’t run out for months. And now, you can give gasoline as a gift too! So I am still receiving almost as much as I’m using, and I still have dozens of tanks to spare.

From a money-making perspective, Zynga was quite smart to do this, since it *was* starting to get annoying doing all that planting one square at a time. So this makes players happy, which keeps them coming back….which makes advertisers happy, etc. etc. Everyone wins, and it was gasoline that saved the day!

Once again, Farmville is ignoring some kinda big issues. For example, where does this gasoline come from? Why don’t prices for it fluctuate? Why shouldn’t there be a bit more of a struggle for Farmville players? It’s easy now to basically ignore all the important factors in farming:

(weather = snow on banana trees looks pretty in Farmville, but as can be seen, it’s not really so wonderful – especially for certain tropical animals: http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/news/2010/01/100111_frozen_iguanas.shtml)

(environment = what kind of fertilizers ARE these anyway? Are they organic? why are we so eager to spray our crops, especially fruits and vegetables that are fully ripe!)

(animal care = why don’t the animals have to eat? why don’t they ever die? are these REAL animals, or are they stuffed?)

(UFO sightings? = do I really want an alien cow in my barn?)

Luckily, despite the ways that Farmville bends the rules (and reality) to meet its needs, some farmers are taking the game quite seriously. I got this IM from Paul the other day:

5:53 PM hey look at my farm I have a pine forest and a meadow, and I have intercropped coffee with corn for the prevenetion of soil exhaustion as well as food security

5:54 PM dont want to rely too much on export crops

Sure enough, I checked out his farm, and the pine forest is doing quite nicely. Here’s a picture:

And good thing I can rely on Paul if I need a sustainable food supply. Although hopefully I will have plenty of food with my plan too, which mostly involves bananas:

Pretty soon I’ll have a banana empire!

Anyway, that’s all for now, more coming soon! Leave some comments of things you’d like me to talk about, especially if you think I might be able to relate them to anthropology a bit more!

Time to Open Presents!

It’s been over a week since my last blog post, but even as I ended my term and traveled across the Atlantic, I was still farming.

Today I opened all of the presents under my Christmas tree – there were some exciting ones, and some a bit less exciting. I kept a tally of all my presents (I might still get more, as the presents last till January 8th)

For those who haven’t opened theirs and want to be surprised, don’t look ahead, as I will now write the tally of what I received.

FUEL:

Fuel refills were the most common present – all in all, I got 42 fuel refills, which will allow me to use my machinery an extra 42 times.

ANIMALS:

3 brown cows, 1 alien cow, 3 black chickens, 3 brown chickens, 2 lambs, 2 calves, 1 black sheep, 3 black cats, 3 grey tabbies, 1 clumsy reindeer (Rudolph?) and 1 golden chicken. I like the animal gifts since most are things I didn’t have – although I do wish I could eat the lamb. Maybe by Easter this will be allowed. Or Passover.

OTHER RANDOM STUFF:

1 new years ball, 5 gold nutcrackers, 3 giant lollipops, 4 lighted gift boxes, 5 silver ornaments, 1 gold soldier, 2 cocoa teddy bears, 1 gold ornament and 2 mystery boxes. I decided to sell most of those things, although I will keep the new years ball till New Years Eve. But mostly these gifts were silly.

I have to admit that opening my Farmville presents was almost as fun as opening real presents.

As I continue to play Farmville over this winter break, I’ll hopefully post some more, and try to make some more anthropology connections as well, especially since I’ll be working on my essays.

Until then, Merry Christmas!

Trapped in the hay!

Generally, when you plant, harvest or build anything on your Farmville farm, your avatar has to walk over to the spot where the action is taking place before it can be finished. This can be annoying if you are on one end of the farm, and then want to do something on the other end – you end up waiting several seconds for your character to make the walk across the screen.

There is a way around this, and I have noticed that some of my friends have figured it out too. Just lock your avatar in a wall of hay in the center of your farm. Farmville recognizes if you are trying to plant, harvest, or build in an inaccessible area – and your avatar can’t go through objects (only farmland and grass).

I did this today, and it made planting go a lot quicker. Notice how I’m stuck in the hay!

I’ve also moved some trees around, and spread out the patches of farmland, to make my farm a little prettier and not so industrial-like. Like all pictures on this blog, click to get a better view.

What’s with weather? It’s snowing in Farmville!

The weather has taken a turn for the worst in Farmville! Suddenly there’s snow!

As my farm loaded, I could see this picture, which shows a farm with a blanket of snow. But in Farmville, snow isn’t free.

To get a blanket of snow, I’d have to spend 1000 coins! But even more than that, wouldn’t snow be quite problematic on my farm? I always assumed that my farm was in a rather tropical (or at least sub-tropical) climate – after all, I have date palms, passion fruit and banana trees! Crops grow quickly (and all year round), and everything is lush and green. So a layer of snow on the ground would surely kill some of my crops! I don’t think that this is really the case (since in Farmville snow is associated with happiness and a White Christmas….not with destruction of citrus harvests).

So I guess my question is whether Farmville will ever include any repercussions for poor decisions that players make. If you let it snow on your orange trees, perhaps the orange crop should get ruined, at least for that year. If you don’t provide a trough of water for your horses, perhaps they should die of thirst?….etc. etc. So far the only negative repercussion is that your crops will wither if you don’t harvest them.

I decided it would be too strange to have it snow over my whole farm (especially my banana trees), but I was unable to resist the temptation for a bit of decorative snow. So I decided to create a small winter microclimate in the corner of my farm. So take a look at my little bit of winter!

Finally, on an unrelated note, here is a snapshot of my friend Paul’s farm. He told me to take a look at his farm, since he said it was looking quite pretty. I agree! It is nice and colorful in this picture, and lots of crops are ready to harvest! I also like how his farm isn’t too grid-like. There’s a mix of trees and crops, haphazardly placed around the farm.

Nicely done Paul!

What’s Inside the Box? The importance of The Gift in Farmville

In my Theories of Social Anthropology lecture this week, our professor spoke briefly about The Gift, by Marcel Mauss. I haven’t read this book yet, but I know that Mauss writes about the importance of gift-giving in many non-Western societies. It’s a very well known book in the world of anthropology, since gift-giving in many cultures has been shown to build and sustain relationships.

I wouldn’t be surprised if the creators of Farmville have read Mauss themselves, since the concept of gift-giving is so central to Farmville. Every player starts out with a bit of money and some initial crops, but after that you are dependent on your own farming work (which takes time), but more importantly, the gifts you receive from other people. In addition to physical gifts, you can also “gift” your time by helping out on other farms. Sure, we get rewarded with coins for helping out on other people’s farms or helping to fertilize, but more importantly, if you send a gift to a friend (or help out), you are likely to receive something in return. You wouldn’t get very far in Farmville without friends, and you won’t maintain these friendships unless you take the time to send gifts.

Fortunately, gift giving in Farmville is quite easy, especially since you can do a “mass-gift-sending” to 30 people at once. And then there’s the pessimistic view that Farmville included “gift-giving” as a way to get you to convince all your Facebook friends to join Farmville, since the more friends you have, the more gifts you’ll get. But there are several ways they could have structured this game, and there’s much more to explore when it comes to why they chose gift-giving, and how it impacts the Farmville community.

I think I’m rambling a bit now, so on to my next point, which is that this past week, we’ve seen the arrival of the Christmas present! The more you receive, the bigger your Christmas tree gets (the tree was a special gift from Farmville). I immediately wondered: What is inside these colored boxes?

I joked in my Facebook status that I was hoping for a butcher knife, or something like it, to finally kill some of those pigs! I doubt I’ll get that, but I do hope it’s not going to be useless items in those boxes when we open them later this month (like a sweater for a scarecrow, or some fruitcake). I hope they give us something good, that we actually could use! Maybe canning machines to can fruits that we harvest? Or blenders to make fruit juice and smoothies with all those nice, fresh berries?

This is the first time ever having my own Christmas tree (as I suspect must be the case for thousands of other non-Christian Farmville folks), and I’m quite excited to see what’s inside the boxes! Don’t disappoint me Farmville!

Purple Grapes Galore!

I’ve been growing a lot of grapes ever since I’ve been allowed to plant them. They have a good profit per hour ratio, and look pretty too.

I found a very helpful blog that has tips on Farmville strategy, which I’ll link here.

http://gameolosophy.com/games/farmville-the-unofficial-strategy-guide/

Here’s a picture of me, about to harvest some grapes.

Once I’m allowed to plant peas, asparagus and onions, you’ll probably see me planting those too. Of course, a lot depends on your schedule. If you are constantly checking Farmville, it makes sense to plant things like raspberries, which grow very quickly. And if you only want to plant things every few days, then crops like potatoes and peppers are good too.

It’s strategies like these that allowed me to get ahead of my flatmate in the game! But it’s not really all about levels and money…it’s also about making your farm look nice. Right now my farm looks okay, but I think with a little more planning, I could make it look much nicer.

Where’s the butcher?

Dear Farmville,

As much as I love truffles, sometimes I’d rather have some bacon. Thus far in Farmville, you can’t kill animals. You can milk your goats and cows. You can get eggs from your chickens, feathers from ducks, swans and turkeys, wool from your sheep….and you can use your pigs to search for truffles.

This is all well and good, and I don’t suggest changing anything necessarily – but I think that giving Farmville users a chance to harvest some meat would be appropriate soon. Perhaps you could be required to build a slaughterhouse first, or a butcher. I don’t think that killing animals in Farmville should be easy, or come without cost – but it seems strange to keeping all these animals around just to pluck out some feathers.

So, Farmville: When can we harvest meat? Perhaps in time to eat some ham or turkey this Christmas?

I will end with my favorite Thanksgiving song, which I sang at Thanksgiving last week – I learned this song from my cousin many years ago. As one of my friends eloquently and earnestly put it last week, the song is sung from the turkey’s point of view, but it wasn’t actually written by a turkey.

A turkey sat on a barnyard fence and he sang this sad sad tune.

Thankgiving is a coming, gobble gobble gobble gobble

I don’t want to be eaten soon.

Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble

I want to run away.

Gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble, gobble

I don’t like Thanksgiving day!

Farmville Snapshot at Level 21

Here is a snapshot of my farm. I’m now at Level 21 (ahead of my flatmate! ha ha!)

The picture is distorted, but click on it to get a better view.

There are probably a number of things to notice and talk about here, and I don’t have time today to write all my Farmville thoughts. So I hope to make my blog posts brief, but frequent. So check back soon for more!

Farmville: Utopia?

So as I mentioned, I’ve been playing Farmville for 3 weeks now. I had never heard of it until I walked into my flatmate’s room one day, and saw her playing something on her computer. I asked her about it, and she convinced me to set up an account.

I have never been one to play games on Facebook. In fact, this is the first Facebook game I’ve ever played – I never even succumbed to online Facebook scrabble. So it’s a pretty big deal that I am playing Farmville, let alone writing on a blog about it.

But there’s something about Farmville that is very interesting. Some others have already written about it. This blog post mentioned how Farmville users in the USA outnumber actual farmers 60:1!

http://www.doorsofperception.com/archives/2009/11/farmville.php

I have lots of thoughts about why this might be, and what makes Farmville so popular. But one initial idea I’ll throw out is the idea that Farmville is practically a perfect world. Almost nothing can go wrong – probably the worst thing to occur in the game so far is withered crops. This only happens if you plant something and forget to harvest it when it’s ready. But aside from this, everything is great. Animals don’t really need to eat anything – and they never die! You can send gifts to your friends everyday (and receive them too), fruit stays ripe on the tree forever, and all of the horrible disasters (floods, hurricanes, fires) from games like SimCity are no where to be found!

The world of Farmville is quite pleasant so far – and I’m curious to see if it remains that way.

Life in Farmville – My introduction

I’ve been using Farmville for 3 weeks now, and in addition to being a nice distraction, it’s made me think a lot. I’ve started this blog to share my Farmville related thoughts, and perhaps I will eventually add some other contributors if I find anyone else who wants to write.

I am currently doing an MA in the anthropology of food, so the idea of virtual farming is quite interesting to me. Sometimes my posts might be insightful, while at other times they might be random complaints or comments.

Please leave your comments, and enjoy!