2885_Cheerio_Future Canon Game – FarmVille
**Posted by Anonymous at 10:50 PM
http://gamerboom.com/archives/3114, visited on 2010/10/2.
Introduction
FarmVille is a Facebook game developed by Zynga, which is the largest developer of social games with 27 million daily users and 93 million monthly users. FarmVille was launched in June 2009 and became so popular on Facebook. (http://www.mahalo.com/farmville) It is quite an intuitive multiplayer online game which people in any age group can play it without any troubles. It contains simple tasks such as plowing, growing, fertilizing, harvesting, for both crops and animals. And users are able to sell those crops and animals that they grow to get money for buying more expensive ones to be able to get level up and greater rewards. (http://www.sys-con.com/node/1084929)
http://opensecrets.pixnet.net/blog/post/28949893, visited on 2010/10/2
Graphic
FarmVille is 2D cartoon-looking game.
New Feature -- Auto Adjustment
The system will adjust different display levels for their graphics – high, medium or low, which depends on how many animals or crops are there in their farm, to make sure the application is running while there are many objects in the farm, the system will select the medium or low quality graphic for their farm.
For example while the graphic setting is at high level, however there are more than 300 items in the farm, then the system will adjust the graphic level to a lower level to meet the players’ system requirement to make sure their other applications are running well.
(Jake, 2010/04/13, http://farmvillefanatic.com/farmville-graphics-quality-auto-adjustment, visited on 2010/10/5)
The Game Play
Farmville is a game which requests friends interact with each other, growing their own farms and build anything they like to make their farm unique from other friends.
Configuration Requirement
Any device with internet connection, even the slowest one in the world will be able to play FarmVille.
9 Weeks’ Successful
“FarmVille demonstrates the huge market potential of social gaming in just 9 weeks the game has become a cultural phenomenon,” said Mark Pincus, founder and CEP of Zynga. “No other application has achieved what this game has in such a short amount of time. Who would have guessed that FarmVille is now the biggest online game in North America and quickly becoming the biggest online game in the world?” (http://www.sys-con.com/node/1084929)
Five Weeks’ Work
In fact, not only the achievement is coming so quick in such short amount of time, the making of FarmVille has spent only 5 weeks’ time, Amitt Mahajan gave a presentation about the development of FarmVille at GDC 2010. Talking about how the work has been done within 5 weeks:
l* They bring the developer into the design process at the beginning of the game development.
l* They give the developers as much power as the designers, which are different from other game development while the designers design everything for the game, and the developer just need to be worried about the development process.
l* They didn’t actually write all of the code in 5 weeks, they just “translated user input to the web server, everything else is off-the-shelf components. So the only thing that they need to concentrate on is only developing the game”.
l* Sleep. It’s important to get work done on time, but sleeping is even more important than anything else while there’s something required brain to work it out.
Statistics
http://mashable.com/2009/12/02/farmville-bigger-than-twitter/, visited on 2010/10/2
Through the statistic it is easy to see that FarmVille has gain nearly 10 million player per month. And it seems that the weekly active users are very steady from the 19th Jan up to 1st Feb, following with a dramatic growth for the users, same as the daily active users.
Also it reveals clearly that during different events that while FarmVille launch some special gifts for the users, there will be more users. Especially on the Earth Quake in Haiti event, FarmVille users donated more than $1 million by buying the gifts and Zynga gather the fund for the issue. And, for the Valentine’s Day as well, “FarmVille users sent more than 220 million Valentine’s gifts in 18 hours”.
(http://www.allfacebook.com/farmville-about-to-cruise-past-80-million-users-2010-02, visited on 2010/10/2)
Odd News on FarmVille
12-year-old boy spent 913 Pounds on FarmVille
A 12-year-old boy was found spending 625 pounds on his mother’s credit card and 288 of his own savings on Facebook game FarmVille. As his mum is thinking to get the money back, HSBC informed her that only when she “report her son to the police and obtained a crime number” then she will be able to get a refund for that money spent on her credit card. (Jill Insley, guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 7 April 2010, http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2010/apr/07/farmville-user-debt-facebook, visited on 2010/10/02)
HELP – My Wife Won’t Stop Playing FarmVille
This is a post from FarmVille Forum, the husband who’s writing this post saying that, his wife has invited by friend called Amy to play FarmVille on Facebook, while she is doing everything in the house, such as wash dishes, cook, laundry and take care of their daughter. However, after playing this game, she left her daughter along; always collect crops and animals on the farm, and ending up her husband found himself doing everything in the house, cook, wash dishes and laundry.
(Chad, 2010/08/14, http://www.farmvilleblogsite.com/159/help-my-wife-wont-stop-playing-farmville/, visited on 2010/20/05)
Famous Sentence from FarmVille
Remember, FarmVille is addictive! Play at your own risk!
(http://www.farmvilleblogsite.com/, visited on 2010/10/02)
Famous Voting Result
There’s a poll asking what will you do if you have only one minute in your life?
There are more than 70 percent people said they want to log into FarmVille and sell all their crops and animals for coins.
Does it look Familiar?
It was said that “If you’ve played Farm Town (another Facebook game) at any point in the past few months then you won’t need any education about how to use Zynga’s version of the game as it’s almost an exact duplicate”. (Nick O’Neill, 2009, http://www.allfacebook.com/zynga-farmville-2009-06, visited on 2010/10/6)
However, FarmVille does different from Farm Town which leads it to become a more successful game:
Firstly, FarmVille gives players a bigger chance to communicate and share their ideas with friends and families. FarmVille players are able to visit their friends’ farm, live next to their friends.
Secondly, FarmVille does not have the bugs that appeared on Farm Town, which attracts more people to play.
Thirdly, they spent a great amount of money on advertisement for FarmVille, for example, “on MySpace, they are reportedly spending $2 to $3 million on MySpace ads every month.”(Nick O’Neill, 2009, http://www.allfacebook.com/zynga-farmville-2009-06, visited on 2010/10/6) As well as Facebook, we can always see FarmVille ads placed on the sides of the webpage.
FarmVille is familiar to some of the existing games; however, it is more successful than any other games in the market. Even it is copying, copy in a smarter way, which is making an improvement.
Research on FarmVille (Questionnaire)
| 1. | Do you know “WOW”? |
| | |
| 2. | Do you know “Facebook”? Do you have Facebook account? |
| | |
| 3. | Do you know “Farmville”? |
| | |
| 4. | Do you play “Farmville”? Why? |
| | |
| 5. | Do you like Farmville? Why? |
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| 6. | Do you like WOW or Farmville better? |
Participant: 10 people Age: 18 ~ 30
Base on the answers on the questionnaire:
1. 40 percent of people don’t know “WOW”;
2. 100 percent people know “Facebook”; 10 percent of them don’t have Facebook account;
3. 20 percent of people don’t know “FarmVille”; 11.1 percent of people who know “Facebook” but have no idea about “FarmVille”;
4. 70 percent of people don’t play “FarmVille” because of studying; they said it’s time consuming; within 30 percent of those who play FarmVille, 20 percent of them quit.
5. 30 percent people like “FarmVille” because they can share their farming knowledge with their friends and have their own land where they can do whatever they like to decorate the big land. 100 percent of people who play FarmVille like it.
6. 40 percent of people like “WOW” better and 40 percent of them like “FarmVille” better, the other 20 percent of them either haven’t played “WOW” or “FarmVille” didn’t give comment.
Analyze those data from the questionnaire, World of WarCraft is one of the games that so many people are crazy about it is a Massive Multiplayer On-Line game, and FarmVille is a new Facebook game, however it gains similar reputation from the audience.
Something that leads FarmVille more a canon game is it is casual game and doesn’t required for downloading of anything while game like WOW will definitely require the player to download something.
Research on FarmVille (Interview)
Two people who have played FarmVille on Facebook before are sharing their experience below:
Interviewee 1:
Farmville is easy to learn how to play and create your own virtual farm, the times on Farmville as the same as real life so it gives a more realistic feeling, lot of people addicted to playing this game on Facebook.
Planting crops in the ploughed land, they will become harvestable in specific time, different level will be unlocked more different kind of crops, animals, declarations, buildings or land expanding. So that makes player desired to get high level to buy more items to decorate their own farm. Player may invite their friends to be neighbours and as well as giving them access to each other’s farm, they can also send message tag to neighbour’s farm and present free gifts.
Moreover, as all ploughed crops have to wait an amount of time which depends on the type of crop it become harvestable and after the crops are left for too long time, they will be withers and gets no money, even lost the cost money. That’s why, it makes player addicted to this game and keep checking their farm in case missing the harvest time then lost money. When you got a big amount of money from crops, you can started focus to decorate your farm, it just such as a small internal competition between other neighbours, to see who’s farm get more rich and growing faster.
At last, while you harvested more, it also means you can get higher XP and earn more farm cash; you can use those farm cash to get some luxury items from market. Base on the reward system, you will feel very happy to get rewards regardless if it is a compliment, money or some new items. As to play a free game to get rewards continually, it can be create very good feeling to players!
Interviewee 2:
FarmVille is awesome! I never like the game on PC before but this game is rock even you don’t like it, because you will feel like it is very hard to play but most of the functions are pretty easy to understand, also fun not boring. My level is up like 40 but I have to stop playing it because it takes so much of my time. If I have time I would love to spend whole day non- stop.
The reason that I play FarmVille is because I like the colors and functions of this game. I also like how they give us the extra point when we adopted the animals that were lost on the way. Also how we have the point when we spend money in the market. I like when we keep all the gifts and not spend it all. I like how the game creates the new stuff for in vacation like Christmas, New Year, Halloween and Valentine’s Day. I like when I get the gifts from my friends and I can keep it as long as I want. Not spoil gifts.
All the decorations are pretty much make me feel like it is the real life and we can grow vegetables and flowers, and harvest them on time so they will not become dry or dead and you will not lose the coins. We also can earn extra coins when we go and visit friends’ farm. You will get addicted to it because you will need to count the time when you need to harvest the crops and animals. And check frequently on the market what I can buy depends on which level I am up to.
What leads FarmVille to a Canon Game? / Why is FarmVille Such an Addictive/ famous Game?
It is quite easy to understand after all the statement mentioned above.
l* It is a user-friendly game. People within any age group are able to play this game without any difficulties.
l* Relaxing: The speed of everyday life has become faster and faster, people getting all the pressure and sense of urgency both from work and family. Being stressful in the work and taking care of family fill up their life. Playing FarmVille give them a chance to relax and have fun, and fill up the space that they haven’t got chance to catch up with friend, so they can just jump into FarmVille to interact with their friend and visit their friends in the game world.
l* Reward system: Firstly, the daily gifts: Users are able to send their friends gifts if they log in to the game everyday. And because they also want to get the gifts from others, so they will invite as many friends as they can to join this game and at least send the gift to them everyday. Secondly, any one who successfully invites one friend to play the game will be able to get a gift that normally won’t be able to purchase with the game coin, instead the real money. Thirdly, the coin: the most important item in this game is the coin, users do everything such as sowing, watering, planting and so on, they have a final goal, which is to sell their harvest to get the coin, some people can’t wait to get the coin from those harvest, they would like to use real money to buy the game coin in order to get some fertilizer for shorter time to wait, because normally if the plants or animals takes 10 hours to get mature for selling, it’s the same in the real life’s 10 hours.
Sometime, FarmVille will have kind of activity like asking you to do some simple tasks and award you with some animals or plants that are limited edition or normally that you need to pay real money for it. So people love to go to FarmVille everyday and check out whether they have this kind of activity, and for those players who log in FarmVille will also be awarded.
l* Competition: FarmVille players are competing with their friends, and every piece of news about their farm will be posted on the homepage of Facebook, players feel proud of themselves to have higher level and bigger farm than their friends, so they are willing to pay some real money for quicker bonus.
l* Unrealistic: Game is the tool for people to get relaxing, entertaining, and the most important aspect of game is doing something that is not easy or impossible to be done in the real life. FarmVille, providing players a chance to live with their friends (adding their friends as neighbors in the farm), a chance to own their own farm, a chance to upsize their land by just spend more time in front of computer , a chance to get richer than their friends by investing little money (buying the game coin to fertilize the crops).
l* Updated frequently, FarmVille will renew the special plants seed and animals in the market during some special dates.
l* Finally, it’s something about psychology, which I heard from an old psychologist, saying that, how people love something depends on how much time they spend on that object, the more they spend on it, the more they love and not easy to give up it. I think that’s the same for this topic, because people spend such a long time taking care of their farm, they decorate the place, it is not easy for them to give up such a thing that takes so much of their time, they can’t quit because they have already spent so much.
Conclusion
FarmVille is the one which is able to be the future canon game because it is a representative of Facebook game, a representative of casual game, and a representative of all aged game, which haven’t been done by any of the game in the list of canon game before. And the uniqueness of the game – sharing idea and experience within friends is a big selling point for FarmVille which will be widely copied by other games in the future.
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