If you haven’t seen the FarmVille satire ad video circulating lately, you should. It’s funny stuff!
(I’m going to be saying that all day now. FARM VILLE! It’s the price of hefty journalistic investigation, I suppose.)
I’d just never thought about it in these terms until we were chattering in the office last week, but FarmVille has over 75 million users every month. It’s almost certainly the single videogame played by the most people, ever. You can stop pointing to WoW as a success story for simplified gameplay — WoW is to FarmVille as Star Fleet Battles is to WoW. Certainly, it seems that large-scale financial success (in terms of an enormous userbase) is tied to simplicity. (For multimedia cross-reference, please see “Reality TV” and the “Twilight” series of books and film.) Implications of this discovery are left as an exercise for the reader.
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Could one also think of farmville as a gateway drug or sorts? Introducing the unwashed masses to the concept on online gaming in a simple way, un-encumbered by far-out fantasy themes. Perhaps, it’s only after they’ve been hooked on Vicodinville that someone might upgrade to World of Crack?
Why would you play WoW when you can play
FARM VILLE!
But seriously, I don’t know. There’s a vast gulf between a game like WoW that demands hours of time, and a game that plays out in 10-minute segments…
That reminds me, I need to add Twilight to my Netflix queue. No, not a fan of the series and have not read the books. Just need to be able to say I saw it…
…
…
what?