Slashdot Mirror
Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction
MarkN writes "Facebook has been trumpeting the fact that Farmville, the most popular game on its site, has more users than Twitter, with 69 million playing over a month and 26 million playing each day. Combined with Facebook's announcement that they have hit 350 million users, that means one out of every five people on Facebook is playing Farmville. Gamasutra has a post taking a critical analysis of Farmville, its deceptively slow level grind, how a number of gameplay features end up as simply decorative since they aren't balanced with the benefits of raising crops, and discussing why Farmville succeeds so well in virally spreading itself and addicting people."
a glorified version of Harvest Moon.
Due to Farmvilles massive spamming, and my inability to make it stop telling me when my sisters/friends/coworkers have found a new cow, I've actually resorted to unfriending people who are farmville addicts. My "newsfeed" went from updates on my friends lives to 3/4 farmville useless announcements, making it effectively useless. I was tempted to install the app to see if I could filter them somehow, but ultimately said forget it.
It's fine if people want to play games, but frankly, the rest of the world doesn't care or need to know that you planted seeds. If I installed a facebook app that broadcasted every time I got a green drop in WoW I'm sure my friends wouldn't be too happy.
Add to this the Mafia wars spam, and these stupid little apps have made a mess out of what was once a useful tool for me to keep on top of my friends day to day and related silliness.
It takes one click to block an unwanted application like Farmville from posting to your News Feed. There's a "Hide" option on any News Feed story which will block all posts from that application. Very useful.
Apparently you don't understand that Slashdot is not a game. The whole point of using moderator points is to help make other people's Slashdot reading experiences more valuable. And if you don't want to contribute in that way, then just ignore any moderation points you've been given. They'll eventually expire and other people who actually care to contribute will take care of things.
Remember that once the application has more than a million users, it can access not only your personal information, but everyone's personal information you can access.
You can disable that.
Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
You can block applications on a per-application basis too. I've blocked everything people have invited me to, except for the two applications I actually use. Not as good as opt-in, but it does exist.