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."

Comments

Re:Something I overheard

[Anonymous Coward]

Something I overheard:

"Can I grow weed on Farmvile and sell it on Mafia Wars?"

You can grow it to sell to the local pot club. If you earn enough points to get cancer you can even use it in the game.

It drives me nuts

[NtroP]

I swear, if I see another post about one of my "friends" finding a little lost duckling or sheep or whatever on my facebook feed I'm going to start making heavy use of the "unfriend" feature. If you want to play your game, fine, but PLEASE facebook, give me the ability to turn off notifications from stupid games like that! I might even try playing it if I wasn't so annoyed by all the crap it spews onto my facebook page and worried that I'd annoy my friends and family in turn - that and I don't trust ANY applications interacting with my facebook account.

No, I don't want that drink, poke, hug, heart, angel, bush or whatever. Thanks all the same, especially not when I have to click a button to give it access to my account. Yes, I'm paranoid.