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They say: “Grow delicious fruits and vegetables and raise adorable animals on your very own farm!”. But this is what you get: “Buy many images for money, lay them in your square field, return back in many hours, sell the images and you’ll get even more money. Buy many images for money, lay them in your square field…” That’s one of many facebook-based cloned games by Zynga company with rural decorations this time and it’s called FarmVille.

Game developers usually get surprised how such a primitive grinding game has more players than twitter has tweeple. Farm village engages the rational ones by simple strategies what images to choose to get maximal profit in minimal time. It engages the irrational ones by attractive childish graphics and animation and the ability to arrange their farms as cozy, interesting, or esthetical as possible. Some players exploit the unexpected possibilities of the game while creating their farm art. Some people get caught by marketing tricks like facebook statuses about the game, various actions and invitations, ads in other games by Zynga, podcasts, twitter statuses, adaption to actual holidays (Halloween, Christmas, Easter), etc.

FarmVille is a community-based game. Recently Tony Ventrice defined the following purposes of such games in Gamasutra:

• Create permanent community (offer collaboration)
• Create the feeling of continuous discoveries (prompt player progress and self-expression)
• Spread the game virally (prompt players to invite friends)

There isn’t much community-forming in the game. You are just offered to invite neighbors whose farms you’ll be able to fertilize so that they get richer crop. Also you can give your neighbors animals, trees, and different decorations from a reserve of gifts, where the amount of gift choices grow up with the increasing level of your village business experience. What I don’t like is that you can give others different presents that you don’t really have and can’t take yourself (as well as you can’t fertilize your own fields). The game is symbolized a lot already, but giving presents from some strange reserve makes it even more unrealistic. On another hand, this ensures that players won’t sell virtual goods to each other what usually happens in multi-player gaming.

The avatar of the game makes no sense. It just slows all the activities down, because if you want to plough and sow a field, the avatar has to go to it first. I found out that if you frame your avatar with a fence, the fields are ploughed and sowed immediately. So you have to limit yourself for productivity (like in real life). If you visit your neighbors, you will never find them at home. You’ll find there only abandoned farm full of crows and weeds, which you can clear and get virtual money for that.

The business model behind FarmVille is this: the game is free for most of the players, but a few percent of biggest fans buy virtual money for real money at their free will, to be able to develop their village business in larger scope.

There is almost no interaction among different objects in the game except the area they take (animals can’t go over the area which is laid with an image, e.g. a field, a tree, or a fence). When you achieve quite high level or buy virtual money, you can get tractors or harvesters which make the work much faster as you don’t have to click on each field, but that works only while you have fuel. The game would be much more interesting, if rabbits would nibble the uncovered trees, unframed cows and horses would trample down or eat the crop, animals would need food, the manure of animals could be used to fertilize the fields, etc.

Having in mind that FarmVille is still in beta, there is a hope that it will be more interesting in the future. If you have several months, you can try farming as is now. But if you have no time and still want to have fun, play the platform game this weekend (surprise surprise! ).