Yikes! It's Farmville!

It's Tuesday at 2:30 am and I can't go to sleep. Why? Last Friday night, I took up my wife's challenge and started a farm on Farmville.com. She's been doing it for a couple of months now, and is at level 37. In less than 72 hours, I have risen from level 1 to level 17. I have increased the size of my farm twice and am just waiting until I have enough coins to buy the next larger farm. I have a tractor, a seeder and a harvester. I have only four decorations: a New Year's Eve Ball, a holiday tree with which to receive presents from the Facebook feed, a toy soldier gate to front my 15 clumsy reindeer, and an evergreen tree, which I may sell. I also have a dozen or so flowers of a few different kinds that have no intrinsic value, along with an outhouse, a rest tent, a picnic table, a well, a butter churn, and a water trough. Everything else is utilitarian. I describe this because many of the farms I have seen online are significantly decorated, which takes up space but brings no recurring return, as the animals and cultivated land do.

What makes this so unique, and why I am posting this information here, is the relevance it has to instructional design. The thing that hooked me right away was the abundance of immediate small rewards. However, that would grow old and boring if it were not for the additional ability to bank small rewards for larger ones. It's a pyramid scheme in the ultimate degree. And it is just as addicting as crack cocaine. I'm told that with crack, the first hit is addictive, and each subsequent hit is an attempt to achieve that initial high. So it is with this. I thought I would just dabble in it for a little bit, but it has become all consuming. Hence, I am still awake at this hour, my mind racing with ideas of how I can upgrade my system to be more efficient and handle the extreme flash orientation of the graphics. Everything is constantly in animation, and whether or not you run the sound, it is still there in the background, consuming assets.

I am obsessed with getting up in a few hours (if I ever get to sleep) in order to harvest my pumpkins, which I planted last night for that reason, since they have an 8-hour maturation cycle. The system is ingenious: some crops, like cotton, have a much longer cycle (4 days) but the yield is much greater in the gross. However, for yield percentage, other crops are much better, like poinsettias, which have a 1 day maturation cycle but a three-fold yield to cost, compared to a 2.5-to-1 yield for cotton. Planning becomes ubiquitous: after I harvest my pumpkins this morning, I intend to sow rice, which has a 10-hour cycle, so that I can harvest when I get home from my real job (!). Then, I plan to sow poinsettias, because they are only available for three more days. That will give me somewhat of a break in the mornings.

In the midst of all this furious planting and harvesting, I am trying to study two facets: the nature of the game (that's what it really is) and the nature of my response to it. Through the interface, I am developing virtual friendships with people here in my own town and others across the globe. For a true nerd like myself, this is the essence of our malady. We are inveterate loners, yet have an excruciating need to belong. The conflict is almost unbearable, yet this venue meets both needs in us. Of course, I am learning. Right now I am learning to play the game. Yet, I also see in the game paradigm couched in agriculture, numerous applications to life. However, the game lacks a few things that life does not, such as bugs, diseases, and drought. Maybe that's down the road a way. We'll see. In the meantime, I had to do something to burn off some mental energy in the hopes that I can get some sleep before I have to go harvest, er, go to work.