FarmVille

FarmVille is a farming simulation game made for social networks such as Facebook developed by Zynga in 2009. This game was unimaginably popular throughout 2009 and 2011 and to this day, it's still very successful. Most people have played this game and some won't admit it.

Gameplay
You play as a farmer who starts out with an empty patch of land and some farm coins. The goal is to upgrade every element of your farm and expand it at your will. Players also earn XP for performing certain actions in the game such as plowing land or buying items. At certain XP benchmarks, the player's level rises. As the player gets more items and progresses through levels, crops and animals become available to them via the "market" where items can be purchased using either Farm Coins or Farm Cash. Farm Cash is earned by leveling up, completing offers or buying it with real money.

Bad Qualities

 * 1) Very tedious and shallow gameplay: The gameplay is just managing your farm, decorate your farm and sending gifts to your neighbors.
 * 2) The game is a rip-off of FarmTown, as both gameplay and visuals are almost exactly the same.
 * 3) While the graphics are passable, the animations are horrible. Your character moves two or three frames, without having any unique emotions, and they don't even speak.
 * 4) This game relies on Social Media spam to get more players to play the game and to progress through the game (meaning that some tasks involve inviting other people on Facebook to play). This means that if you are one of those people, you can end up spamming your friends on Facebook PMs/Facebook Messenger and vice versa, with messages directing to play the game, the same tactic games like Thug Life use.
 * 5) The character customization is painfully limited.
 * 6) No sound effects are present in the game, except music.
 * 7) The game can be considered as pay-to-win too, as using the game's Microtransactions allows to gain better items faster, also contributing to WIS #4.

Good Qualities

 * 1) As mentioned before, aside from the choppy and awful animations for your farmer, the graphics are passable. The same can be said about the music too, also being passable.
 * 2) The idea of a farming simulator game featuring a mixture of farming and many fictional things was interesting and unique on paper, despite being executed badly.
 * 3) If you have friends who play the game too, you can send gifts to them, which is kinda cool.

Reception
Despite the initial success of the game, it received very negative reactions from critics, video game designers, and personalities. The Time magazine called the game one of the "50 Worst Inventions" in recent decades due to it being "the most addictive of Facebook games" and a "series of mindless chores on a digital farm."

In a December 2010 interview with Gamasutra, game designer Jonathan Blow criticised FarmVille for being designed to create an atmosphere of negativity, requiring an unprecedented commitment to the game, and encouraging users to exploit their friends.

The video game researcher Ian Bogost designed another game called Cow Clicker as a satire of FarmVille and similar Zynga games to deconstruct the repetitiveness and perceived absurdity of such games.

Martha Stewart criticised the game on several episodes of her television series Martha. Stewart's argument touched upon the notion that FarmVille was an excuse for fans of the game, among her staff and audience, to waste their time on virtual farming instead of actual gardening.

If It's Bad, Why Was It So Successful?
Gaming journalists, critics and even a few researchers have determined that the game's savior was the social aspect. Putting the game on Facebook and MSN and adding achievements that can be shared and ranked would prove to lure people into playing the game and actually competing with others.

Also, putting Microtransactions in the game was obvious, because most players would pay anything if it meant "getting a high score" and being able to show off.

Zynga even later released the game on mobile devices, which helped it some more. This proved to be a perfect execution for the company (at least business-wise), because FarmVille won an award at the Game Developers Conference for the "Best New Social/Online Game" in 2010.

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