A long time ago, I was a FarmVille addict. I confess that because I played that game as if my life depended on whether I could harvest my crops on time and I could sell my goods on time. That addiction woke me up at odd hours of the night just so I could advance to the next level. My body clock had changed, I was obsessed and FarmVille had taken the front seat in the journey of my life !!!
Once when I had one of my writing urges, I composed a very long post about my addiction and tried to see myself from an unbiased perspective. That is when I realised what I truly was then – a FarmVille-holic. So, here is the post (edited and modified to suit the current times) I had penned down to justify my addiction and look at it from my eyes.
The advent of online games and Flash mini-games brought about a new wave of addicts who spent hours, if not days or weeks, on these games and derive satisfaction from even the most trivial of visual and graphic actions. These actions include, but are not limited to, the growth and harvest of crops, the assassination of a drug lord and the takeover of his drug empire, the preparation and sale of visually-delicious recipes, and the construction of town halls and businesses to expand one’s virtual metropolis. Not many of these games are very active now but a couple of years ago, these games and their creators were the talk of the town. Zynga, one of the major players in the online gaming community, established itself, despite a lot of organisational turmoil, in the lives of people. Though most of the games were hosted on Facebook, not many knew Zynga closely and deeply. Of course, both companies benefited from the exponential rise of users on their platforms. But exactly how many of Facebook’s users logged in just for Zynga games is unclear. I, for one, was incessantly active on Facebook. But before Mark Zuckerberg could feel happy about it, I want to clarify that I was a victim of the Zynga addiction. I barely looked at my News Feed or the “Wall”, as it was known then (mind you, the Timeline came much later), and spent almost all my time attending to my “farms”.
So think about this – at its zenith, how significant was Zynga to the success of Facebook? Was Facebook more beneficial to Zynga or was it vice versa or was it just a well balanced synergistic move that benefited both equally? Food for thought for this post.
Have a look at the next post to read more about the addiction of a FarmVille-holic.