Farmville: The Online Gateway Drug

It all starts innocently enough. You sign up for Farmville and wonder what the fuss is about as you stare at your six little plots of gardening space. You plant some strawberries or pumpkins and wait for them to harvest. Then you collect your bounty and start planting all over again. It’s a cute little cycle and you enjoy visiting your farm every few hours to check your crops, collect eggs from your chickens, and gather fruit from your trees. Farmville is fun. It’s relaxing. And you may not realize it yet, but it’s about to take over your life.

Somewhere between planting your first crops and harvesting your hundredth watermelon, something changes. You’re dealing with a lot more than six plots of land and you have no room for your animals or trees. You have to expand your farm, and in doing so, you have to set it up all over again. You drag all your items around and try to maximize your space, but now your inbox is filling with gifts, you have to display your mastery signs, and you can’t imagine running a farm that doesn’t have a gigantic windmill (or cemetery or Winter Wonderland). You need more space. You need a bigger farm. And that means you need more coins and farm bucks.

You start visiting your farm more often, making sure you gather all your crops like clockwork. You realize that you’re part mathematician as you calculate which crops you should plant, where you’ll be when they’re ready to harvest, and how many times you’ll need to go through these motions to master any given crop.

You’re suddenly very punctual and Farmville may be the only place where you’re not late. If, by some unforeseen horror, you’re not available to harvest your crops when they’re ready, you have to devise a Plan B. Maybe you sneak off to harvest and replant while your boss isn’t looking or maybe you call a trusted friend to tend your farm for you. Whatever you do, you know you can’t be late because that will throw off your whole schedule, which could possibly throw off your whole day, week, or month.

Now your schedule is so full that you don’t even have time to do your standard farming chores. You rely on farm hands and arborists to collect from your animals and trees. Once you see how much more manageable your farm is when you have help, you search for more assistance. You can’t do this by yourself anymore – not if you want your farm to grow – so you turn to your Farmville friends. You start visiting other farms to fertilize crops in hopes that your friends will return the favor. After all, why would you want a field of regular eggplants when you could have jumbo, glimmering eggplants? That’s right. You wouldn’t. So you spend your time wandering between your farm, your friends’ farms, and the new farms that you’re suddenly allowed to have. You’re one hell of a farmer now and you only have to give Facebook about a third of your life to keep your status.

Before you know it, your farm is the coolest, hippest place in the history of agriculture. Your farm is huge. It’s organized. It’s beautiful. You’re not struggling to level up just so you can have a pig anymore. You have entire pens full of animals, orchards full of trees, and more crops than you could give away to a starving nation. (You know – if the food was real.) Hell, you may have even helped a starving nation along the way by buying some seeds that benefit real people. It only costs a few Farm bucks for the seeds, and you figure that’s way cheaper than what you’ve probably spent signing up for book clubs, Netflix, acne regimens, and anything else that can get you more Farm Cash.

But if you want to be the very best, you have to have the very best – and sometimes you can’t just buy what you want with Farm bucks. That’s okay, though. It’s easy to earn more rarities for your farm. You just need to level up a few times in some other Facebook games. It’s not like you have to keep playing the new games to keep your Farmville rewards. Just a few levels and you can get back to farming full-time.

So you sign up for some other games and try to level up as quickly as possible. You don’t really want to run a restaurant, but you know it could look a whole lot better than it does in the default setting. Plus, some new decorations would help you level up faster. So you start decorating, customizing avatars, building cities, cutting away at forests, searching for hidden objects, fishing for guppies, and doing whatever you can to level up faster. Somewhere in the back of your mind you know this is all for your farm. But you’re just too great of a player to settle for mediocrity, so you do everything you can to pretty up your other living spaces.

At this point, you may realize you have a bit of a problem. While you try to keep your crops from rotting and your kitchen from burning, you realize that Facebook has gone into full attack mode. The mafia is putting hits on you. Vampires are biting at your heels. Your inbox is on the verge of imploding from gifts and requests. You can feel the sweat dripping down your neck as you try to keep up with all your apps; as you try to keep your work alive. But it’s all too much. Everything is happening too fast. And just as you feel like your brain is about to explode, you realize something. This isn’t a game anymore. It’s not just a job anymore. This is your life.

Your mind flashes back to those awful anti-drug commercials with the eggs and frying pans while you try not to think about the fact that you haven’t sent your farm hands to collect any Farmville eggs yet today. As you tear yourself away from your computer for the first time in months, you try to stay strong. You try to be brave. You try to fight against your clicking finger's withdrawals. Deep down you know that if you can overcome Farmville, you can beat anything. As the last thought of chicken eggs flutters from your mind, you think, “This is my brain. This is my brain on Farmville.”

Any questions?