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What I Learned From FarmVille -

So You Don’t Have To Play It
by Brian Meidell (brian@spacetimefoam.dk / linkedin / http://spac
etimefoam.dk/)
Please Note: This is a living document!
I’m dumping rough text into it regularly and polishing the ro
ugh spots.
Feel free to email me comments, corrections or ideas.
Introduction
I’m a “traditional” game designer (lately of Deep Blue Sea 2, and
working on Chase Ace), and
I’ve spent a few months (and some money) playing FarmVille, to
understand what makes it
work. I’ll continue playing it for a while yet, since there’s still grou
nd I haven’t covered.
I would definitely recommend other game designers to do the sa
me, even while they rightfully
laugh at the gameplay. The key is to look beyond the core game
play (which is bad) and realize
that the reason why FarmVille is very widely popular is not that th
e world is broken, but rather
that Zynga are very good at something else than gameplay.
Why you should play FarmVille, even though you think you
are better than Zynga
Zynga are very good at compulsion and viral pressure, and even
though you are probably better
at designing basic game play than them, you can learn from wha
t Zynga are good at, and
improve your regular games (and their viability) with social mech
anisms that may actually
improve the game experience for your players, even if you are n
ot interested in making so-called
“social games”.
Fun vs Compulsion
I usually distinguish between Fun and Compulsion, when talking
about gameplay. World of
Warcraft and other RPGs have a lot of innate Compulsion mecha
nisms, but usually also give
you some Fun to balance it out. Most games have a mix betwee
n Fun and Compulsion, but
games that keep you playing for 60 hours and have a strong coll
ection element are usually
heavy on the Compulsion side, with varying success on the Fun
side.
I personally think that Compulsion taps into some hardwired repti
le-brain behavior in people,
which came about because covering all the territory or collecting
all the [valuable stuff] was
beneficial to survival at some point in human history.
You can usually tell if you’ve been the victim of Compulsion with
out Fun, if you end a game
much later than you intended, and promptpy feel kind of stupid fo
r not turning it off 3 hours
earlier.
I’m pretty sure Zynga is not concerned with Fun gameplay at all -
they are only interested in
Compulsion and viral pressure (which both feed their primary int
erest: making money).
I am not prone to play or become hooked on Compulsion heavy
games that are light on Fun.
Ever since I missed a couple of weeks of university classes back
in the day when Fallout 2
came out, I I became very aware of Compulsion vs Fun and hyp
ersensitive to games that offer
too little Fun per time unit.
I’m playing FarmVille in spite of this, because I think it’s interestin
g to learn what makes Zynga
worth more than EA (6 billion USD vs 5 billion USD), and I think i
t’s my duty as a game designer
to keep an open mind, step outside my comfort zone and play sh
it that I really don’t like, when it
seems to work for so many players.
FarmVille did not become like this by accident
It’s worth noting that Zynga are very heavy users of analytics, an
d every change to their game is
heavily tested and mined for data, to determine whether it was b
eneficial to their bottom line. If
it’s not, it’s scrapped. This is business-
smart, but designing games purely on the basis of
metrics is ultimately the kind of thing that leads to the game-
equivalent of a McDonalds meal -
overly optimized to sell and with zero soul or inspiration.
While Zynga are pretty sleazy in their practices, there are a lot of
fundamental lessons to learn
from FarmVille that can be applied in various degrees to games t
hat offer actual gameplay.
In other words - you can use these powers for Good!
In my opinion, FarmVille is quite a crappy game with zero to no F
un game play and a horrible
user interface, but it is full of clever compulsion-
inducers and viral mechanisms that keeps you
playing, and incentivizes spreading the game to friends in ways t
hat push hard up against - but
usually don’t overstep -
the treshold of feeling like you’re outright being paid to spam oth
er
people.
In general, FarmVille is clever about generating real value (or rat
her, perceived value) only when
two or more people are interacting “socially” with each other or if
you straight up give them real
human money.
This means that either Zynga is directly making money on the us
er, or they are at least keeping
each other playing, which in turn raises the possibility of them ev
entually spending money or
generating more users by involving their friends. It’s a lovely pyra
mid scheme.
Semi-structured list of FarmVille mechanisms
Below is a dumping ground for various observations about viral a
nd compulsion mechanisms in
FarmVille that work pretty well.
A quick introduction to the currency types in FarmVille.
As Teut Weidemann (a free-to-
play game consultant) recommends, the game has two types of
currency
●Abundant Currency: FarmCoins, which can be had for free by
playing (you often have
hundreds of thousands of these, if not millions)
●Rare Currency: FarmCash, which is rare and hard to come by -
you get 1 FarmCash per
level up, or you can buy FarmCash for about 1 DKK (0.2 USD) p
er FarmCash unit. This
is what the game is all about - getting Cash Value.
Completion Urge
FarmVille uses a simple mechanism to get you to benefit them in
various ways, like pressing
“Like”, allowing them to email you and finally (you’ll notice I did n
ot allow this) post spam
automatically to your wall.
They do this by simply showing you a progress bar, and appealin
g to your need to finish things.
That 80% filled progress bar just sits there right above the game
screen and beckons you to
complete it.
(Thanks to patio11 from hacker news for reminding me).
Email harvesting - Offering Value in return for your email
●Within a short while in the game, you are given a free gift (a loc
ked box) which requires a
passcode that can only be emailed to you.
●Daily reminder emails (Daily Email Only Fuel Boost) to play far
mville, that have value for
the player, but also works as a daily reminder to go and play.
Viral Pressure Mechanisms
●Neighbors
○You can invite friends to be your farm neighbors.
○Most of the interesting stuff (like good farm machines) can eithe
r only be
purchased with FarmCash or you can buy it with a lot of FarmCoi
ns but only if
you have a lot of Neighbors.
○Having many neighbors and playing a lot makes it possible to g
et a lot of the
things that are otherwise only possible to get with FarmCash. Th
ey cost
enormous amounts of FarmCoins then (for example, 2 million Fa
rmCoins for a
farm expansion that can be bought for 60 FarmCash)
○Kids and other people who have no respect for digital boundari
es (the kind of
people who will email you and 600 other people a fake virus war
ning with
everyone in the TO: field), will be inclined to spam heaps of peop
le with neighbor
requests, resulting in more users. People who are playing FarmV
ille already are
in the same boat of needing as many neighbors as possible, so t
hey will be happy
with the neighbor requests.
○Sleazy: FarmVille slightly obscures which of your friends are alr
eady playing
FarmVille and who aren’t, on the “Invite your friends to become y
our neighbor”
screen, so you’re likely to spam non-
FarmVille playing friends with “PLAY
FARMVILLE!” requests..
●Gifting
○Things of FarmCash value (typically around 1 or 2 FarmCash)
are available for
Gifting
○When you give people gifts, you are not losing it yourself -
you never owned it,
you are just able to pull it from a magical cloud, but only if you gi
ve it to someone
(i.e. we’ll give you something of value, but only if you give it to so
meone else,
which also reminds them of playing FarmVille some more)
○Gifting basically lets you spam a friend with a FarmVille remind
er, but it comes
with something of actual cash value, that can otherwise only be p
urchased with
coveted FarmCash. Any FarmVille player will welcome gifts.
○Gifting frequency is limited, meaning you can’t ”farm” infinite am
ounts of stuff by
ganging up with a friend. You are typically limited to one gift per f
riend per day
(around there).
○When you receive gifts, you are prompted to return the favor, w
hich you typically
do, which is then returned again, etc, resulting in what I call “Gift
Tennis”. This
accrues slightly valuable items for both parties, but also has the
effect of users
reminding each other to play FarmVille all the time.
○The frequency limiting of gifting for a certain user motivates use
rs to gift to as
many friends as possible, as often as possible. This probably wid
ely keeps
people coming back, long after they intended to stop playing Far
mVille. I am very
interested in seeing how much pressure (and in how many forms
) I’m going to be
getting when I stop playing - I bet it’s impressive.
○Sleazy: FarmVille doesn’t make it clear to you who of your frien
ds are already
playing FarmVille and who is not. You may well be sending gifts t
o people that
arrive as “Your friend thinks you should start playing FarmVille, a
nd has given
you this gift to get started”.
●Asking people for stuff
○Inverse Gifting
○You can let FarmVille post requests on your wall (that will show
up in your friends
news streams) for certain items (of the type that are typically gift
ables - low
FarmCash value, not possible to buy with FarmCoins).
○Your friends can click on the news item and be brought directly
to FarmVille
through a “Gift sent!” screen.
○This is yet another reminder for people to get back to the crack
pipe.
○Sleazy: As everywhere else, FarmVille does not make it clear t
o you who is
already playing FarmVille and who isn’t, so you can easily spam
all your
non-
farming friends with “Start playing FarmVille and send me a gift”
messages.
●Collaborating (mostly unexplored)
○There are a lot of collaborative Value Creation mechanisms tha
t I haven’t gotten
into. Stuff where you can complete challenges with friends (farm
X amount of Y
crop in Z days).
●Trading (mostly unexplored)
○There are trading aspects to the game that I haven’t yet gotten i
nto.
○It seems these have 3 purposes
■They motivate people to diversify the crops they plant, possibly
creating a
bit of variation in this boring game.
■They are yet another motivator to interact with your friends and
neighbors
■They have yet another digital hoarding aspect, where you can c
ollect
recipes, upgrade them, etc, etc. All feeding back to planting differ
ent crops
and bugging your friends (the entirety of core gameplay in Farm
Ville).
Consumables: Fuel / Feed
●Fuel is important in FarmVille because it saves you a lot of click
ing - it runs farm
machines, like tractors, harvesters, seeders, etc.
●Fuel is not strictly necessary, but it can cut your boring farming
(click, click, click) by up
to 27 times (if you have a Hot Rod Combine Harvester) and poss
ibly more with more
upgrades.
●Fuel is a consumable -
you use it quite quickly, especially if you have an expanded farm
.
You will always need more.
●Fuel costs FarmCash, and can’t be bought with the abundant F
armCoins
●The Daily Email Only Fuel Boost is therefore worth real money.
●You can gift fuel to friends (without taking it from yourself), and
ask for it from others.
●Fuel supposedly recharges over time (I’ve heard, but this might
have been replaced with
the Email Only Fuel Boost).
Capturing Quitters
I’ve heard that Zynga are phenomenal at capturing people who a
re tired of one of their games,
and roping them into playing a different Zynga game -
 this gives them great retention across their
portfolio.
That’s it for now -
I’ll keep updating, especially once I stop playing and they start tr
ying to get me
to play FarmVille or another Zynga game again.
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