The Not So Great Farmville Trick

By now everyone is on Facebook. Or at least those webbed up to the internet are. (Save the worriers about privacy but even those are slowly coming around to the idea of 'social networking'.) And as such applications and games have also become popular among users. The one most widely used must be Farmville, where players can become digital farmers and grow plants/vegetables, feed animals and live the 'life' of Old MacDonald. (Remember the childrens tune?)
I used to be a fan of it myself and still plant a few green tea seeds whenever I feel Titchmarshy but a darker side to the game has cropped up (pun intended.) It used to be you had a choice whether to part with real cash or not to buy 'special' things and only the truly dedicated ever did. I had a lapse of sanity once and paid a very real £3 for a Christmas snow globe. *slaps wrists*
But now it seems the makers of Farmville (and other games like Frontierville and Cafe World) have upped the ante in attempting to get you to splash your cash by making some objectives impossible to complete without tapping up your credit card. Take buildings for example; you generally need 8 nails, 8 hammers and 8 anything else to build your barn/tavern/brothel (guess which is fake) and you can ask Facebook friends who are neighbours on your farm to send these to you for free. But after having recieved some freebies from your chums those hammers and nails become less and less available thus forcing you spend REAL poundage to acquire a completed barn. And we all know how tempting it is to keep up with the Joneses, even if your 'land' exists only on a computer screen.
Its happened to me when my friends were constructing something and I attempt to gift them paint or a wooden board only to have the paint and boards disappear from my gift list, rendering my help useless. Its very frustrating and a good example of how success can breed greed. I have given up on completing these quests as all they are is an excuse to wangle more dosh out of us.
Not only that the makers of such Facebook games take our personal information from our profiles and who knows where that intel lands up. I for one have been getting an increase in SPAM since adding these games. Time for a clean up methinks. My computer would thank me for this kind act because invariably logging into my virtual farm or cafe results in a programme crash, making me shut everything down.
Sad too because initially I enjoyed tending to my land and animals.