In early 2009, when Facebook was still incipient in its efforts to swallow as much of the Internet as possible, online games were not yet the giant they would become.
Then, that June, FarmVille came. If you weren’t among the tens of millions of people looking after a piece of cartoon land on Facebook every day, accumulating an endless stream of cute collectibles, you still get a lot of requests for help from your friends. The game pulled Facebook users into an obsession or persistently reminded them that they were missing one.
The Flash-based game created by Zynga, designed to be played on Facebook, will end on Thursday – yes, there were people still playing it – although its sequences that can be played via mobile apps will survive. But the original FarmVille lives on in the behaviors that it instilled in daily Internet users and in the growth hacking techniques that it perfected, now incorporated into virtually all sites, services and applications competing for your attention.
At its peak, the game had 32 million daily active users and almost 85 million players in all. This helped transform Facebook from a place where you went to check for updates – mostly in text form – from friends and family to a time-consuming destination.
“We think of it as a new dimension in its social, not just a way to bring games to people,” said Mark Pincus, who was chief executive of Zynga at the time and is now chairman of the board. “I thought: “People are just visiting these social networks like Facebook, and I want to give them something to do together.” “
This was achieved in part by attracting players to loops that were difficult to pull. If you didn’t check every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you need help, you can spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends – a source of annoyance for non-players who have been harassed with notifications and updates in their news feeds.
Ian Bogost, game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, said that the behaviors normalized by FarmVille made it a flagship for the Internet economy in the 2010s.
He didn’t mean it as a compliment.
The game encouraged people to attract friends as resources for themselves and the service they were using, said Bogost. He gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said.
“The internet itself is a bazaar of obsessive worlds where the goal is to bring you back to it to do what it offers, to get your attention and run ads against it or otherwise derive value from that activity,” he said.
While other games tried many of the same tactics – Mafia Wars was Zynga’s biggest hit at the time – FarmVille was the first to become a mainstream phenomenon. Pincus said he used to have dinner with Mark Zuckerberg, a Facebook co-founder, and that in early 2009 he had been warned in advance that the platform would soon allow games to post to a user’s news feed. He said that Zuckerberg told him that Zynga should flood the area with new games and that Facebook would separate those with resonance.
Although farming was far from a popular game genre at the time, Mr. Pincus saw it as a relaxing activity that would appeal to a wide audience, especially among adults and women who never spent hundreds of dollars on a console like the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii. It would be a preview of the market about to explode from mobile games, with casual gamers stop using the desktop as smartphones get installed.
The gaming industry has always been cold for FarmVille, despite its success. A Zynga executive was booed when he received an award at the Game Developers Conference in 2010, and Pincus said he had difficulty recruiting developers, who thought his colleagues would not respect them for working on the game.
In 2010, Time magazine named FarmVille as one of the “50 worst inventions”, recognizing how irresistible it was, but calling it “just a game”.
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For many, the game will be remembered more for its presence in people’s news feed than for the game itself. Facebook was well aware of the complaints.
After hearing from non-players that the game was spam, Facebook restricted the amount of games that could post to news feeds and send notifications. Facebook now plans to send fewer notifications only when it is most likely to impact, said Vivek Sharma, Facebook’s vice president and head of games.
He credited FarmVille with much of the growth in social gaming and said the excessive notification “saga” taught Facebook some important lessons.
“I think people started to discover some deeper behavioral things that needed to be adjusted in order for these apps to be self-sustaining and healthy,” he said. “And I think part of that is the idea that people actually have a limit, and that limit changes over time.”
Even though people were uncomfortable with the notifications, there is no doubt that they worked. Scott Koenigsberg, product director at Zynga, noted that orders were shipped by players who chose to ship them.
“Everyone saw a ‘lone cow’ notification at some point or another, but they were all being shared by their friends who were playing,” he said.
Mia Consalvo, professor of study and game design at Concordia University in Canada, was among the people who saw FarmVille constantly in front of her.
“When you log on to Facebook, it’s like, ‘Oh, 12 of my friends need help,'” she said.
She questioned how social the game really was, arguing that it did not create deep or sustained interactions.
“The game itself is not promoting a conversation between you and your friends, or encouraging you to spend time together in the game space,” she said. “It’s really just a button-click mechanic.”
But those who came back every day said that it kept them in touch with friends and acquaintances, giving them something to talk about.
Maurie Sherman, 42, a radio producer in Toronto, said he and a receptionist played together and that he went to her table daily to talk about it. “She would tell me about the pink cow she won,” he said.
He liked it as an escape, a virtual stress ball and a calming activity that would let his mind wander. He said he spent more than $ 1,000 – that’s real money – over the years to improve his farm or to save time.
And he was absolutely guilty of sending the notifications, he said – but they always managed to get the help he wanted.
“There are people who are dumbfounded or not friends just because they are tired of hearing that you need help with your cows,” he said.
Jaime Tracy, 59, of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, said she was “one of those annoying people” who made frequent calls for help until her friends and relatives told her to stop.
But she loved the game, which she saw as a form of meditation, and she played it for more than five years. With her children grown up and out of the house, “I had nothing else to do,” she said.
“You could just turn off your mind and plant some carrots,” she said.