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Kira Greer was sitting in a meeting one afternoon when she suddenly remembered an urgent deadline. The San Francisco instructional designer knew there was no time to waste.
She excused herself, saying she had to go to the bathroom, then rushed back to her desk. Quickly opening Facebook, she began furiously clicking on rows of virtual vegetables, harvesting her FarmVille crops before they withered and died.
"I realized I was hooked when I was planning my day around when I knew crops needed to be harvested," says Greer, 33.
Leaving a meeting to tend to her videogame of choice was Greer's wake-up call. "Once I realized I'd done that, I told my husband and I just came home and had a moment – d'oh! And I realized, OK, I'm taking it a little bit too far."
"If there's any way to explain it, it's that I'm playing it right now, because you reminded me that I had crops," she tells me over the phone.
Here a Farm, There a Farm
We may live in a post-agrarian society, but that isn't stopping millions of Americans from heading back to the farm. They're not working real farms, with dirt, crops and diesel-belching tractors. Instead, these back-to-the-land pioneers are plowing the back 40 on their Facebook homesteads. Budding virtual farmers stake their claims in free games like FarmVille, Farm Town, Happy Farm, Country Story, Barn Buddy and Sunshine Ranch, each of which draws millions of players on the social network.
The farming games have become so successful that they've even spawned parodies and hybrid knockoffs like Jungle Extreme and Farm Villain, which let you steal other people's crops or raise Wookies.
Zynga's FarmVille, the biggest Facebook game of all, pulls in more than 75 million players who log in each month to plant, tend and harvest virtual crops, over and over. The attraction is less about the game itself, say players and designers, and more about the social experience: Fields adjacent to your farm belong to family members and friends pulled from your Facebook profile. You can visit their acreage, help them complete farm chores and exchange gifts of in-game items.
The appeal is natural. "I was raised around farms," says Leslie Nautiyal, a 64-year-old from Rockford, Illinois, who says she's hooked on FarmVille. "I spent a lot of time on my aunt and uncle's farm. So it's kind of fun to have your own crop, go in and harvest them, feel like you're doing something."
By utilizing the simplest action-reward gameplay mechanic – borrowed from a Chinese game, which was itself inspired by a Japanese RPG – Facebook's farm games have quietly turned millions of people into constant gardeners (and consistent gamers).
"What these games give me is a sense of control over my life." – FarmVille player Cheri Van HooverCheri Van Hoover, 56, tends a real 11-acre farm in Washington state, but she's glued to her virtual fields, too. "What these games give me is a sense of control over my life," she says. "It is a neat, orderly place that I can escape to, and where things unfold in a relatively predictable fashion, and I can work out all of my needs for domination and power and control in a safe environment."
Such "social games" on Facebook have quietly turned time-waster appeal into big business: Close to 100 of them boast more than a million active users each, and Facebook says 100 million unique people play just the top 10 games on the site every month.
And this is just the beginning: After some very public turmoil, Facebook and Zynga announced Tuesday they have entered into a five-year strategic relationship. Zynga is currently testing Facebook Credits in some games and will expand use of the social network's virtual currency to more titles in coming months.
As social games explode in popularity, the videogame industry's big players, faced with slumping sales of traditional games, have a hungry eye on the fresh produce: Electronic Arts recently acquired Country Story maker Playfish for $300 million in cash and another potential $100 million in performance bonuses, and plans to bring its Madden football franchise to Facebook.
"The game industry's going mainstream," says Gareth Davis, head of Facebook's game division. "A lot of people who built traditional games for a long time are starting to build social games."
Companies like Playfish and Zynga say their free games are profitable "many times over." How? Through the sale of virtual goods. While the vast majority of users put in the hours to build their own little slices of nature for free, a small percentage pony up real-world cash to buy the best decorations, seeds, fertilizer and farm animals.
In other words: Why get the milk for free when you can buy the cow?
Family Farms
FarmVille player Nautiyal, a grandmother of four, says she started playing the game after family members – also avid players – asked her to be a virtual neighbor. That's how FarmVille and its competitors hook new fans: by giving existing players the incentive to bring in friends. The more friends you have, the more free gifts you can receive from them.
Games like FarmVille also give players like Nautiyal an entertaining way to keep in touch with their families. "I have a couple of nieces who play it, and they'll send you a gift, or come and fertilize your crops – it's sort of like you just drop in and say 'hi' to someone," Nautiyal says.
The games can become strangely addictive, sometimes to the detriment of real-world responsibilities. Natalie Ericson, 28, from Durham, North Carolina, says she became hooked on FarmVille after her friends asked her to sign up. Though mostly disinterested in playing first-person shooters on her husband's Xbox 360, Ericson started spending hours a day on FarmVille, both at work and at home as she watched her 1-year-old son.
"He'd be playing downstairs, and I'd be upstairs (at the computer) and I'd have to go down and watch him, and it would be like, 'Oh man, just hang out a couple more minutes, hon! I'll be down in a second!' And he'd get into stuff.
"I was just like, 'OK, I gotta stop, I gotta cut back a little bit,'" says Ericson, who adds that she no longer plays FarmVille at home.
Others are cutting back, too: After Kira Greer's rush from her meeting, she says she plays the game differently, planting only crops that take a few days to harvest, not a few hours. "I plant them and walk away," she says.
Happy Farm: Seeding a Sensation in China
Farming games grew out of Happy Farm, a game that became popular on Chinese social networks in 2008. Its creator has said that it took inspiration from "a Japanese console game," which is probably the farming role-playing game Harvest Moon.
Neither Happy Farm nor its many imitators, including the new crop of browser games that run on services like Facebook, are high-end gaming. Most feature basic 2-D artwork, extremely simple gameplay and derivative themes. But gamemakers and players agree: All that is beside the point.
"The value of a social game doesn't come from the immersive experience, or high-end 3-D," says Playfish co-founder and COO Sebastien de Halleux. "It comes from the social interaction."
De Halleux compares playing games like FarmVille to a family crowded around a traditional board game like Monopoly. "Ultimately, it's a piece of cardboard and a few rules, but it provides so much fun because you're with friends in the same room, chatting, having a drink." To that end, social games are not about immersing the player – they are about letting them get back to real life and their real friends as quickly as possible.
"Social game design is about taking traditional game design and turning it inside-out," de Halleux says.
Zynga's Social Secret
Bill Mooney, vice president of FarmVille at Zynga, has worked for gamemakers like Activision and LucasArts. Now he's tasked with taking all the things that make games fun and figuring out how to make them relevant to an audience that might never touch a traditional videogame.
"I joke to friends sometimes that we're a secret recruiting organization for gamers," says Mooney, 39.
Whatever Zynga's doing, it's working. The private company doesn't divulge its revenue, but a recent study says Zynga brought in more than $200 million in 2009. The company's San Francisco headquarters shows all the physical signs of rapid expansion: Employees sit in massive bare spaces with hastily whitewashed walls, the wooden beams in the ceiling still exposed. Zynga currently employs 800 and has around 200 job openings worldwide.
Sitting in an unfinished conference room, Mooney says the most basic old game designs become fresh and new again when the social mechanic – playing with friends online – becomes involved.
"People play for much longer than we would have expected initially." – Bill Mooney, Zynga's vice president of FarmVille"A relatively straightforward game that, if you were just playing as a single player, would exhaust itself rapidly, takes on a hugely longer life when you add even relatively light social interaction," says Mooney. "People play for much longer than we would have expected initially."
Like Facebook itself, says Mooney, playing games like FarmVille is "intimate, yet public." You can publish your accomplishments to your Facebook Wall for all to see, in case you want your friends to know that you've mastered the art of farming strawberries or won a blue ribbon for your prize eggplants.
These rewards, says Zynga designer Amitt Mahajan, are the same things that keep hard-core gamers playing, just with different names. "We have achievements, but we don't call them achievements," he says. "We call them ribbons. Or if I'm playing World of Warcraft and I give your player a stamina buff – in Farmville, it's fertilizer."
The social aspects of the game also fuel the drive to succeed. Players can compare the state of their farm to their neighbors'. "I have to admit that I am a very competitive person," says Van Hoover, the Washington Farmville player. "If I see them gaining on me, I do kind of think about how I can get ahead a little quicker."
Harvest or Die
A good social game design also creates what Playfish's de Halleux calls a sense of urgency. "When you leave Facebook, the game doesn't stop. You have to come back to it and check out how you're doing," he says. If you don't harvest and sell your crops, for instance, they'll wither and die.
The "harvest or die" nature of the games proves powerful, players admit. Sometimes, pressing virtual farm work drives players to pinch-hit for each other.
"You help each other out," says FarmVille hand Nautiyal. "My daughter called me when she was at work and said, 'Mom, do you think you could go in and get this done, because I got busy last night and couldn't do it.' And it's like, 'Oh my gosh, now I'm doing your virtual farm?'"
The most important element of the games' designs, however, is what Mooney calls "click love." The simplest unit of fun for gamers, it's the tangible sense of connecting your physical button-pushing with satisfying on-screen reactions. With farming games, it's click, strawberries. Click, raspberries. Click, eggplants.
First-person shooters are exactly the same, just with a different metaphor: Bang, dead. Bang, dead. Bang, dead.
Need for Speed
Such moment-to-moment payoffs are the hardest thing to get right and the most likely thing to ruin a game. If the gameplay doesn't send a mini endorphin rush when you push a button, all the designers' well-laid design plans and big-budget graphics are worthless.
That's where social games possess a big advantage. They don't spend two years in the oven before making their big debut. Mahajan and his team developed the first release of FarmVille in just five weeks, then immediately released it to Facebook. Every week, the team releases at least one update with design tweaks and new features, allowing Zynga to constantly assess what the game's fans want, and to give it to them.
"You have a direct relationship with your users, so you can track everything they do, every click." – Gareth Davis, Facebook games chief"You can adjust the game in real time as you go," says Facebook's Davis. "And you have a direct relationship with your users, so you can track everything they do, every click. Where they get stuck. Whether there are certain places they like to explore."
But why farming? There are plenty of other genres of social game, from Mafia Wars to virtual aquariums. How did this particular one get so big?
"Farming is a very basic human thing," says Mahajan. "You don't have to explain the rules of farming to anyone. People realize that you put seed into the ground and it grows into a plant and you can eat the produce of that plant."
In other words, it's less indicative of a latent longing for human beings to get back to the good earth and more that the metaphor works well for the simple gameplay – plow, plant, harvest, repeat as desired.
Pay to Play
Mooney and Mahajan have one more task as game designers, and it's likely to be their biggest challenge: Moving customers from free to paid.
"We don't want you to feel like you suck if you don't pay," says Mooney. "It's critical that you feel like, if you really want something, you can get it if you don't want to pay. But we want you to pay."
Of the FarmVille fans that I interviewed, only Kira Greer said she'd spent money on the game – about $20, she says, "not as bad as some of my friends who've spent $50 to $60."
Some of the money she spent was on items with profits that were donated to Haiti earthquake relief; Zynga raised more than $1.5 million for the effort in five days. But her first purchase was entirely frivolous: a $5 scarecrow.
"Monetization is best achieved when you align it with game design," says Will O'Brien, general manager of social games at TrialPay, a company that specializes in adding advertising offers to online software. When a customer uses one of TrialPay's offers, they buy a product or sign up for a service, then receive the virtual goods after the transaction goes through.
Slapping such offers onto a pre-existing game rarely meets with success, says O'Brien. "The successful players brought in the concepts of virality early on," he says. When you get a bunch of FarmVille gifts from your grandma, that's priming the pump for monetization. Once you're hooked trading virtual doodads, the games start dangling more carrots in your face. (Sometimes literally.)
O'Brien says that limited-edition goods that are only available for a limited time cause more users to jump at the chance to have it, even if they've never bought anything before. One limited-edition item offered this year was the Unwither Ring, a special Valentine's Day present that bestows upon its owner the gift of never-dying crops. At a little over $40, it's by far the most expensive item in the game, but as a present for a Farmville-addicted significant other it could be better than a real-life bouquet of roses.
How are Farmville users paying for all these virtual goods? TrialPay's O'Brien says between 50 percent and 80 percent of social games' revenue comes from direct payments, via credit card or PayPal. The rest is made up of offers – and that's gotten social games into a heap of trouble in the past.
Weeding Out Scams
TechCrunch blogger Michael Arrington went to the Virtual Goods Summit business conference in San Francisco last October and posed a question to Anu Shukla, then-CEO of advertising company Offerpal Media. Arrington said Shukla's company, with the tacit support of Facebook, was "scamming" users, tricking them with deceptive advertising into paying for products and services without their knowledge. Shukla responded in part by calling Arrington's remarks "shit, double shit and bullshit."
The – video of Shukla's response spread as virally as a limited-edition butternut squash, and the fallout came fast and furious. Facebook said it would increase its enforcement of its advertising guidelines, which resulted in Zynga's aquarium game FishVille getting temporarily pulled from the social network.
Zynga pulled all offers from its games. Shukla was out as Offerpal CEO, replaced by George Garrick, who immediately posted on TechCrunch: "Offerpal has been guilty of distributing offers of questionable integrity from some of our many advertisers."
On Nov. 17, 2009, the Sacramento law firm Kershaw, Cutter and Ratinoff filed suit against Facebook and Zynga. The plaintiff in the case, Rebecca Swift, said she signed up for two allegedly deceptive offers through Zynga's games: One in which she provided her cellphone number and ended up being charged $10 a month, and one in which she signed up for a "risk-free" trial of green tea supplements shipped from China that she said she could not cancel. Swift later withdrew her suit against Facebook, but the suit against Zynga is still ongoing.
"This lawsuit that keeps getting touted," says new Offerpal CEO George Garrick to Wired.com, "to me, it's a head-scratcher, because they ought to be suing the U.S. Postal Service, because that's probably the biggest source of scammy offers, the stuff that you get in your mailbox every day."
According to Garrick, the meteoric rise of social gaming contributed to a lack of proper oversight: "The category expanded at a faster rate than people anticipated, and nobody called attention to the fact that some of these [shady] marketers were getting through," he says.
Zynga's Mooney says the company didn't realize seriousness of the problem, but took appropriate action to weed out any scams. Eventually, Zynga reinstated offers into its games, but only from eight major advertisers like Netflix and Blockbuster.
Garrick said Offerpal has checked all its current offers and instituted several new safeguards. The company now has written guidelines for any offer that it carries, and checks each offer before it goes live. Software makes sure advertisers don't switch terms after offers are approved, and Facebook now reviews offers in apps it hosts.
Since most of the millions that companies like Zynga and Playfish pull down come from direct payments, it seems as if the controversy over questionable offers isn't going to shut down anyone's farm.
For now, FarmVille fan Nautiyal says she plays for free, but that might change: "I am reaching a point that I may need to [buy virtual goods] to expand my farm," she says. "They have me."
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