Farmville

When I wanted to learn about Farmville, I created a fake Facebook account, googled for people seeking Farmville neighbors, and added several dozens of people I don't know. Made things interesting later on when I logged in from another computer, and Facebook said, "That's unusual! Let's make sure you're really you, by quizzing you on profile pictures of these friends of yours." I'm not sure if the photos of random women or the screenshots of a farmville chicken were harder to guess the identity. Though I passed on the 6th try or so.

Farmville, and games like it, have a brilliant strategy of tricking players into working for them for free; that is, make the very gameplay into an advertisement. You can't avoid participating in the viral marketing if you want to succeed in the game to maximum effect. And it worked on me: I saw people I liked and respected making posts about "Soandso really needs a neighbor to help fertilize their crops. Will you help?"

But then, it didn't precisely work on me, because I created that new account and avoided like the plague all temptation of connecting to people I knew. When it comes down to it, I'm still a little bit of a closet gamer in some social contexts. If I play to level 30 in a game like this, and I spam their facebook feeds with 305729 messages about Farmville, I feel like I am both likely to come across as a hopeless nerd and to annoy people. I have this fear that anyone who knows enough about Farmville to know how much time I must put into it to get to that point, but who has played less than me, must judge me to be some kind of terrible addict, entertained unreasonably by what must be in their eyes a low quality entertainment.

The above is an important point for expanding to border cases of the untapped gaming market, I suspect. People may be shy about crossing that psychological barrier of identity. Like coming out of the closet. Don't expect everyone to do it all at once, to a very public audience.

• Support shy players.

On the flip side, I think it is a very valuable technique to make a game built on helping others. Letting players offer gifts to other people, at no cost (save time) to one's self, is an excellent way to make people feel good about playing the game. I suspect this is especially true of women, who are often particularly socialized to be caretakers and helpers.

The "evil" that I see in Farmville, however, is the hooks it ties into the player. Come back within a given time window to harvest your crops or lose it all. Send and receive a bunch of stuff for this new, limited-time event, or you'll miss your chance, and by the way, there's a new event next month, same deal. Make sure to ask your friends for help, so they get stuck with the hooks, too.

Those hooks kept me playing for a while, but at some point, they were self-defeating, especially when combined with the viral marketing machine built in. To succeed (to expand my farm to the maximum space without paying a bunch of money) I needed 50+ neighbors. 50+ active neighbors sending 1-4 requests every day adds up to a lot of requests. Even a half a dozen neighbors active daily (which happened after a few weeks, from my 50+ random "friends") is a lot. Addressing each request required several clicks and a pageload for each click (at the point I quit playing). Then, some of the requests became inactive due to age, but wouldn't tell you they were inactive until you clicked through. I'd fall farther and farther behind, trying to limit how much time I spent to a few minutes in a day, triaging down to helping only the people who'd helped me most, or who were asking most recently.

So when I skipped playing Farmville (and half a dozen other games of its ilk) for a few days, and it turned into a few weeks, I found I had a great desire to never return to that demanding, whining page of a hundred time-consuming requests.

So, I think that may lead to another useful point of good casual game design:

• Support casual playing.

Like squeezing too hard on a handful of sand, if you try to build too much pressure to play constantly, you'll lose people permanently from your pool of players, when they might instead just want a break. Sure, it's a good thing to have enough content to support the serious, hardcore players. And it's probably important for Farmville's profit scheme to make people feel like they need to spend money to "keep up" with collecting every free offering. But for the players who enjoy a bit of the gameplay once in a while, and who might potentially want to get only a handful of trusted friends to play it with them, isn't long-term retention a plus, still?