What makes me uneasy about FarmVille

[yakalskovich]

What makes me uneasy about FarmVille is not that it's eaten the Nazgul's brain at the moment; worse brain-eatages have occurred, for example when I first discovered the old Discworld RPG back in 2004. The crack that is RPing (in contrast to the more sedate and ponderous nose-powder that is fanfic) so totally took me in for a while, I even did set alarms for it, and that seems to be an alarm sign.

It's not that Zynga, the company that makes it, is probably quite evil, and Facebook definitely is.

It's that there are no seasons!

You can plant whatever whenever you want to. There is no lambing season, no sowing in spring, no asparagus that stops on June 24th latest, no cabbage for winter, no St. Martin's geese, no blackberries belonging to the devil after October 31st...

Okay, making people wait for a result for a year would be counter-productive. But why not set random shorter season? Why not allow sheep tupping only on a Friday, and the sowing of certain crops only during the first week of the month, and so on? What makes real farming in real life what it is is seasons, and FarmVille totally eliminated that.

We first world people are used to having strawberries and tomatoes in the supermarket all the time, to mushrooms all year round, to green beans flown in from Egypt in winter, and to fresh flowers from Nigeria at Christmas. The globalised world is ignoring the seasons, so why should FarmVille reintroduce them? FarmVille farmers don't really want to keep up all night in the lambing shed at the dead of winter; they don't want to harvest a surfeit of cherries that they don't know what to do with, or do nothing between waking and sleeping but pluck apples and make cider in autumn. They don't want to race a thunderstorm for the wheat harvest, or pull a calf out by the feet. It's sanitised agriculture with purple cows.

There would be nothing wrong with it -- it is a game! -- except that it suggests to million of city dwellers that farming is a sanitary, fun business that brings forth bounty without season, without dirt, without suffering.

And that's demeaning to everything mankind did since the neolithic revolution.-

Comments

[idylchild.livejournal.com]

I snorted when I read the title to this.

At first I thought I was reading about some evil corporation. When I learned it was a game, I laughed but immediately reconsidered.

My problem with games -- and corporate farming for that matter -- is that they create unrealistic expectations for people and makes the real life experience so much more difficult for them.

I wanted to make a post on my Hunger Games comm asking the other members if they thought they could cope in the environment described as District 12 but the other mod felt this was too inflammatory. The point I wanted to make was that spoiled Americans could most definitely not survive in that society. Accustomed to having what they want when they want it (and being able to pay for it with the cheap foreign labor that has permitted them their opulent lifestyle), they are literally not fit to survive hardship.

And games such as these are as much symptomatic as causal.

[yakalskovich]

Yes of course it's just a symptom, but a jarring one.

I read an article recently that posited cheap food was the basis of modern capitalism, and that the end of cheap food will hasten its end, but I can't for the life of me find the article again...

[idylchild.livejournal.com]

What's far more disturbing about modern food is how it is engineered. The new growth hormones can take an egg and produce a full-blown chicken in a matter of months.

It makes you wonder what that is doing to our bodies.

And our minds.

[yakalskovich]

Yes -- do not want! However, buying everything organic is probably more than I'm up for yet.

[idylchild.livejournal.com]

(Adorable icon! <3)

Buying organic is problematic because any time money is involved, sellers will find ways to manipulate the rules.

Here, we have locally grown produce/beef/eggs. You have to seek it, but the farmers' markets are there.

[yakalskovich]

Yep, we have that, too. A small weekly market down the road around the corner on a Tuesday.

[idylchild.livejournal.com]

When I lived in Russia, I remember the smell of the rotting meat in the summer sun. *gagging*

[yakalskovich]

Eurgh!

Nah, the weekly market here has trucks with refrigeration.-

And our minds.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

That's why we have slash - it's like mad cow disease, bird flu and killer tomatoes!

Re: And our minds.

[yakalskovich]

ROFL!!

And I thought it was about that quotation going round on tumblr...

Re: And our minds.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

Hah; I regret buying his book - unread, like at least 1000 of my others. It's people like us making the shows and kids half our age watching them - or worse, people half our age owning the corporations *wonders if smiley called for, and who is the empire that strikes back* - - because, being boringly serious and pedantic again for a moment, if fen uphold the status quo of myths, that millenia old formula that is only varied but never changed, then its actually the show runners who are revolutionary and trying to make something new, and broad humanity resisting these individuals! Now don't point cathexys at me ;=P

Re: And our minds.

[yakalskovich]

How about a synthesis where brilliant out-there show-runners and demanding, emotionally invested fen actually call forth and inspire each other, so one thing wouldn't be there without the other?

What they don't need [any more, soon, at least] are the corporations. Joss Whedon made 'Doctor Horrible' to prove just that point.

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

I always imagined FV to be something like this: http://uk.midas.games.yahoo.net/games/strategy-games/animal-parade/ (what with being the only person here still shunning/being shunned by Fbook().

[yakalskovich]

Welcome to the club! Facebook is evil, and I'll never go there. Even if the entire damned world is there.

[idylchild.livejournal.com]

ty, bb.

I thought I was the only person that didn't feel the need to be on facebook!

[yakalskovich]

Nope.

The one book I shall never touch.-

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

I'm refraining from making a list of books to ask if you would touch them or from wondering how one could touch facb ;P I just came back to tell you - since obviously I haven't written any theatre reviews this year either - that there seems a real trend in damning the way humans settled down and farmed - that was the downfall of man, that's where it first went wrong. Interesting to hear it in 2-3 different plays from different countries, esp. since I don't do papers or TV or anything so wasn't aware of this interesting philosoophy.

[yakalskovich]

Oh, it's the Mesolithic Paradise theory!

[http://users.livejournal.com/_inbetween_/]

I'm not sure and frustratingly, my traumatised brain cannot recall perfectly - OTOH it's the typical youth thing which now has to be a positive trait for everyone who isn't a weird dullard: "want to travel", travel is so great, in the extreme: never settle down. The other is against farmers, which seems a longstanding UK gripe (forgot if connected to insane meat markets), so it wasn't quite the same thing but still pre-Waldo Emerson.

[ashen_key]

I remember back when I had a post-apocalyptic RPG I was in (werewolves, yay), I was the ONLY one to actually stop and go 'well, what are they eating? It's been three years since everyone else died...'. And so I did research, and the uni everyone lived at already had a farm, so I spent a week researching what type of things were grown and when, and I wrote up things about preserving food for the winter (plus of being next to a city - TONS of salt and sugar still around in people's houses and restaurants and supermarkets) and...I was the only one to think of it. Or to research it. Everyone else was mostly 'la, just raid a supermarket' until I started poking.

It was...very disconcerting, actually.

[yakalskovich]

Yep, that's the kind of disconnect I mean, and the kind of disconnect FarmVille fosters. After three years, the only edible stuff left in an apocalyptically abandoned supermarket would be dried stuff and tinned stuff. People would farm and hunt voluntarily, even if they had the regional supply center for a great chain next door, because a) OMG boring and b) OMG scurvy!!

Fun fact: I once knew a lady to actually get scurvy! She'd lived on cookies and coffee, mostly, with the occasional sausage and bread roll, and had managed to eliminate all vitamins from her food for a long time. Doctors were baffled -- none of them had seen it in a living person, or paid attention during their medical courses because they'd never see it anyway...

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

The programmers probably live in California. Which doesn't have seasons as distinct as those in temperate zones.

Most people today - those who get all their info from the boob tube - have no concept of seasons. I had one grandfather who was a gardener and the other was a farmer, so that ignorance just appalls me. People just don't THINK.

[yakalskovich]

Ugh. California. I failed to take that into account.-

But even in Napa Valley, I think the grapes are harvested at certain times in the year, and not just at any old time?

[lee-rowan.livejournal.com]

Grapes, yes, and orange groves are seasonal to some extent. But things like lettuce, beans, etc? Year-round. Much of the produce in the US comes from the eternal-summer fields of California, and most crop production is heavy into chemical fertilizers that goose the growing season. I think maybe Europe still has a closer connection to seasonal food.

Here in Canada, much of our local winter produce comes from greenhouses (and, of course, long-storage foodstuff that the German and Eastern European settlers brought with them -- cabbage, turnips, potatoes, onions. We aren't totally local or organic, but we try. This year I think we've only bought one box of strawberries from a local grower - the rest are from the patch in our back yard - and I've just put in asparagus and brussels sprouts, and I've now got 3 different heritage tomatoes in the ground. It's great having the Mennonite farmers around because I think that's all they grow, and they sell their extra seedlings at market.

[yakalskovich]

Oh wow, what a lovely vegetable garden that must be! I'm glad I have my own herbs on my balcony.

Here, we can get something called a 'subscription box' where one gets fresh organic and seasonal vegetables and fruit delivered every week for a fixed price, which means the growers have a steady income. I still hesitate to do that, not because of it being too expensive but because I sometimes doubt I can eat quite that much green stuff every week...