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]

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.

[yakalskovich]

Well, they claim that was when humans and the environment were perfectly adapted to each other and in balance, and everything since then is claimed to have been a bad move.

I dunno -- I like bread. And books. And the internet...

[(Anonymous)]

lj logged me out and it wont even let me log in, no option but anonymous. perfect. fml. anyway. i always said or thought that i could not have lived in any other age because i m such a faulty useless thing and need the visuals and comforts (hence also constant panick of impinging blindness and homelessness aka haha living in the past?).

[yakalskovich]

No, I'm definitely an early 21st century city dweller all through...