Starbright Illustrations (blog)

By The Illustrator 　http://starbrightillustrations.com/blog/2009/10/26/facebook-brett-fitzpatrick/

I’m back on facebook, not particularly because I love facebook (I hate facebook, because millions of people are creating great content and then posting it on someone else’s website), but because of that new game FarmVille. Farmville is a playing experience that has infected the brains of all my normally grown-up and business like friends and turned them into computer game addicted kids.

If you haven’t played it yet – don’t worry you will, you will, it won’t be long before you get an invite because part of the action of the game is persuading friends to join so that you can enjoy greater farm-related riches – if you haven’t played it, it’s like that Tamagotchi key-ring game of the 90s, but a bit more complicated and with better graphics.

And FarmVille has some of the addictive qualities of Tamagotchi too, where according to Wikipedia,

“Some parents also express concern because the device constantly calls the user to it with penalties for ignoring its signal, including death, starvation, and sickness, effectively keeping the device in the child’s consciousness at all times and interfering with other, potentially constructive, activities.”

If you ignore your farm crops can die, and you can lose FarmVille money. I’ve already experienced apparently sane adult people breaking off conversation over dinner to say, “I really must milk my goat.” Before running out the door leaving their meal half eaten.

It’s a mind bending plague of a game, but it does have great graphics, and it’s fun to play, and my crop of wheat is almost ready to be harvested.

I only wish I’d thought of it first.