
What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don’t Have To Play It - ThomPete
https://docs1.google.com/document/d/1MDqR1MJHfa98ragj2NBp7JMEROKuo29fLJrgb_e702E/edit?hl=en&authkey=CMz61vMB#
======
patio11
I was considering writing one of these for Frontierville, since it was scarily
effective at sucking me in. I have been playing it for mental breaks during
the coding for AR, and have spent... crikey... $140 on it.

One taste of this: they had a Thanksgiving mission, which required (as the
fifth stage of the mission) you to gather 40 of item A, 40 Bs, 40 Cs, 40 Ds,
and 40 Es. ABCDE are all not available through gameplay : the only way to get
them is to get your friends to give you one or to give one to a friend (gifts
are symmetrical). "Giving" means sending them a Facebook request.

Each of these items was available for 2 horseshoes (the scarce currency which
can be bought for real money), plus there was a final item which cost
something like 30 horseshoes. So, if you didn't spend a few weeks spamming
everyone you knew on Facebook, but you still wanted to complete your
Thanksgiving quest, you just had to click the buy-for-Horseshoes button a few
hundred times, and bam, quest complete.

I did that. Only afterwards did I do the math: I had bought 1,000 horseshoes
for $70. 350 horseshoes is... $24.50. I just spent twenty five dollars _to
close a dialog box_ and get a brief flash of text on my screen inviting me to
spam my friends with the fact that I had closed the dialog box successfully.

(The rewards for the quest are immaterial -- FrontierVille doesn't tell you
what they are in advance. It turn out to be stuff much, much less good than
what you could otherwise acquire for 350 horseshoes.)

It isn't a good game. But it is _compelling_.

Still, I have taken one lesson from Zynga that I am almost certainly going to
use: they show a progress bar on the first screen, with progress totally based
on taking actions which benefit Zynga. (Installed app, get updates, bookmark
app, Like app.) Your reward for filling the bar is to have a full bar. This is
_brilliant_. I'm stealing it to make my signup page shorter -- I'll just defer
the non-critical parts until later and make successful completion a
requirement for filling the bar.

~~~
starpilot
Your progress bar comment reminds me of the satirical RPG Progress Quest:
<http://progressquest.com/>. I've got to admit, just watching your character
gain experience as you "play" is weirdly satisfying.

~~~
maushu
It's not as weird as you think, most people have jobs where it's hard to get a
medium to convey the progress of their work.

This usually leaves the person with a unfulfilled need to _see_ stuff getting
finished.

Try this one <http://progresswars.com/> too.

------
verroq
Cracked.com had a fairly informative article on the "fun vs compulsion"
debate.

[http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-
gam...](http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-games-are-
trying-to-get-you-addicted.html)

~~~
prodigal_erik
> Now, I'm not saying this guy at Microsoft sees gamers as a bunch of rats in
> a Skinner box. I'm just saying that he illustrates his theory of game design
> using pictures of rats in a Skinner box.

Wow, that's both funny and disturbing.

------
jrbedard
Cool document, in the same vein, we are setting up a new Wiki that open/crowd
source various game mechanics at <http://gamification.org>

~~~
JCThoughtscream
Between the article and your wiki, I now have access to pretty much every iota
of social gaming theory I've been looking for. Much gratitude.

------
Wilduck
Kind of unrelated, but when he says it's a living document, he means it. I
just watched him add a few bullet points and notes in real time. Google docs
is pretty cool like that.

------
shib71
This is awesome. Zynga has data mined their users for value and Brian mined
their game for the insights they gained. The links between the sharing-
creates-personal-value mechanism and virality becomes really clear when
someone describes the game this way.

------
ThomPete
Mirror here [http://meidell.dk/archives/2010/11/25/what-i-learned-from-
fa...](http://meidell.dk/archives/2010/11/25/what-i-learned-from-farmville-so-
you-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-play-it/)

~~~
VMG
Thanks. Google Docs is weirdly not working (waiting for docs1.google.com...)

------
dominostars
Interesting how strongly they use users to remind other users to keep playing.
It's not so different from Facebook, which will send you email reminders any
time a user performs an action related to your profile. You may not like
writing on people's walls, but what if someone writes on yours? You feel
obligated to respond.

Do all social products rely so heavily on applying social pressure and guilt
to keep users active, when they don't want to be?

------
ThomPete
The guy behind the review Brian Meidel did this one
<http://www.deepbluesea2.com/> with a little help from friends and family.
Quite an accomplishment.

------
nikster
Zynga - The Game

Aim: Make money How to: Gather more played time. The more hours are spent on
Zynga games, the more money is going to come in. More hours can be had by
recruiting more players and making existing players play more. Add stuff to
the games that makes people play more, or recruit others, or spend money.

------
markbao
This is great. I'd like to reverse-engineer every successful web startup to
see what they know.

------
AgentConundrum
I was debating whether or not to comment on this, but now that I've seen that
patio11 not only got sucked into this too, but also spent money on it, I feel
a little more comfortable with detailing my addiction.

I should start by saying that I am prone to addiction. I don't smoke, and I
rarely drink, but that doesn't mean that there aren't other really horrible
habits I've found myself bound to. When I was in college, I started gambling.
Online. Not good. I had the usual idea that so many naive idiots have: that I
could beat roulette through sheer dogged determinism. I didn't play the usual
tactic of betting only on the "50/50" spots (which are actually 47/53 spots,
but casinos make a lot of money on people who don't notice that) and doubling
my bet on each loss. Instead, I bet on a single number an ungodly amount of
times. Essentially I would bet 1 chip for as long as hitting my number would
be profitable, then 2 chips, then 5, then 10.. it was a terrible addiction.
This is probably the same mechanism in play with FarmVille, where I'll repeat
an action a truly stupid number of times to make an incredibly minuscule
amount amount of progress.

FarmVille was released at a really unfortunate time for me. My girlfriend had
just started playing the game and had a very slight addiction to it, when
suddenly I lost my job. Faced with more free time than I knew what to do with,
and since I'm prone to procrastination, I started playing too.

At the bottom of the FarmVille screen is a display of your "neighbours" -
Facebook friends of yours who also play FarmVille - showing their respective
levels and experience totals. Naturally, I was compelled to climb to the top
of this list, but I already had friends who were very much out in front of me.
Because I was just starting out, my farm was considerably smaller than other
players (as mentioned in the article, you can expand the available space on
your farm by having a certain number of neighbours or by paying real cash),
which meant that I couldn't collect as many points as others could. I also
didn't initially "hack" (in the PG "hacker" sense) the game, which left me
receiving minor rewards compared to what I could have "accomplished" in the
same time.

Once I learned how to optimize my game - I even had a spreadsheet at one time
where I determined how to get the most FarmCoins or game experience depending
on my current target - I started to blow past my friends. I eventually got to
the point where I was the highest level player among my list of friends, and I
started to slow my game. Then I set my sights on the highest value item in the
game - a 1M FarmCoin Mansion. I told myself that I would just get that item
(requiring several additional levels of gameplay, and the collection of a fair
number of FarmCoins), then I would quit.

By the time I got my Mansion, one of my cousins - also unemployed - had
started playing, and was way out in front of me because he had many more
neighbours than I did and so he had a larger farm. We were both relatively
close to reaching FarmVille's Level 70 - the highest level in the game - so I
decided I _had_ to beat him to it. So I obsessed, I optimized, I did
everything I could to beat him. And I did. I won. I got there before him, but
just barely.

So FarmVille decided that Level 90 was the new Level 70. This was just
coincidental timing - they released it to everyone at once - but it hooked me
again, because I had no longer beaten the game. I had got right to the line
(which was rewarded by my completionist brain), and so now that the line has
moved, I need to get their again. It's an incredibly vicious cycle.

Zynga is really impressive at finding the pain points in their game and
removing them to optimize toward keeping users coming back. For the longest
time, in order to farm your land, you had to click each plot individually
three times - once to harvest your existing crop, once to plow the land, and
once to plant a new crop. Eventually I got sick of this, and was ready to
quit, but then they came out with vehicles. You had a harvester, a tractor,
and a seeder - all of which would perform your click actions on four plots at
a time, and instantly (before this, your click actions would make your
character _walk_ to each plot, taking forever). You had enough fuel for 150
actions, but could buy more if you needed. I'm happy to say I've never paid
one cent to Zynga, so I just used my fuel and then walked the rest. Your
150-fuel tank would recharge over a period of about six hours, so there was
always that initial optimization that could keep you coming back, since it
wasn't as much work anymore.

Eventually they created crafting items - you can collect bushels of crops
you've harvested to be used to create items which can then be traded for fuel.
So now I can create all the fuel I need, but only by planting more and more.
This creates another cycle of dependence wherein you plant more to get more
fuel to plant more, it's an addiction feedback loop. It's even more insidious
that the crafts-for-fuel that you make also have levels attached, so you get
more fuel if you make more crafts, so you're compelled to craft more and more
as well. I'm actually at the point where I have a single craft that is of a
high enough value that I no longer have to walk to any crops - my vehicles are
always fueled enough to do it for me. They've even come out with a "Combine"
vehicle which harvests, plows, and seeds at once, so I can get my farming done
even faster, and they've created expansions so you can perform these actions
on more than just the original 2x2 plots. All of this means that I can get all
my farming done in a matter of about two minutes, but since it now feels like
I don't have to spend so much time on it, it's not a burden to keep coming
back, so I do. Zynga wins again.

I will say that I don't fall into all of Zynga's traps:

I don't give them money because a) I can see that it's not rational to send
money on such items, and b) I'm broke and don't have the money to spend
anyway.

I don't collect new users for the game. I created a list on Facebook of the
friends I have who play FarmVille, and when I post items to my Facebook wall
from FarmVille, I set it so that only those people who are already trapped can
see them.

I also don't send spammy "send me this item" or "here is an item for your
farm" to people who don't already play. Contrary to the text of the article,
Zynga doesn't make it that hard to tell which friends play. By default, the
list of people to send items to _is_ "Facebook friends", which includes non-
FarmVille players, but includes a separate list of "FarmVille friends" which
is a list of people who have the application installed. That way, I'm not
spamming people who aren't already in the game. (I do have to be careful not
to spam people who have stopped playing the game but who still have the app
installed - I only have a handful of friends still playing so it's not that
hard).

The number of micro-optimizations made to keep people coming back, or to spam
their friends, is staggering. Zynga does an amazing job at reinforcing that
feedback loop, but they have gone too far in the past. People _do_ have a
breaking point. Not long ago, they made a change so that certain messages to
"post this on your friends wall" were non-optional - they removed the Windows-
style "X" button in the top corner of the message, leaving only the "Share"
button at the bottom. I was savvy enough to realize that I could just click
out of the Facebook dialog that then appeared, but others were not, and they
got pissed. So pissed, in fact, that the change was reverted within about a
week. In retrospect, this could have been intentional. You piss off some of
your long term, now disillusioned, users who don't/no longer pay you because
they're fed up with the game, so they leave (lightening server load, perhaps),
but do it by forcing them to spam their friends, creating new users with
better potential to pay. After a brief period of time - enough to get some new
users - you revert the offending change so it doesn't annoy the new folks.

Absolutely insidious, but Zynga knows exactly what it's doing.

~~~
mh_
> will say that I don't fall into all of Zynga's traps: > I don't give them
> money because a) I can see that it's not > rational to send money on such
> items, and b) I'm broke and > don't have the money to spend anyway.

Especially on HN, i would expect people to point out that spending valuable
time on X, is as irrational as spending money on X.

.. we all don't have the time to spend anyway..

~~~
AgentConundrum
I never said it wasn't irrational. It's definitely irrational for me to spend
so much time on the game, but that's the whole point of the article. Zynga
uses compulsion, not fun, to keep players coming back. Compulsion isn't
rational, so if you're arguing "but that isn't rational" then you've missed a
big portion of not only the article, but my overly verbose comment as well.

------
jacques_chester
> I personally think that Compulsion taps into some hardwired reptile-brain
> behavior in people, which came about because covering all the territory or
> collecting all the [valuable stuff] was beneficial to survival at some point
> in human history.

Most of the 'compulsion' is actually the Variable Interval Reinforcement
Ratio. It's the same reinforcement schedule that makes gambling addictive. The
rest of the compulsion is social pressure.

~~~
derefr
I think he's also talking about what is simply single-player Achievement-
oriented play, i.e. the "compulsion" to find 100% of something because, until
you have, you haven't yet "won" the game ("Completionism.")

~~~
brianmeidell
You're right, that's what I was talking about. "Get all the ribbons", "Upgrade
your crop mastery to 3 stars", etc.

------
Jabbles
Does anyone else think that this kind of document collaboration is _exactly_
what Google Wave was for? Pity...

------
osuburger
I think the very last point is one of the most important. The ability to drive
users who are bored with the current game towards other, similarly addictive
games is huge. The more games you can get one user to sink time into, the more
money you can make.

------
sliverstorm
"Ever since I missed a couple of weeks of university classes back in the day
when Fallout 2 came out, I I became very aware of Compulsion vs Fun and
hypersensitive to games that offer too little Fun per time unit."

Exact same thing happened to me with Oblivion...

~~~
brianmeidell
It was a pretty transformative experience - if that hadn't happened to me back
then (while I was scoffing at my friend for missing classes to play
EverQuest), I would probably have walked right into the WoW trap :)

~~~
nikster
I'd already wasted countless weeks of my life on offline RPGs - the idea of
WoW just instantly screamed "stay away at all costs". I've never played WoW. I
know better. I know it would suck me in and weeks later I'd wake up and wonder
what happened...

------
chamakits
Is Zynga really worth more than EA? This seems unlikely, but could someone
point me to more information towards this?

~~~
brianmeidell
There's some debate about it, apparently, but I recently saw articles
mentioning that Zynga was valued at $6 bn, while EA's market cap is $5 bn
([http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ERTS&ql=0](http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=ERTS&ql=0)).

------
mobl
Seems like the doc is blocked by google, can you post it somewhere else?

Have an awesome day!

~~~
trezor
Yeah same problem here. First I have to log in to a google account, then see
google docs crash and burn.

I'd appreciate a link to plain old fashioned document, or just some HTML. Not
everyone loves google docs.

Works for me now, but for those who can't get it to work, he has posted a
mirror on his blog: [http://meidell.dk/archives/2010/11/25/what-i-learned-
from-fa...](http://meidell.dk/archives/2010/11/25/what-i-learned-from-
farmville-so-you-don%E2%80%99t-have-to-play-it/)

~~~
LiveTheDream
The google doc is still broken for me; thanks for the mirror link.

------
CJefferson
I think it is very interesting to see this. While it is easy to mock FarmVille
as trivial or stupid, they are clearly doing something right, in terms of
getting players.

------
wicknicks
Thanks for the interesting article.

I couldn't help notice the Google Doc pop-up message "This doc is read only
because too many people are editing it"

------
hugh3
Does anyone know what has happened to Farmville traffic? Did it eventually
plateau and decline?

~~~
ThomPete
It is declining and Frontierville isn't really taking it's place.

~~~
Keyframe
Source?

~~~
ThomPete
[http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&...](http://www.google.dk/search?sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=farmville+declining)

