I started playing FarmVille, when one of my friends sent me a request to be his neighbor. I denied his first, second, and third attempts to add me until he messaged me saying:

　　“Dear Marco the Jerk who won’t add me on FarmVille,

　　I’ve sent you three requests, and you denied all of them. I don’t need you to play the game I just need you to add me so that I can expand my farm. You better add it to your profile or I’ll tell everyone the time you…”

　　Rabbits and Fig Trees go great together.

　　The next day, I added my friend as a neighbor in FarmVille. Soon after, I started to get notifications telling me that my friend had cleaned up my farm, fertilized it and more. I kept getting these messages until I accidently clicked one of them-shooting me out of what I was doing and into the world of FarmVille.

　　When I arrived at the game I saw that I had multiple requests for neighbors. I added all of them and got a message thereafter saying that I had earned a ribbon for adding neighbors. The ribbon intrigued me because I did nothing in the game, yet it still rewarded me. So, I thought, why not give it a try? Within 15 minutes, I was farming and embedded in the world of FarmVille.

　　I left the game alone for a couple of days to return to a dead crop. This is when the addiction began. FarmVille is based on a constant need to tend your crops or you’ll lose everything formula. From then on I made conscious decisions on what seeds to buy, how long they took to grow, and so on.

　　2009/301/Farmville_1_68795_screen.jpgg2009/301/Farmville_1_68795_embed.jpgYou can have cow's horse's and more.

　　After leveling up I started noticing that my neighbors, especially a cousin I had just recently added, had leveled up quicker than I had. Confused on what I was doing wrong, I asked him his secret.

　　“Hey Cousin, Are you actually paying for the game, so that you can level up quicker than me?”

　　In FarmVille, you have two choices in leveling up. You either pay actual money to buy fake money or you grind it out with the free money as I was and still doing. My cousin told me he was also grinding and that the key to growing your farm was acquiring more neighbors. I bowed my head on my desk realizing why my cousin was so anxious to get me to add him, and why I would slightly become the same way.

　　Now, the process is easy to add friends that already have the game installed on their Facebook profiles, but the hard part is getting the one’s like me who didn’t have it installed to actually install the game. But it seems like if you try to get people out of their normal Facebook routines to install something really easy, they will become more difficult to convince. Thus, I became my cousin sending, no-so-crazy emails but simple messages telling my friends to add me and that they wouldn’t have to lift a finger other than installing the game and accepting my request.

　　FarmVille is an addictive and fun game. Addictive why? I don’t know. Maybe because I like simulations games such as SimCity or real-time strategy games like Command & Conquer. But I ask you to try the game that 65 million active users are playing on Facebook and give me your thoughts.