What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don’t Have To Play It

https://docs1.google.com/document/d/1MDqR1MJHfa98ragj2NBp7JMEROKuo29fLJrgb_e702E/edit?hl=en&authkey=CMz61vMB#

by ThomPete • 16 years ago

251 50 16 years ago

docs1.google.com

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

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.

CJefferson• 16 years ago

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.

shib71• 16 years ago

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.

wicknicks• 16 years ago

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"

mobl• 16 years ago

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

Have an awesome day!

trezor• 16 years ago

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...

LiveTheDream• 16 years ago

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

Wilduck• 16 years ago

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.

markbao• 16 years ago

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

osuburger• 16 years ago

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.

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

Mirror here http://meidell.dk/archives/2010/11/25/what-i-learned-from-fa...

VMG• 16 years ago

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

dominostars• 16 years ago

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?

hugh3• 16 years ago

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

ThomPete4• 16 years ago

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

Keyframe• 16 years ago

Source?

robryan• 16 years ago

From an hour or so of frontierville I didn't see anything to compelling about it. Basically the same engine with the added activity (annoyance) of cleaning the farm of weeds etc.

verroq• 16 years ago

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

http://www.cracked.com/article_18461_5-creepy-ways-video-gam...

prodigal_erik2• 16 years ago

> 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.

JonnieCache• 16 years ago

Thanks for that, an excellent article. Despite its sophomoric (I hope I'm using that word right) humour, a lot of the articles on cracked.com are actually quite deep and inquiring.

jacques_chester• 16 years ago

> 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• 16 years ago

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.")

brianmeidell5• 16 years ago

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

jrbedard• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

brianmeidell5• 16 years ago

Looks like a cool site - I'll definitely take a good look at it and possibly contribute if I have anything to add.

patio11• 16 years ago

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.

m_myers• 16 years ago

Have you tried Progress Wars (http://progresswars.com/)? It's a slightly cheaper way to get one's fix of filling progress bars.

ambiate• 16 years ago

I learned the progress bar element from eZine Articles. Watching my article never move but always sitting at 33% made me come back to the site day after day. I really had no intention of writing more articles. I was already there though, so, why not write 3-4 more?

Another great example of my willingness to give in to hypothetical progress bar and waiting lines was callgraph.biz. I signed up and was placed #2500 in queue. The first few days were manic refreshes and F5 key slamming. After those initial days, I gave up. Later on I was accepted, but I had lost my immediate thunder which I found while I was 'struggling' in a queue system. Luckily, being bombarded with "new test files available" in my inbox everyday convinced me to give them a try. It was a really interesting service and actually landed me a cheap part time job at my university. Who would have guessed "transcribing skills" was something people need? :D

I think a pseudo-queue system or a progress bar is actually quite heroic in the first few days. Later on, you lose that immediate faith and interest. You have to utilize it properly in those first few moments! Convince your user they're #25,000 in waiting list. Send them an email saying they've been bumped to #10,000 later on that evening for some random word in the signup form, etc. You'll have them craving your service.

tomjen3• 16 years ago

You are a smart person, and generally have the admireration of most people on this board. Given that you knew you where a recovering WoW addict, how could you start playing anything like named *ville? Wouldn't all sorts of old habits just resurface?

AndyKelley• 16 years ago

Admiration. Hopefully he has a timer that he set for a specific date, and once that date rolls around, he's not allowed to play any more.

brianmeidell5• 16 years ago

Yeah, the progress bar is also a good mechanism - I'll add that to the document. Thanks.

The distinction between compulsion and fun (or "good game") is something I spend a lot of time thinking about.

Compulsion is like a spice - a little of it can make a good game even better, but if you use it too much, it will ruin everything :)

starpilot• 16 years ago

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• 16 years ago

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.

icegreentea• 16 years ago

Penny-arcade has a relevant comic:

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2010/3/12/

henrikschroder• 16 years ago

I also played Frontierville for a bit, but never spent money on it. I even got a lot of fake Facebook friends that were Frontierville players so I could have more neighbours without spamming my actual Facebook friends.

The one thing that suckered me into it was the sound effects and sparkles whenever you do something "good" in the game, like gather coins or hearts or wood. They are absolutely brilliant and complement the progress bar very nicely. For me, they just hit the reptile brain button labelled "good boy!". Clingeling cling cling caching... Oh yeah...

ebrenes• 16 years ago

I recently signed up on OkCupid, thanks in part to some of the OkTrends posts and the string of posts regarding the site a while back. And for the first few hours I was on the site I stuck around mostly to fill in the 100% completion progress bar for my profile. It's an incredibly compelling mechanism, at least more so than I would have imagined it to be had someone told me about it without these examples to back it up.

sliverstorm• 16 years ago

"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...

brianmeidell5• 16 years ago

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 :)

nikster3• 16 years ago

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...

prodigal_erik2• 16 years ago

In 1989 my roommate was somewhat hooked on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classic_Empire_(computer_game), a turn-based strategy game. Many servers executed a turn and accepted new orders every six hours, which meant a choice between withering under a sustained assault or getting a full night's sleep. I only dabbled, but there were persistent rumors about students dropping out over that game, even though it predated graphics as well as intermittent reinforcement and achievements.

chamakits• 16 years ago

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

brianmeidell5• 16 years ago

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).

Jabbles• 16 years ago

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

AgentConundrum2• 16 years ago

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_• 16 years ago

> 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..

nikster3• 16 years ago

You make time. Same reason people "have time" to gamble, or do whatever feeds their particular addiction. Speaking from experience here.

AgentConundrum2• 16 years ago

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.

nikster3• 16 years ago

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.

What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don’t Have To Play It

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