Everybody has heard about it: Facebook is flooded by Farm Ville and all those who do not participate feel annoyed by the requests, the feed updates and the other viral spread functions of Facebook letting us know what ribbons our friends have earned.

What we are going to observe here is an interesting merge of excellence in viral marketing functions of Facebook combined with a simple but highly effective thing called agency that is defined by professor Janet H. Murray in her book “Hamlet on the Holodeck”:

Agency is the satisfying power to take meaningful action and see the results of our decisions and choices.

This means Agency is a form of having a choice and seeing the immediate results of our own actions. In Farm Ville language this appears to mean that your choice of what you are going to seed is affecting your success in the game. For example, if you choose to seed strawberries you can harvest them after 4 hours. If you wait too long, the strawberries will decay. So the game requires the participant to double check to be successful and to earn virtual money from your farming. The more virtual money you earn, the more you can seed. The more you seed and harvest, the higher you climb in levels. The higher you climb in levels, the more options you get to choose from different types of corn and fruits. The more options you have, the more you can choose the fruits and corns causing higher profit. To relate back to agency, Farm Ville offers the option to choose and interact within the game and to earn virtual money.

Murray defines the way Farm Ville is designed as a tangled rhizome which has many possible options instead of one ending:

A linear story has to end in some one place: the last shot of a movie is never a split screen. But a multithreaded story can offer many voices at once without giving any one of them the last word. This is a reassuring format for encountering a traumatic event because it allows plenty of room for conflicting emotions.

In addition to agency Farm Ville is integrated into a social networking site. The feed functions of Facebook are spreading the information around. The more people play Farm Ville within your network, the more it shows up in your feeds and highlight list.

Farm Ville also allows to interact with participants within your social network. You can send gifts and receive gifts, add them as a neighbor to your farm and help them out on their farm.

To close, Farm Ville is just one of the online games that are connected to social networking sites. The agency factor is high which caused its popularity. I believe that the rapidly growing gaming industry will increase it’s collaboration with social networking sites.

References

• Murray, J. H. [1997]. Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace. The Free Press
• Wikipedia [2004]. Janet Murray [online]. [Accessed 12. September 2009]. Available from World Wide Web: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janet_Murray>
• Wikipedia [2009]. Zynga [online]. [Accessed 12. September 2009]. Available from World Wide Web: <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zynga>