In my mind, Farmville was the first game to really annoy people. It was also the first game I saw that sucked in for days people I knew – people who otherwise had little interest in even casual games.
In other words, Farmville was the first large-scale success of online gamification. These are techniques that are designed – deliberately – to promote anxiety, fear of missing out, hijacking attention, guilting players and their online ‘friends’, among others.
This New York Times article from December last year takes an unsparing look at the game. Even though it shut down that month,
FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users and the growth-hacking techniques it perfected, now baked into virtually every site, service and app vying for your attention.
The article cites examples of the techniques I listed above:
drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends — a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds.
It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon
I see a recurring pattern of blaming people – the ‘consumer’ – for their supposed weakness in getting sucked in by products like Farmville, and social media in general. This has happened before with tobacco, with packaged snacks, even with recycling.
This article makes clear that companies like Zynga deliberately design games and social media to prey upon our emotions and attention in ways that TV and outdoor advertising couldn’t.
They use phone and email notifications, unread counts, access to your phone contact list and facebook friend list, your location and individual pattern of use, design techniques like pull to refresh, arbitrary countdown timers – all to systematically weaken your resolve and act according to how the game or app wants you to, including spending real money to buy in-game baubles.
Unfortunately, Farmville’s techniques now pervade the tech industry. Fortunately, enough of us have been burnt by such games and are aware of our addiction to social media that – should we want to – we can in fact start of wean ourselves off it.
Unlike with viruses, there is no vaccine that immunises you from distraction. But you can build a natural resistance to it. It’s harder, but it’s also equally effective. And we will each be the wiser for it.