Farming, farming, farming
Originally published at Modern Domestic Geek. You can comment here or there.
Sometime in the future, you will hear a podcast that Sara and recorded about casual gaming. In it we talk about Farmville, and Sara convinced me to play. And even though she is my podcasting partner and dear friend, she is evil, evil, evil. For I am blaming any lack of domesticity this week on Farmville.
I’ve been playing for a week, and I’m obsessed. Okay, not really obsessed, I only check my farm whenever I check Facebook. Which is a lot. Of course, I can only check it when I have a computer near, since I cannot do anything with Farmville on the iPhone. Which is probably a good thing. For the iPhone, I have Zombie Farm, which works sort of the same way as Farmville, without the gifts from friends, and instead of animals, you grow zombies, and when you have a certain amount - you invade other farms and have the zombies eat farm hands. It’s all great fun.
While these cute little time-wasters are fun - one aspect of them that I haven’t bought into are the micro-transactions - little purchases of farm cash, or objects within the game to make it a bit easier. I don’t know if I will cave or not. For example - I can’t grow the blue tiny zombie without the blue headstone, and that’s a $.99 micro-transaction. For the moment, I’m going to try and get by without resorting to purchasing anything, but I guess I will see.
So - who are playing these games, and why do you think they are so popular? As a time suck - really, if I weren’t constantly checking facebook, it would probably be about 10 minutes per day for Farmville, and Zombie Farm varies, since it goes with me every where.
And now, I saw step away from the laptop to make a feeble attempt at domesticity. I’ll get it back…at some point.