Facebook & Farm Town

When I started my PhD career my good friend and classmate was constantly on my case to open a Facebook account and start friend networking. I thought it was going to be an even bigger waste of time than my Myspace account that my sister had bugged me about until I signed up. After having used Facebook for about a year, I think that I can adequately discuss it's good and bad points.

Social networking. That can be both a good and bad thing. Who wants Molly Sue your high school girl friend that you broke up with because of bad acne contacting you again after so many years? It seems that's just the kind of thing that happened to me. There were people that didn't think twice to talk to me in person when I was their high school classmate (even a few elementary school "friends" added me). Then after adding me, they never message or contact me. Then there are those people that are out there on a constant pursuit to boost their friend totals. But what for? I can't count how many people that have added me but never contacted me since then. It's great there is the "delete friends" feature. There are some people in real life it would be nice to just "delete" from your life.

These built-in apps can be addictive as well. At first the "send your friend a chocolate cheese cake" app seemed cute and harmless but now they are beginning to feel pointless. And how many more surveys or quizzes need to be filled out to determine "Which movie are you?" or "Which color suits your spirit?" or "What animal are you most like?" Not only are these quizzes poorly constructed but some are just down right dumb.

But of course it's not all that bad, otherwise I would not be logging in everyday to play my favorite pastime Farm Town, a neat on-line farming game that currently can only be accessed through Facebook. Sure, it's buggy at times and slows my old five year old iMac G5 to a halt, but I still cannot resist it. It reminds me of my childhood days of Nintendo Mario Golf. I'd never do the real thing but the electronic version, heck yea!

In Farm Town you first are given a plot of land in which you can later expand if you have enough coins and experience. Experience points add up and you are promoted to a new level that will allow you to purchase different "things" that can be placed on your farm. Also it will allow you to purchase more money-making crops as well.

So how to earn coins? There are a number of ways. You can plant crops and then after the period of time passes for those crops to grow, you can harvest. You need to pay to buy the seeds from the "store" to plant the crops. Also before you plant you must first plow the land. Both plowing and planting cost money. You can save on plowing by "hiring" someone to do it for you but you must do the planting yourself. If you hire someone that is considered your "neighbor" you can save even more money on plowing. You can find people looking for work in the "market place" that is a place you go to sell your harvests. You can hire random people to help you plow or harvest your crops there or as I said before hire your neighbors, but of course your neighbors need to be on line at the same time you're on line.

How do you have neighbors? Those friends from Facebook that have added the Farm Town app and have also requested to be your neighbor and you have accepted their request will appear on your neighbor list. By visiting your friend's farms to help them rake or water crops you can earn coins and experience points. Each day you can also send your neighbors gifts, which range from farm animals to flowers and trees. Right now the farm animals do nothing on your farm except take up space and slow down those people that are trying to load your farm. Yeah, maybe they are cute but I'd like to have a pig farm and sell all my pigs to the slaughterhouse. Also the baby chicks never grow up.

The forever "beta" is stuck to the loading screen of the game. I'm not sure it will ever not be beta since these kind of on-line games are always expanding although they have made some improvements on the game since it was first released. Now you do not need to wait for each individual plot of land to be plowed or planting before you click on the next plot that you want to be plowed or planting. So for example, you can click 50 plots of land you want plowed (that is if you have enough coins to afford it) and if your computer is slow enough just let it do its work while you work on other things.

The game is highly addictive but also it can get quite monotonous as well. What makes the game the most fun is that your friends can log on and play together with you.