Farm Town

A couple of weeks ago a friend invited me to add a Facebook application called "Farm Town" I generally ignore most facebook application invites as generally they are just spammy and manipulative. However Farm Town proved to be very different. It's a flash game based upon the premise of farming and selling your goods at the market, but it also manage to pull in some social networking features: Similar to old flash based games like Hotel Habbo an the old Mentos Cruise ship.

I was always interested in those games as a basis for communication. I've found Farm Town to be a little addictive and quite a challenge - deciding what crops will reap the best rewards at the market, deciding when and if to purchase more farming land. You're also (Rather like The Sims) able to buy houses, objects and animals to populate your farm. In Farm Town your farm sits in a "Virtual Neighbourhood" populated by your real facebook friends (if they play the game) And you are able to visit their farms and help clear up after hurricanes, or help out with the watering of their crops.

A neat addition to the game is the ability to pay your friends or other users you meet in the Market or Inn to harvest your crops - the benefit of this is that it increase the value of your crop as your friends are able to harvest more volume... and of course it encourages interaction. Remarkably the application was only launched four months ago but has already attracted over 4 million users. Apart from the logistical and financial concerns involved what I find most remarkable is that such a genial game has met with such success... a lot of the people I meet are 30+, indeed even my mum has joined under the name of "Grandma"