With everyone excited about wizards and vampires these past few years, one would expect magic or brooding bloodsuckers to be the focus of popular social games online.
But nope, look elsewhere: It’s farming, of all things.
A succession of popular farming games has hit Facebook this year, starting with myFarm, with the crowds seemingly then jumping to Farm Town, and now pouring into the mega-hit FarmVille. Despite (or because of) its popularity, Farmville has caught some flak for not being an original idea
I’d argue that farming games are clearly now a genre, but that point’s moot anyway, because in my eyes they’re all following in Harvest Moon’s footsteps.
The predecessor
Harvest Moon, developed by Natsume, was released for the Super Nintendo around the time AOL got the idea to start charging a flat monthly rate. Yes, it’s that old but it was truly a great game for its time. The player managed his or her own farm, growing crops and taking care of animals. There was no social aspect to it at all, of course. In 1996, multiplayer for console games still meant huddling around a TV together with controllers, a feature which Harvest Moon still lacked.
The game was a hit in Japan. There’s been an iteration of the title on every major Nintendo console since then. It didn’t see as much success in the states, a point which gaming publications attributed to a difference in culture. The Japanese public lived an ultra-urbanized life; Americans didn’t, or at least not to the same degree. Therefore, Americans didn’t want to sit around playing a farming game.
Clearly, they were wrong. Or maybe things have changed that much in the past 13 years. Regardless, the Harvest Moon experience lives on, and not just in the latest installment on the Wii. You have to wonder if Natsume looks at something like Farmville and asks, “Why aren’t we doing that?”
Farming in games
Farming plays a part in a lot of games— not just those with crops, tractors and chickens. Gamers have used the term farming for years to refer to any in-game action which can be repeated over and over to acquire items in a game. In any big online game, you can farm for experience points for your character, new shiny weapons, and gold too. Gold farmers do this as a full-time job and earn real money for it. Farming will usually fill a large portion of a player’s in-game time— even in a game that, on the surface, deals with fire balls and acid-breathing dragons.
It’s curious then, that farming games, games that make no effort to hide the farming behind a fantasy gameplay mechanic, are such a hit. It could be that farming games offer the simplest analogy to the non-gamer. They simply say, “In this game, you farm for stuff. Like a real farm.” It’s an easier concept to swallow than “In this game, you kill ogres, which give you a mix of items, gold and character experience which you can collect over time.”
They’re both farming in the gaming sense. Just one is literal. Sort of.
Are farming games pulling in casual gamers? Yes. Are they educating them about gaming in general? Certainly. Will these players get tired of the basic analogy and move on to different games? Well, I hope so. That’d be great for gaming.
Looking elsewhere
Farmville isn’t the only mega-hit farming game, nor is the farming game trend limited to Japan and the United States. Happy Farms, a Chinese online farming game, is seeing exactly two million sign-ups a day.
Why “exactly”? Well, because they had to limit their sign-ups to avoid drowning in a sea of new players. You can read all about it in this interesting article. Here’s the Cliff’s Notes: People are going crazy over this game. It seems to play like Farmville or the others, but with a feature that lets you steal crops from other players. Players remain logged in for hours and hours to drive away potential thieves.
It will be interesting to see if any of the American games copy the stealing mechanic. People are already addicted to facebook; I can’t imagine how bad it could get with virtual eggplants at stake.
