PSP World

Is FarmVille Addiction a Real Threat?

Inquiring minds want to know, can a FarmVille addiction actually mask something more sinister? What started off as a fairly banal Facebook app has now garnered more than 75 million users, making it the most popular game on the social networking site and quite possibly the world. The game, which allows players to amass virtual money by farming and harvesting crops, strikes a seductive balance between simple interface and Pavlovian reward system. Just about every activity in the game is rewarded by some form of virtual prize, be it experience points or game world currency. Players who want to short-circuit the whole working for money dynamic can simply input their credit card numbers and convert real world money into FarmVille cash, which can then be used to upgrade their operations.

Now, one of the long-standing fixtures of conspiracy theory websites, Above Top Secret, wonders whether FarmVille might be more than simply the world's most popular time-waster. They have turned their tinfoil-hat wearing minds toward Facebook to wonder, "What if it was like, enslaving our brains, dude?"

Member Doc Velocity advanced the following theory about FarmVille, which posits a dark and sinister ulterior motive behind the friendly, smiling rural motif:

'This game is addictive like cocaine-laced-alcohol-cigarettes. It's like flypaper, you can't put the thing down. It's Pavlov's dogs with a Salad-Shooter dispensing goodies and high-fives for no apparent reason. The game causes a complete cascading failure of the higher functions of the human brain, so you're reduced to a near-vegetative state save for motor skills necessary to operate the mouse, by which you accept your rewards of flowers, animals, farming equipment, Mardi Gras beads and SuperBowl premiums and other precious things that you can't live without. It's virtual commerce and virtual consumerism... maybe we're being set up to ACCEPT a world in which we live vicariously through our little FarmVille Avatars while any true value we may have in Life is drained away?'

Of course, Facebook is not really known as a haven for productivity, so I'm not sure that we can accuse the game of acting alone to mysteriously drain our time. Personally, I'd be more concerned about FarmVille emptying people's pocketbooks before it empties the contents of their cerebral cortex.

Still, as conspiracy theories go, this one is pretty entertaining and it does have some observable basis in fact, as anyone with an addicted friend will agree. The game's developer, Zynga, is not exactly a warm and fuzzy company, either. The publisher has been accused of blatantly copying other games as well as enticing users into evil recurring subscription scams. So if you or someone you love has become addicted to FarmVille, you might want to consider unplugging them from the Matrix.

FarmVille, useless Facebook app or Illuminati plot? You decide.