作者：Mark Newheiser

游戏邦注：本文发表于2010年5月9日，所涉时间、时间和数据均以此为准。

Facebook曾向外界宣称网站上的农场模拟游戏《Farmville》比Twitter更为流行。该游戏日用户超过2600万，月用户逾6900万。《Farmville》的流行性在诸多层面上引人关注，玩家数超过《魔兽世界》和Wii控制器用户。我看了下自己的《Farmville》好友列表，游戏正诱惑着那些通常情况下不会接触视频游戏的玩家享受游戏带来的快乐。

当然，《Farmville》采用的运营模式与多数视频游戏有所不同。你无需支付月费，也无需支付一次性购买费用。玩家可以免费玩游戏，商家会向你兜售游戏中的产品，为用户提供花费金钱（游戏邦注：而不是时间）跳过繁杂的过程解锁所有游戏内容。

游戏注重社交化而非单打独斗，它没有采用《mybrute》（游戏邦注：欧美网页游戏）之类在线游戏的金字塔形方案，后者主要依靠玩家的投入来升级。《Farmville》会锁定某些游戏内容，直至你在游戏中拥有足够的好友数，而且社交网络中玩《Farmville》的好友可稳定提供钱币、经验和礼物等主要游戏资源。

farmville(from s736.photobucket.com)

《Farmville》非常有效地利用了Facebook的社交层面，每当你在游戏中取得成就时，就有信息弹出询问是否将其与好友共享，让他们知道你在游戏中的乐趣并邀请其参与。

游戏也很乐意为参与病毒式传播的玩家提供奖励。你的农场上偶尔会出现可爱但孤独的小动物，此时玩家会面临两难的选择。要么在虚拟世界中对它们置之不理直至死亡，要么在Facebook上发表公告称，需要某位好友加入游戏中以“领养”这个讨人喜爱的小家伙。

当《Farmville》相关信息在某人页面上弹出时，点击便可以获得名义上的奖励，发出信息的人通常也能够在游戏中获得奖励，而游戏同样会不断鼓励你与全球分享你对朋友玩《Farmville》并助你脱离困境的感激之情。

《Farmville》中设置的挑战与我所熟悉的多数角色扮演游戏（游戏邦注：下文简称RPG）不同，多数RPG需要更多经验值来升级，这样玩家才可以体验到更大的挑战。在此类游戏中，你会发现挑战带来的收获越来越少，除非你在游戏中不断向前发展。在《Farmville》中，这些苦差事会不断持续下去，而且似乎其目的就是为了持续更长的游戏时间。

你可能在首个游戏日升7级，次日升2级，但不久之后升级速度就会放缓，每天只升1级甚至更少。《Farmville》对任何游戏新手恩爱有加，但随后会逐渐放慢其发展步伐，从23级升到27级所需经验值是升到23级所需总经验值的两倍。

玩家赚取经验值的渠道也会日渐增多。假设你在《Farmville》中有足够数量的好友，便可以扩大农场面积使得每天赚取的经验值更多。你也可以通过购买建筑来用钱币换取经验值，但随着等级提升，游戏发展进程会变得越来越慢。

《Farmville》并非我玩过的首款农场模拟游戏，它的许多特征与《Harvest Moon》和《Rune Factory》类似，但《Farmville》设计的方向稍微有些不同。在游戏《Harvest Moon》中，时间通常成为限制性因素，你想要在游戏中完成的所有事项都需要现实的时间。但在《Farmville》中钱币和空间成了限制性资源，只要你愿意，二者均可花钱从开发商处购买。

《Harvest Moon》需要玩家投入特定时间来玩，游戏无需等待，随时随刻都可以做完某些事情，而《Farmville》是想让玩家每天花数小段时间来玩。在《Harvest Moon》中，你可以种植作物，时时刻刻都很忙碌。但在《Farmville》中你需要以现实世界时间为基准来种植和收获作物，作物成熟时间可能是几个小时或几天，而且你需要在作物枯萎前及时收割。

两者最大的差别可能是，玩家在游戏《Harvest Moon》和《Rune Factory》中投资修建农场并获得财富是种达到最终目标的方式，你获取的资金和资源为次级游戏系统服务，如向某人求婚、与邻居成为朋友或获取足够的资源以打通地下城。在《Farmville》中，修建农场就是最终的目标，你获得的所有资源可以用来装饰或纯粹出于美观目的来布置农场。

《Farmville》受如此多人喜爱的设计技巧在于其处理玩家投入时间的方式，每次你玩《Farmville》并种植作物后，就注定会在某段时间后回游戏收获作物，否则投入便会付之东流。

这段时间从两小时到四天不等，时间长短决定了你可以收割作物获得回报的等待时间，以及作物从成熟到枯萎的时间。因而，《Farmville》中充满了沉迷性行为的传统元素，提供奖励以让你产生在游戏中继续发展的意识，这对新手来说尤为明显。假如你离开游戏的时间过长就会受到惩罚，游戏为你定期回到游戏中的行为提供奖励，这会让用户养成玩游戏的习惯。

如果玩家长期不登录游戏，需要做些精细的安排，比如收获作物后不再种植，否则再次种植的作物最终会死亡。我有些朋友甚至在度假时将其Facebook密码告知好友，帮忙照看他们的农场。

女友坚持要我陪她玩游戏并为其提供帮助，所以我才迷上了《Farmville》。我们制作了一份电子数据表，列出游戏中每种作物每小时带来的收益，这让我们看到某些很有趣的结果。和我此前玩过的其他农场游戏有所不同的是，树木和动物好像是设计后期才加进去的，它们产生的盈利与收获作物完全无法相比。

即便你可以做奶牛场之类较大的投资，这些每天可让你赚取数百钱币的东西直到数月之后才真正开始盈利，这个时间对于简单的在线农场游戏来说过于长久。分析每种作物带来的利益也得出某些奇怪的结果，虽然新作物通常在规定时间过后会产生比之前作物更高的回报，但每小时平均回报最高的作物在游戏中几乎是固定的，有时提升十多级仍未发生改变。

我们最终得出的结论是，《Farmville》中大量物品纯粹起装饰作用，虽然从表面上看并非如此。游戏中设置了大量的绶带和成就来鼓励玩家做某些事情，而并非简单地让玩家采用最具收益作物来使农场盈利最大化的战略，这便是作物回报分析告知我们的内容。

我认为就社交游戏而言，《Farmville》做了许多颇有意义的事。玩家建造和布置自己的农场，并展示在全世界覆盖率最广的社交网络中。只有它能让我迅速知道高中朋友是否还在玩游戏。但在游戏中与其他玩家的互动甚为肤浅，你可以每小时帮他们的作物施肥，在空闲时间给他们送礼，但玩家间无法交易产出资源。这也预示着游戏的真实目的，也就是让你在其中投入真正的金钱。

《Farmville》看起来确实是围绕上述目标来精心设计，它可以轻易通过你的社交网络进行病毒式传播，暗示玩家花钱购买道具比花时间等待农场发展更有价值，而且用只能通过真实金钱购买的装饰物来吸引玩家。游戏所缺失的是传统游戏的战略深度、更具真实性的游戏结局、内容中更加平衡的挑战和发展过程。

坦诚地说，相比其带来的乐趣而言，《Farmville》更多的是让玩家沉迷其中。对于游戏不断融入我的社交生活且已证实能够为那些通常不玩游戏的人所接受，我感到欣喜。我希望能够出现其他普及度和对现有社交网络的利用堪比《Farmville》的游戏，我只是想要更好的游戏，即便付费也在所不惜。（本文为游戏邦/gamerboom.com编译，如需转载请联系：游戏邦）

Farmville, Social Gaming, and Addiction

Mark Newheiser

Facebook bragged to the public this week that Farmville, a farming sim game hosted on their site, is now more popular than Twitter, with over 26 million daily users and in excess of 69 million monthly users to its name. Farmville’s popularity is impressive on a few levels–more people are playing it than World of Warcraft, than ever bought a Wii, and a look at my own Farmville friends list indicates it’s seducing players to the joys of gaming who would never even pick up a video game under normal circumstances.

Granted, Farmville exists with a very different business model than most video games: you don’t pay by the month to play it, you don’t even shell out a one-time payment to play: you play for free, and then the game tries to sell you in-game perks and a chance to skip the grind to unlock all of the game’s content by spending money rather than time.

It exists in a social rather than solitary space, while it’s not an explicit pyramid scheme like some online games such as mybrute that rely on referrals, Farmville locks you out of some content unless you have enough friends playing Farmville with you, and having friends in your network playing Farmville is a reliable source of coins, experience, and gifts, the main resources of the game.

Farmville leverages the social aspects of Facebook very effectively: every time you so much as sneeze in Farmville, a message pops up and asks you if you would like to share with your friends how much fun you’re having sneezing and encourage them to come sneeze in Farmville with you.

The game is also more than happy to bribe players for participating in its viral spread: cute lonely animals will show up on your farm periodically and as a player you face a dilemma in sentencing them to virtual abandonment and death unless you post on your Facebook wall that you need one of your friends to start playing Farmville and “adopt” the adorable little self-promoter.

When a Farmville related message pops up on someone’s wall you’ll typically get a nominal reward for clicking on it, and the person who posted it usually gets an in-game bribe as well, on top of the constant encouragement from the game to share with the world how thankful you are that your friends are asynchronously playing Farmville with you and helping you out.

The grind in Farmville is different than most RPGs I’m familiar with–most RPGs require more and more experience for each level you gain in order to nudge the player towards taking on greater and greater challenges–you face diminishing returns for grinding unless you keep moving forward in the game. Farmville’s grind appears to get progressively longer for the sake of getting longer.

You can go up seven levels in your first day, two on your second, but before long you slow down to gaining a level or less a day. Farmville bestows ample amounts of beginner’s luck on anyone who’s just starting, but gradually puts the brakes on their pace of progress until going from level 23 to 27 will mean doubling all the experience you’ve earned up to that point.

The rate at which you earn experience does gradually increase; provided that you have enough Farmville friends to allow expansion of your farm you’ll start earning more XP a day due to that space.

You can also trade coins for experience by buying buildings, but progress in the game is scaled to happen more and more slowly as you advance in it.

Farmville is not even the first farming simulation game I’ve played: the Harvest Moon and Rune Factory games share many of the same conventions, while Farmville takes them in a slightly different direction. For the Harvest Moon games the limiting factor is most often time and dividing it up among all the things you want to accomplish over a real-time day, in Farmville the limiting resources are money and space, both of which can be purchased if you’re willing to donate to the developer.

The Harvest Moon games are designed to be played full-time so you have no downtime and can always be accomplishing something, Farmville is designed to draw you back in small doses scattered throughout the day. In Harvest Moon you plant crops and keep yourself busy while in-game days pass, in Farmville you plant crops and harvest them on a real-world schedule, crops come due in hours or days and you have a limited amount of time to harvest them before they rot.

And the most significant difference is probably that in the Harvest Moon/Rune Factory games, investing in building up your farm and acquiring a fortune was a means to an end, the money and resources you acquired were funneled into secondary gameplay systems like wooing a wife, befriending your neighbors, or acquiring enough resources to fight your way through a dungeon. In Farmville, building a farm is the ultimate end-goal, and all the money you acquire is spent on decorations or the ability to arrange your farm for purely aesthetic purposes.

The genius in how Farmville has succeed in getting so many people addicted comes down to how it handles commitments on a player’s time: every time you play Farmville and plant a crop, you’re making a commitment to come back during a 12 hour window or so to harvest your crop, or else you forfeit your investment.

You can pick the size of your window to be anywhere from two hours to four days: that time period determines how long you have to wait until you can flip your crop and get your money back, as well as how long you have from harvest time to when it rots. And so Farmville fulfills the classic elements of addictive behavior: it rewards you for playing it by letting you have the sense of advancing in the game, particularly early on, it punishes you for going too long without playing, and it rewards you for coming back at predictable habit-forming intervals.

In order to quit Farmville you’d have to make a conscious choice after harvesting your fields to not re-plant them, or else leave all your currently planted crops to die. Some of my friends have even handed out their Facebook passwords to get their friends to babysit their farms for them when they’re on vacation, or just put up with the ongoing multi-minute demands of their virtual fields.

I got roped into playing Farmville when my girlfriend insisted I needed to help her out and play with her. Together we worked up a spreadsheet to figure out what the profit per hour was for each crop in the game, which lead to some interesting results: unlike the other farming games that I’d encountered, trees and animals seemed to simply be an afterthought, they offered nowhere near the profitability of harvesting crops.

Even the larger investments you can make like a dairy farm which earns hundreds of coins a day would take a few months to become profitable, which is an eternity for a simple online farming game.

Analyzing the profitability per crop also revealed some odd results, while the newer crops always offered a better return over their given time period than previous crops, the most profitable crops per hour remained fairly fixed throughout most of the game, and in some cases didn’t change for more than 10 levels.

We came to the conclusion that a large number of features in Farmville were purely decorative even when they weren’t intended to be–the game has a number of ribbons and achievements designed to reward players for pursuing something other than the simple profit-maximizing strategy of farming the heck out of their most profitable crop, but the returns offered told their own story.

I think Farmville does a lot of promising things for a social game, you get to build and arrange your own farm and show it off in a social space that overlaps with the most widely used social network in the world–there really aren’t any other games I can pick up and immediately know whether any of my friends from high school are still playing it. The interactions with other players are largely superficial–you can fertilize a few of their crops an hour, and give them gifts at spaced intervals, but there’s no real economy between the players for the resources you produce, which would undermine the real purpose of the game, getting you to spend actual money on its perks.

Farmville does seem consciously designed around that goal: it virally spreads itself throughout your social network as innocently as it can, and subtly convinces players that it’s more worthwhile to pay actual money than spend all their time farming to get ahead, and tempts them with decorations you can’t achieve any other way. What it’s missing is a depth of strategy found in traditional out of the box games, a more substantive end-game, and a more balanced grind and progression through its content.

Frankly, I think Farmville is more addictive than it is fun. I like the fact that it’s instantly networked in with my social sphere and it’s proved accessible to people who don’t normally indulge in my hobby of choice. I would love to see a game do all the things Farmville does in terms of its accessibility and ability to leverage existing social networks, I just want that game to be better, even if I have to pay for it. (Source: Gamasutra)