An American Lion

Farmville

It only took me a few passes at it to realize that Farmville isn’t a game—it’s a marketing device. After being hit with SPAM and unwanted invitations to waste time doing something else, abandoning Farmville was easy as pie.

I encourage folks to walk away from it. Leave your Farmville farmstead up and running as if nothing happened so that it eats away at their bandwidth and server space. Don’t end up like this poor lady:

Cathy Hinz is really into “FarmVille.” But she swears she’s not obsessed. 

“I can, you know, walk away and say, ‘I’m not going to worry about it.’ I don’t worry about it, but I will plan my farm around my life,” she says.

Hinz, a 50-year old mom and grandmother, manages an apartment complex in Portland, Ore., so she has time to be online, fiddling with the farm simulation game as much as she wants. And she’s far from the only one.

Since its launch in June 2009, “FarmVille” has grown like an invasive weed, with 80 million players and countless annoying updates from said players about eggplant mastery, lost turtles and found mystery eggs. 

It’s absurdly easy to get started: Pick an avatar, plant some crops, harvest some crops, earn some “FarmVille” coins. Before you know it, you’ve got raspberries that need to be harvested RIGHT NOW, and your friends are trying to give you sheep. It’s no “World of Warcraft,” but for non-gamers like Hinz, that’s exactly the point.

“I have messed around with other games a bit but nothing that really held my interest. They were either too violent or too complicated or too ‘childish,’” she says.

The thing is, you have to use your own money to really have anything. You can start off like I did, selling wheat and corn, which is how real farmers started, but you’ll never get the $45,000 or whatever you need to buy a home and all that unless you kick in your own money. Meanwhile, you’re constantly being barraged with unwanted invitations and nonsense from other people or from the owners of the game itself.

I’m a “leave me alone” sort of fellow. As in, leave me alone. I’ve tried your game. It sucks. Now, go pound sand.