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What Makes Farming Games Irresistible
By Mike M. Age 16 from San Diego CA
When I was younger, a game I remember playing a ton was Marvelous Entertainment®’s Harvest Moon 64 ™) on the Nintendo ® 64 console. It the first farming game that I've ever played, and I loved it. Unlike the popular Zynga’s Farmville®, you did not have to wait until the next day for crops to grow, however, there was no online interaction. I remember spending hours of just harvesting crops, buying seeds, taking care of weeds and rocks that were littered on my farm, etc. But since then, the farming genre has really changed, mainly with the on-line aspect of it.
The main question here that I would like to address is why we all like them. What makes them good and keeps us coming back for ore? Well what farming games do is very, very similar to what role-playing games (RPGs) do. They make the game addicting by telling you “Okay, if you complete enough tasks, we will award you more abilities and ways of playing the game.” So, when you start out, you realize that you are not playing the full experience right in the beginning. There is more of the game ready to be unlocked by getting experience points, money, or whatever point system they use.
This makes you want to continue playing, until you can get that extra accessory to add to your farm, another plot of land, or a new animal. But right after you get what you want, another reward is offered to you by doing something else. This cycle repeats on and on as long as you keep logging in everyday. That is one of the ways we find these type of games are so compelling.
It's not just in farm games and RPGs where we can find similar game mechanics.
Even in first-person shooters, like Call of Duty® (copyright Activision®), Dead Rising®
(copyight Capcom®) , and Halo® (copyright Bungie®) we can find these “RPG elements”.
For example, in Call of Duty, the more you play on-line and the more games you win,
the more guns are available to you. This gives the player more ways to play the game,
and makes them want to keep playing so they may earn more freedom in how they play.
As alluded to earlier, RPG elements are not the only things that make the modern farm simulator fun. The part that Farmville nails right on the head is social interaction. Social interaction has become one of the main differences between traditional, off-line farming experiences, and newer, Facebook® integrated farm games. They introduce another level of playing; cooperating with other players. Not only that, but at the same time they introduce a competitive form of playing. You can cooperate with other fellow farmers to help each other out and make both of your farms bigger and better. While this may be going on, this also encourages a competition of “who has the best farm”. These make the game even more addictive by making you play more because you feel the need to have a better farm than your friend. It also allows you to play a game while talking to someone else, essentially combining two fun things into one, whole experience.
These two things, RPG elements and social interaction, are what makes farming games fun. They, on their own, have been powerful elements that many other games can rely on. However, what farm games do well is uniquely executing both of these elements and making it into a fun, addicting experience. And Seeing as how much popularity this niche genre has gained from the very successful game Farmville, I really wouldn't be surprised to see a new wave of farming games to be coming soon.
Copyright 2012 FarmPeeps.com