'FarmVille' is a fanciful departure from reality

With approximately 63 million active monthly "farmers," one would think "FarmVille" players would have to worry about crop rotation and exhausting their fields of nutrients. But in the surprisingly popular and cheery digital farm community of "FarmVille," these oppressive real-life concerns are of no interest to players and their cartoon avatars.


"FarmVille" is currently one of the most popular Facebook applications and one of the few that actually functions as a real video game. It is not text-based like many other applications, and "farmers" can actually customize their allotted plot of land in the Adobe Flash Player-based simulation.


Unlike in the "Oregon Trail," users don't have to trudge across the country fearing broken axles or death by diphtheria. All one has to do is allow the application access to one's profile information, and there it is: your brand new, untilled and unblemished homestead.


"FarmVille" takes place in real-time, and there are several rules players have to follow with certain farming procedures in the game. Chicken eggs can only be gathered once a day. Trees take several days of maturation before their branches become heavy with fruit. If the player doesn't visit their farm in time, crops can wither and die. The player will receive no profit from the crop if that happens, and it costs them gold coins to remove the dead plants.


Luckily, weather is a non-factor in crop growing. Every day is a sunny day, and no matter how many mischievous wild creatures a player chases away from neighboring farms, they will not actually destroy any player's crops.


Players gain both gold and experience points while they engage in activities such as planting and harvesting crops, chasing foxes and raccoons from neighbors' farms and adopting the occasional stray pink cow. Players can also earn achievement ribbons by harvesting set numbers of crops, convincing enough friends to be their neighbors, owning enough knickknacks to be called a packrat, etc.


The game also takes advantage of Facebook's social networking capabilities. Certain achievements cannot be completed without help from friends and neighbors, so players are in effect encouraged to inundate their comrades with gift and neighbor requests.