Welcome to FarmVille
[atsimg]http://files.abovetopsecret.com/images/member/cddcb5228d9d.jpg[/atsimg]
Innocuous enough, right?
A time-killer game attached to your FaceBook portal, along with about five other meaningless do-nothing games such as Mafia Wars and PetVille. These
niceties are provided to you courtesy of
Zynga, which may or may not be the front for the Antichrist.
I'm assuming that most of you have at least encountered FaceBook and FarmVille.
This game is addictive like coc aine-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.
Oh, of course, there's no real
value to any of this nonsense. The rewards are meaningless. The crops are meaningless. The
entire
experience is meaningless, but very extremely psychologically addictive. It's brain candy.
They made it for kids, you say.
Yeah,
right... That's why there are options to plug in your CREDIT CARD and
ADD POINTS to your game in exchange for
HARD
CURRENCY. Oh, you can
BUY the biggest, baddest plantation in FarmVille, certainly... There's no ceiling, You can pump as much money as
you want into this hole, it'll never fill up.
Yeah, I tried it for a few days, got caught up in it, even sent $10 to Zynga via PayPal in exchange for a few extra points. And then I stopped and
shook my head and realized....
WTF?
Like, open a window and just throw a handful of cash out there. Wave bye-bye...
But, you know, I'm not so self-righteous that I refuse to recognize a lucrative venture when I see one. I know it's pure Pavlovian manipulation for
commercial gain, but there's something
ELSE about this that feels weird...
The Matrix
I envision
hundreds of millions of people around the world
plugged-in to
FarmVille, mesmerized with their simplistic
Flash-generated virtual reality, their neural spark in perfect synch with the rotations of their little virtual crops.
This is their world.
Meanwhile, Zynga is draining their credit accounts.
It
IS The Matrix, but we're on the
outside looking in,
PAYING to live these bizarre two-dimensional lives.
Is it any coincidence, do you think, that the movie
Avatar just broke all box-office records?
Ya think 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?
— Doc Velocity