The Writers Gateway

FarmVille is a highly addictive multiplayer strategy game that you will find in Facebook. The objective of the game is to build and manage your own farming business. You can easily play this game using simple mouse clicks. The game proceeds in levels. Your success is measured as you move up the different levels, you make more money and expand your farming business.

Here is a snapshot of my farm in FarmVille. I am a level 8 farmer

Let me now give a brief overview of the activities you do in this game.

Low Level Activities

Creating your persona

Before you get started with the game, you create your own persona using the persona builder. Your persona executes all the activities for you in your virtual farm.

Ploughing the land

Ploughing costs money. So you plough portions of your land depending on how much money you have.

Buying

After you plough, the next step is to buy some seeds to sow. In Farmville, you have a market, where you can buy all the stuff to run your farming business. Here again, you buy seeds depending on the amount of money you have.

Sowing/Planting/Rearing

After sowing, you need to keep checking for the harvest.When you buy seeds, check for harvest time. If you leave it overtime, the crops wither away. You can plant trees. You can buy animals and rear them.

Harvesting and Selling

Once the crops are ready for harvesting, you sell them and make money.You can also sell cow’s milk and goat’s milk. You can sell sheep’s wool. S0 everything in your farm can fetch you money.

Adding Neighbors

When you add neighbors, it is an advantage to your farming business. You can visit your neighbors farms. You can make money by helping neighbors clean their farm. You can send your neighbors gifts and they send you gift in return.

High Level Activities

Watching business profit/loss

As you keep repeating the low level activities to run your farming business, it is very important you watch the cash inflow.  You need to keep track of how much money is coming in and how much you are spending. You must make sure nothing gets wasted.

Strategising

As you move up levels and you expand your farm, you need to strategise and plan how to make the best use of available resources to sustain and grow further.

Investing money

You invest money in seeds, plants, animals, vehicles, homes etc. Wherever you are investing, you need to keep the overall business in mind and see how this can fetch you more money. You need to spend money judiciously.

Noteworthy Aspects of the Game

Simple Usable Interface

The game has such an usable interface that you do not need to read the help instructions to play the game.  Everything is neatly places and is easily accessible.

The top bar has options to send gifts to neighbors, invite friends to FarmVille etc.

The main bar clearly indicates progress, business profits.

The tool bar has tools to execute activities in the farm.

The market is the place where you buy things.

There is a bar at the bottom of the screen where you can add neighbours.

Easy Game Controls

You just have to click on things using the mouse. You get all the options that you require. There is no chance that you will get confused on how to proceed in the game.

Use of Indicators

In the farm, when you mouse over you should see some figures in percentage indicating how much time is left for harvest. This way you are informed of the progress and you know when you can expect a harvest.

Similarily if is a cow is ready to be milked, that cow gets highlighted. For example in the image below, there are 3 cows and one is highlighted.

This is really a good idea to use such visual effects to indicate progress or completion of a process.

Theory of constructivitism in learning applied

This game does not tell you how you should make money out of your farming business. It gives you all the tools you need to do your business. You learn how to do business by experimenting, through trial and error. You learn to do business yourself.

You do your business in your own style. You look at what your friends are doing and learn lessons. This is what constructivitism is all about.

Example of Immersive Learning

This game has this virtual farm setup where you try you hand in farming. The experience is interactive and engaging.You get an idea as to what it means to do business in the whole process of playing the game.

A good exercise for  spurring creativity and individualism

This game gives you lot of scope to use your creative skills. Your creativity come to play especially when you are arranging things in your farm. So each farm looks unique. You make decisions individually and you do things individually. There are no rules as to how you need to arrange your farm or what decision you need to take.

The choice is all yours. This is where you learn a lot through experimenting.

Key messages – growth and sustenance

I am not sure if the game actually ends. You play FarmVille continously. So the objective is not to complete the game but to start a farming business, expand it and sustain it. You choose when you want to stop.

If you are already playing FarmVille, please let me know your views about this game. If you have not played the game before, play it now