Why Folks Should Ditch FarmVille and Embrace the Farm

Jason Mark is a columnist for Change.org's Sustainable Food cause. He is a co-author of Building the Green Economy: Success Stories from the Grassroots and the editor of Earth Island Journal. When he's not writing, he co-manages San Francisco's Alemany Farm, a four-acre organic fruit and vegetable garden in the city.

I don’t want to be a hater — really, I don’t. How people choose to spend their free time is none of my business. And if they decide they’d like to use some of their precious recreational hours playing farmer — all the better. Still, I can’t get around the idea that there’s something a little, well, weird about the online gaming phenomenon FarmVille.

In case you’ve missed it, here’s the gist: FarmVille is an online social networking game in which you create a virtual farm and then spend your time buying seeds, farm vehicles, and “decorations” for your little spread. You water and tend your crops, and hopefully get some of your friends to help you. Then you harvest, and when you sell your produce you earn credits, or “farm coins,” that you can use to buy more land, more seeds, and more animals to keep expanding your farm. Developed by the gaming company Zynga, FarmVille is kind of like SimCity for the agrarian-inclined. And it’s hugely popular: Since its debut just 14 months ago in June 2009, FarmVille has enlisted some 61 million active users, according to the New York Times,  including 24 million people who play via a Facebook App.

I suppose all of us farmers and gardeners should be tickled. Imitation, after all, is the highest form of flattery — even when it’s just online simulation. FarmVille’s huge success is a reflection of the deep cultural yearning to be more connected to our food production. Its popularity is yet more evidence of people’s hunger to know about where their food comes from ... right?

In some ways, the game does a fine job of representing the best parts of the farming craft. It requires attention to detail. It offers a glimpse into the complexity of managing a diversified farm. It encourages cooperation among individuals, the very cornerstone of the community ethic agriculture relies on. I would much rather have gamers working with their Facebook friends to coordinate the different yields among tomatoes, melons, and raspberries than, say, blowing away pedestrians in Grand Theft Auto.

And yet I can’t get around the basic fact that FarmVille is, well, fake. At the end of a FarmVille “season,” no one gets to bite into a melon or take home any tomatoes. No one gets the satisfaction of sustaining their body through the very same labor that demands sustenance — the cyclical rhythm of working to eat, and eating to work. There’s only a fraction of the joy of actually stewarding a plant from seed to fruit. With FarmVille, you don’t get to play in the dirt.

FarmVille boosters like to say that one of the game’s most important virtues is how it encourages cooperation among users. But I think that the game’s social networking aspect is where FarmVille’s limitations (and, by extension, the Internet’s limitations) are most apparent. The open secret of Facebook is that it’s not, in fact, a great medium for meeting new people. With the exception of those Facebook users who rack up friends like county fair prizes, most people use the site for either sustaining their existing friendships or rekindling old relationships — the classic Facebook connection of “What have you been up to since middle school?” Facebook is perfect for keeping in touch with the people you already somewhat know; it’s not so great at forming totally new relationships. And so FarmVille, dependent as it is on the Facebook model, fails at one of the most important tasks of farming — growing community.

Just compare FarmVille (where you rely on existing friends to help manage your plot) to Alemany Farm, the four-acre organic garden in San Francisco I help manage. Every weekend, people from across the Bay Area show up at the farm to volunteer. Our volunteers are gay and straight, toddlers and septuagenarians, Black, White, Asian, Latino, eco-punks and boho professionals. Strangers meet each other, bond, and become friends united by a shared passion. In any given workday at the farm, new relationships are created among diverse peoples as they get to know each other face-to-face. Over time, those relationships, soldered by the sweat of hard work, become the bonds of community.

Of course, that’s not the only advantage actual gardening has over the virtual kind. For starters, you get to be outside, and even as you work, you relax, restored by the reconnection to natural systems. And at the end of the day you get the reward of the take-home salad and the sun-warmed strawberry.

So if you’re a FarmVille player, consider this screed an invitation: Drop the mouse. Pick up a spade. Leave the screen and come out into the sun. Get a taste of what it’s like to be part of the physical world.