I 'Aint Gonna Work On Maggie's Farm No More

I spend an unholy amount of time on Facebook. In someways I feel ashamed, but then I look out onto the streets of Gillingham and think: 'apart from mugging old women, there's not much else to do out there'. So I 'like' another set of stupid photos and waste away my evenings achieving nothing but turning my eyes slowly more square.

I suppose the other thing I could be doing (work doesn't count) is playing video games. And sorry for stating the obvio

us, but my they've changed. Not just graphically o

r how many different plastic instruments you can flog to the masses, but how we play video games. In some ways, I bet everyone thought we could get away with simply making games prettier and prettier and all would be well. Clearly not. I'm going to head back to Facebook to explain why.

If you replied to the question 'What did you do at the weekend?' with 'Instead of going out I watered some carrots and sheered some sheep', people would have thought you were some backwards inbred recluse. Unfortunately, around 80 million people worldwide give this same response, and they don't even have to break out the chequered wellies to have this riveting weekend.

Yes, FarmVille. God knows how Zynga (the publisher and developer of the game) thought that by letting people having their own 16x16 grid where they could plant fruit and veg, it'd turn a massive proportion of web users into something equivalent to a violent heroin addict.

The thing is though, this unbelievably simple game has got a bigger audience than Twitter. And most of the players are not just casual, half-interested folk. The nature of the way FarmVille is played means that people keep going back to it like a prostitute will keep going back to Soho. I (ashamedly) use to play FarmVille, way back in June last year when it was a fairly new and novel idea. Unfortunately, if you wanted to progress anywhere in the game, you had to structure your life around it. Crops would harvest and die in realtime, and as a result, if you were out when your lovely new pumpkins had grown, the likelihood was by the time you sat back down at your computer, they would have wilted and died. Because of this 'harvest or die' style, it led to conversations where a friend would say 'we have to leave by *insert time here* otherwise my wheat'll die and then I would have wasted 4 days growing them'.

I don't really know why I'm bothering to explain the concept of FarmVille because by the sounds of it, anyone with an internet connection has harvested some virtual crops. The thing that's interesting though, that whilst games developers pour millions of Pounds into creating super complex and pretty games for the home consoles, a game that looks like it was created in a time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth is the one that has pulled in the most players. It's not clever, it's simple gameplay and it's graphically very poor. Yet somehow, it has caused my sodding Facebook 'news feed' to become full of FarmVille updates, and I'm not impressed.

It has also meant that I receive a ludicrous amount of gifts to accept on Facebook. I keep getting offered a free chicken for the farm I don't even have by some girl. I think it would be nicer if the girl got off Facebook, got a real chicken and cooked it, then offered to me. I'd be much happier then.