So that’s why I don’t play FarmVille.

Social gaming is an interesting genre. As someone who spent my whole computing life playing computer games where you wander around by yourself kill things on your own, solve solitary puzzles, and discover lonely places, the concept is rather hard for me to understand.

What I find funny is that everyone I know who plays FarmVille is a 40-50 year old women with dogs and cats living in the upper midwest that will insist that this study is totally wrong.

Social gaming is an interesting genre. As someone who spent my whole computing life playing computer games where you wander around by yourself kill things on your own, solve solitary puzzles, and discover lonely places, the concept is rather hard for me to understand.

Farmville does seem to be a thing that women like, except for my wife who rolls her eyes at the thought.

As for me I spent half of my life traveling around the world with the Navy, visiting exotic places, meeting interesting people, and such. Computer games don’t appeal to me, I want to be an eccentric artist.

I’d like to see them build CodgerVille. Where I’d be antisocial except for occasionally coming out and yelling “Hey you kids get offa my lawn.”
Wait, I don’t need a computer to do that.

I’m always surprised at the number of grandparents who play MMOs. When I played DDO, some of my regular co-players were grandparents.  Same is true with Guild Wars.

I caught the FarmVille bug from my 36 year little old sister, who is ultra-competitive against a mostly under-35 crowd in her workplace. On FarmVille, I have caught up with several high school friends, many of whom are turning 40 this year.

I think what is really special about FarmVille is that it’s competitive in a cooperative way. Unlike Mafia Wars and many of other popular similar social games, in FarmVille, you don’t spend your time destroying others. And that’s what makes it an especially safe place to catch up with people, in that everything you do for one of your neighbors is a positive.

There are 70 million active FarmVille users. Zynga aggressively uses the instant updatability of Flash apps to deliver the FarmVille experience and experiment with the community. I really feel that this alone will be the deal-breaker for the iPad. The 10 or so minutes a day I spend with FarmVille is continually and inexpensively cultivating relationships I’ve had for 25-30 years. While few would characterize FarmVille’s value in explicit economic trade-off terms like I do—because they lack the formal training, not the intuition—they will notice when they have to put down the iPad to do FarmVille, and it will quickly become a known shortcoming of the device. When you add in the hubris of Steve Jobs saying that the world is moving to HTML5 etc., a strong negative vibe about this device will emerge. FarmVille be a readily appreciated punchline of the iPad joke.

If you truly love Apple, this should cause you grave concern. What it’s done for me is put things over the top. Apple is focussed on polishing a DOA turd for the next 6 weeks while its Mac line-up is showing its age and all sorts of things are happening in Android phone space and Windows tablet space. The HP tm2t, for example, now has an active digitizer on the tablet and a 2.33 GHz Core2Duo stock. $950 base, $1200 very nicely equipped.

the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Her name is Alice, and she lives in Wisconsin with a terrier and a large tabby cat.

Impossible.

There’s way she’d have just one cat….

’d like to see them build CodgerVille.

Harry need help finding his TV remote.

the average social gamer is a 43-year-old woman. Her name is Alice, and she lives in Wisconsin with a terrier and a large tabby cat.

Impossible.

There’s way she’d have just one cat….

Maybe it isn’t a cat, but a raccoon as in the Sears Optical commercial.