Retiring to the Farm...

While my day isn't coming soon, it is coming eventually. Without naming any names to protect the innocent, Farmville has become a retirement home which is a whose who of former Fantasy Wrestling RRers. People who fell off the grid five years, ten years ago, hell, some even twenty years ago now have been turning up left and right in staggering numbers.

What is it about Farmville that is drawing this many older RPers?

For the most part, it is a nice and peaceful non confrontational game where you can go at your own pace. I've found that it has helped lower my blood pressure down a bit since I've started to play it. It just has a calming way to it.

You can style your farm however you want. While you do have visitors who come over from time to time to fertilize crops and feeds the chickens, you are the one basically seeing your farm the most so if you want to put a building here or an animal there, you can do whatever you want.

While it is a laid back game, there are masteries and ribbons for those who need to strive towards a goal which gives you something to shoot for and anyone can achieve it if they work long enough. There is day to day action to give you your fix like in the old days of Fantasy Wrestling on Prodigy, but not too much where it becomes a chore.

There is still plenty of interaction though, neighbors often leave messages on farms and send gifts to each other in order to get gifts back in return for their farm so it is great way to interact with everyone without having to churn out pages and pages of a pro wrestling cards.

I never really thought a game about Farming could be compelling. I remember cracking jokes about how Maxis put out SimFarm for the PC. Now, it is the biggest social app in the country and around 26 million people are playing it on a regular basis which is insane and I can even play it on my aging old machine that remembers the day Kennedy was shot.

When I do eventually upgrade to my Dell Studio XPS 8000 or 9000, I'm really looking forward to finally being able to see what is out there without my computer crashing.

I've been doing some scouting recently looking for talent outside of FWC and it seems like the ROH has created this whole generation of characters that are very dry and boring, 1980 IBM employee, like technical wrestlers. This always drove me nuts when I was RPing Marx because when I was in a league, because since Marx was a technical wrestler, he would get stereotyped and automatically get thrown into the ring with other technical wrestler on the planet. In hindsight, I really wish I didn't make Marx a technical wrestler. It is almost as bad as RPing a Japanese Wrestler because people don't understand how much wrestling and character over there have changed since the nineties, not that Meltzer helps that image any with his lack of proper coverage.

Don't get me wrong, I loved Dean Malenko in the nineties, but I wouldn't have wanted to RP him. There are promo on USA, which is the top rated cable network on the air today, which says "Characters so original, they stick with you."

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=71EHI55d1FQ

I think for a large part, this new generation has forgotten this or they are rebelling against the current WWE product by trying to go as much in the other direction as possible, either way, while their promos are technically FINE, they are lifeless. What makes a character stand out from the pack is being larger than life and take chances with your writing.

In college, you are told and taught to write like they want you to write and since they are the ones handing out the grades, they can do that. When you have the freedom to write however you want to want, you should relish the opportunity to do so. You don't get that opportunity in life very often.