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.