Please read with a “grain of salt”. [I wrote this up in May with the intention of posting it then, but I’m just getting “round to it” now.]
I’m a closet Farmville addict. Ok, to be truthful, Farmville was not my gig…The aquarium apps such as “Happy fish”, My aquarium”, and “Fish world”, and then there’s the “paradise island” genre as well that was taking up an hour or two of my time each day.
If one only plays one of these a few minutes a day (or one a week), methinks you’re ok, but if you’re like me, and are playing multiple games (while you’re laid off or not working), then you better face it, you’re addicted. 🙂
As some of you noticed last winter, I stopped my presence on FaceBook last November for several reasons, but one of them was due to the amount of time I was spending, maintaining my crops, my aquarium, my island, etc. Whew, that was a lot of work to do each day!
Here is an excellent article regarding how these ‘social games’ are “impacting our lives”:
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2010/05/farm-wars/all/1
Here is the first part of the article – does this sound like you?
Kira Greer was sitting in a meeting one afternoon when she suddenly remembered an urgent deadline. The San Francisco instructional designer knew there was no time to waste.
She excused herself, saying she had to go to the bathroom, then rushed back to her desk. Quickly opening Facebook, she began furiously clicking on rows of virtual vegetables, harvesting her FarmVille crops before they withered and died.
“I realized I was hooked when I was planning my day around when I knew crops needed to be harvested,” says Greer, 39.
Leaving a meeting to tend to her videogame of choice was Greer’s wake-up call. “Once I realized I’d done that, I told my husband and I just came home and had a moment — d’oh! And I realized, OK, I’m taking it a little bit too far.”
“If there’s any way to explain it, it’s that I’m playing it right now, because you reminded me that I had crops,” she tells us over the phone.
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I’ll let you read the entire article – if you can pull yourself away from cleaning your tank or feeding your fish, or harvesting your crops.
p.s., even though I’m not playing these types of games on FB anymore, starting in April I’ve migrated a portion of my addiction to a different venue. More on that later – see my “new gadgets” note – to be published/posted soon! (I promise!).
]This is being posted “in fun” in case someone doesn’t see the humor in this.]
