I've never worked on farms. Oh, I know how it is. The hard labor, early morning risings, dawn till dusk harvesting. Believe me , I know. Been surrounded by farmers for the first 25 years of my life. My family own lands (a little bit) and they are farmed and planted by real farmers.
So, I know the demanded early mornings, sweaty labor, and a willingness to tackle and retrieve the occasional stray cow, carabao and even a goat.
I am a farmer when I log on to Facebook. Yep, I am obssessed to FarmVille, a game developed by Zynga that lets users plant and harvest virtual crops, gift livestock to other players, and grow fruit trees. And I'm far from alone.
More than 12 million people logged onto FarmVille in the last month, according to AppData, and almost 13 million pulled on their virtual overalls in Farm Town, a near-identical game developed by Slashkey.
But why? There's plenty that the Facebook apps can't offer when measured against their real-life counterparts: The sun in your face, the dirt in your hands, the actual, edible fruits of your labor. There's not even a true sense of victory to be had: users don't compete against one another and as long as you're willing to watch the clock and harvest your crops on time, there's no element of peril to the play.
Could it be that the more tech-saturated us city folk become--and venture off the beaten concrete only on weekends--or we are so far away from home--the more we crave some sort of agrarian experience? And that for many of us, plugged in 24/7 and restless to nurture even pixels on a screen, this is as close as we're likely to get?
I was wondering about this late last night, staying awake an extra half-hour to harvest my strawberry crops with a point and click, and I realized there is one reason I opt for farming over playing some games in my computer. I miss the rural life, the country life--the easy smiles, familiar greetings of a Bauangenian farmer. ( oh di ba? taga Guerrero ak, Apo!)
