Forget Smallville, Lex Should Destroy Farmville.

Forget Smallville, Lex Should Destroy Farmville

Lex Luther is often written as some evil maniac hell bent on killing that man of steel, but what is often forgotten is the motive. He's just trying to protect America from this illegal alien. In a sense, he's a hardcore republican like that.

What he should be doing is protecting America from itself. We seem to have been thrown in a facebook world of monotonous action in raising a virtual farm. If you weren't aware of it already, Farmville has been fucking up society for a while. Here's a pretty good essay on the subject.

Farmville is not a good game. While Caillois tells us that games offer a break from responsibility and routine, Farmville is defined by responsibility and routine. Users advance through the game by harvesting crops at scheduled intervals; if you plant a field of pumpkins at noon, for example, you must return to harvest at eight o’clock that evening or risk losing the crop.

Each pumpkin costs thirty coins and occupies one square of your farm, so if you own a fourteen by fourteen farm a field of pumpkins costs nearly six thousand coins to plant. Planting requires the user to click on each square three times:

once to harvest the previous crop, once to re-plow the square of land, and once to plant the new seeds. This means that a fourteen by fourteen plot of land—which is relatively small for Farmville—takes almost six hundred mouse-clicks to farm, and obligates you to return in a few hours to do it again. This doesn’t sound like much fun, Mr. Caillois. Why would anyone do this?

While it's just some guy with a French sounding name saying some random things, it's still a pretty accurate statement



I've seen a lot of similar analysis of Facebook-style games and how weird and patently unfun they are when compared to basically any other form of game/recreation we willingly pursue. I've never played any Facebook games as they sounded as annoying as the people I know who aren't in college anymore, but still spend all day on Facebook playing them and updating you their smallest achievements.

While I'm not going to claim to be the king of productivity, I do think that those Facebook games are just the poorest use of time and completely void of fun and I'm not sure how you can find games like that even remotely playable and not get flash backs of your boring monotonous day job. So I have to ask, how is it an escape from the 9 to 5?



In every sense of the word, Farmville has become the cutesy more socially acceptable version of World of Warcraft. Only you see less elf T&A. Oh wait, no. That was Lineage II. But you get the point, it's a standard issue leveling up repetitive bullshit game that I have no idea why anyone invest so much time in.

I don't go into 7-11 much anymore. I used to. I used to a lot. I was drinking at least one big gulp a day right before my second heart attack. So it came to a surprise when I realized that these multi-million dollar Facebook games were crossing over and successful enough to market to folks at 7-11.



How the hell is this game company making millions? I guess when you take the same formula and apply different genres to it like Mafia wars/Farmville/other zynga game themed products and then slap them on drinking products at 7/11, you are clearly making a lot of money you can easily piss away.

Then again, it's only fitting that a game that robs you of your productivity time as well as your money for stupid online only upgrades will be in a store that hikes up the prices of just about everything.

It is pretty funny that nothing on the shelf of a 7-11 could even remotely be considered as once coming from anything that looks like the farm you keep on bugging me to help you grow. Then again, Factoryville doesn't have the same ring to it.

A couple of weeks ago there was a billboard put up near my place advertising the L.A. County Fair...



It's a pretty sad day in America when I agree with the local fair. I mean, do you know how much lard they use to deep fry any and everything? It has to be some scary levels of heart conditions with any of your meals there. Let alone the amount of shanking that happens on those fair grounds. It's really pretty scary.

But again, the billboard makes a valid point. Though, I'm not sure how much entertainment comes from petting a goat. I mean, it's a fucking goat. Shouldn't it be eating a soda can or something? I'm not sure if they're claim is exactly true in that, but I guess I'm just saying they are half right.

But now that we are talking about the fair, it ends tomorrow. Ha, see how I promoted that piece of shit place a day before it closes? Yeah.. that's what you get, L.A. County Fair (of Pomona) for not giving me free tickets as a means of promoting your shitty deep fried tourist trap!