Tag Archives: gaming culture

Farewell, FarmVille.

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FarmVille is coming to an end.

Be honest with me. When’s the last time you even thought about it?

Well, you’re thinking about it now, and you’ve got a few more months to ponder its peculiar existence before it vanishes into the ether along with your abandoned garden plot.

But why are we talking about it here?

Yes, although this is not a puzzle game, there’s no denying a connection between FarmVille and the puzzle community. (And not just how puzzling it is that FarmVille ever became as popular as it did.)

There’s no refuting the metrics. In the Venn diagram of crossword/puzzle solvers and FarmVille users, there’s plenty of overlap. They scratch very different itches in terms of what someone gets out of engaging with them, but both did become a daily part of many people’s routines.

Of course with FarmVille, that was by design. Except for keeping track of your solving stats through puzzle apps, there’s no penalty for not solving crosswords every day the way there was with FarmVille. The puzzle crops will not wither and die in your absence. Though I have it on good authority that the puzzles will miss you.

Anyway, I can’t NOT write about the end of FarmVille. We cover games as well as puzzles here, and FarmVille was one of the biggest games in the world at one time. And it did so by engaging plenty of users that weren’t typical gamers.

FarmVille launched in 2009 as part of Facebook’s social gaming platform, and that year alone, Adweek reported that there were 73 MILLION monthly active users. (For comparison, that was a fifth of Facebook’s entire user base at the time.)

The company behind FarmVille, Zynga, has never published FarmVille-specific user stats. I haven’t been able to verify peak usership or where the usership stands now. The best I could find was a 2013 claim that the sequel, FarmVille 2, had 40 million active monthly users.

Now, to be fair, it’s only going away as a Facebook-accessible program. You can still play it as a mobile app, along with FarmVille 2, FarmVille 2: Country Escape, FarmVille 2: Tropic Escape, and FarmVille 2: Revenge of the Neglected Turnips. (Okay, I made that last one up.)

There is also a FarmVille 3 on the horizon. For some reason.

Although the game officially closes by December 31, in-app purchases for the Facebook version of the game close November 17th, so if you’re feeling nostalgic and want one last chance to blow real-world money there (or to spend credits you still have in the game), better get to it.

So what do you think, fellow puzzlers and PuzzleNationers? Are you sad to see it go? How many hours did you leave behind in that farm? How many people did you consider unfriending just to stop their requests for FarmVille-related nonsense? Let us know in the comments section below. We’d love to hear from you.

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Puzzles and games: A community of hobbyists

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A friend of the blog passed along a fascinating article analyzing the current gaming market.

The piece encompasses console games, PC games, mobile games, and MMOs (massive multiplayer online games, like World of Warcraft), and not only categorizes different types of gaming experiences, but predicts the future of the gaming business as a whole.

From the article:

“The concept of one true gamer community will be less feasible as evergreen hobbies grow in popularity. Instead, we have a crazy mixing bowl of diverse, separate, long-term communities. Few will share the same values or goals. Few players will consider themselves having anything in common with players of a different game.

Social organizations such as PAX will still promote common ground, much like the Olympics promotes common ground between athletes. But day-to-day cross-pollination will be rare.”

And his conclusion is one that rings true for puzzle-games particularly:

“The shift comes from realizing that individual digital hobbies will soon to be the default play pattern.”

Puzzles and puzzle games are famously singular endeavors. Crosswords and Sudoku puzzles hardly lend themselves to group play (unless you’re asking for help), and often the only “interaction” comes in tournaments or other forms of competition wherein individuals are pitted against each other in isolation.

The expansion of puzzles and puzzle-games into the mobile market (tablets, smartphones, etc.) has helped solidify this. Whether it’s Angry Birds or our own Classic Word Search iBook, puzzle-solving games remain something of a solitary hobby.

(The big exception to the rule here is, of course, Words With Friends and other Scrabble variants.)

But the similarities between the PuzzleNation community and the gaming community don’t end there.

We too have our “grinders” (those who enjoy one particular game to the exclusion of others, posting impressive monthly scores) and our “aficionados” (those who dabble in all kinds of puzzles, peppering the scoreboards with their name across numerous puzzle variants).

You know, the line separating puzzles and puzzle-games is a tenuous one, and while I’ve spent a good deal of time myself parsing out the differences between the two, it’s always nice to be reminded how much puzzlers and gamers have in common. We’re two very enthusiastic communities with a lot of overlap.

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