Farmville

If you use Facebook you have probably seen ads for Farmville or dabbled in it yourself. If you don't use the F-book you have no idea what I'm talking about.

Farmville is a game you can play for free through facebook. You get a gridded piece of virtual land. You can plant an increasing array of virtual crops as you progress in experience, as well as acquire livestock and ornaments and plant trees. Crops, animals, and trees give you money. They are simple, risk free investments. It is absurdly addictive.

The game progresses as a kind of well-graphicked algebra problem in which you, the player, try to figure out which plants--factoring in their time til harvest, their cost, and their payoff--you want to put in the ground. It is the way capitalism would work if it were a single variable problem. Farmville is only about supply. There is an infinite and continuous demand, so if you grow all soy beans all the time you get the same return every time. Isn't that wonderful? By the same token, there can be no exploitation of crop failures, of speculators, of market manipulation. You can't game the system.

My personal feeling toward Farmville is that it is a harmless addiction that restores logic and order to my largely disordered and anxious existence. (Weightlifting works in a similar way but, as with all empirical processes, is given to moments of independent fluctuation). I am not sure what to make of it as a critical or reactionary program. As I have shown, it both idealizes capitalism as the best possible world, and it slaps down the actual working of capitalism as anathema to that ideal. In the same way, one can continually harvest products from virtual trees and animals without destroying them (milking the cows, getting eggs from chickens, finding truffles with the pigs). This is both deeply idealistic and ideological. To borrow from the Beach Boys, yeah, that would be nice--but does imagining it make us closer or farther? And does the addictive pull to return to the screen, to plan one's virtual acriculture around a relationship to the computer, similarly entail a coming together between a carbon- and a silicon-based operating system? Or does it underscore how an organic veneer is necessary to allow the one to "pass" in the world of the other? Whatever the answer to these questions, many, many people are living that experience right now.