Monday, March 29, 2010

Councilman Booted for Tending to FarmVille

Now if you play Farmville great, I completely understand. I love computer games but for what ever reason FarmVille has never gave grabbed my attention. Some headlines about this game have:

1.  Anyone who plays FarmVille knows it is critical to harvest your crops on time. But maybe it's not as important as administrating the second-largest city in Bulgaria. Dimitar Kerin was voted off a committee assignment by the Plovdiv City Council for his inability to stop tending his virtual crops on the Facebook game during meetings.

2.FarmVille, a free online farm simulation game available through Facebook, has been accused of generating "hundreds of millions of dollars" from unsuspecting players, many of whom are children. (not sure where the parents are?)

3. Farmville, a simple, cute game where players plant crops, raise animals, and harvest them for profit, is the brainchild of Mark Pincus, CEO of San Francisco-based casual game company Zynga. "I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away," Pincus told attendees at the tech startup mixer. "I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn’t get rid of it...We did anything possible just to just get revenues so that we could grow and be a real business."

So I guess buyer beware and perhaps inform your children not to click the extras so you don't get stuck with the bill!

2 comments:

  1. I'm a recovering Farmville addict.

    When I started getting out of bed in the middle of the night to harvest, instead of sleeping, I knew it was time to quit.

    I never spent real cash on anything, so I guess that makes me less of an addict than some.

    I'm way too cheap/frugal to spend money on virtual stuff.

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  2. It's THAT addicting??? Really??? Oh My Gosh!!!

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