For the record, Forrest and I actually considered implementing this nightmare scenario. He still might be, in fact, but I cannot bring myself to justify an entirely meritless project simply because it actually has the potential to become quite popular. There are others in this world who wouldn’t let such small contrivances stop them.
The goal, in a nutshell, is to make your players feel ashamed to stop playing your game. To artificially inflate some kind of peer-pressure system that keeps them logging on and, ultimately, looking at advertisements. Brian Reynolds would even go so far as to propose that one doesn’t even need to consider fun as a motivator should they be an expert in this. He envisions a game where you start playing because everyone else is doing so, and then you continue playing to keep from losing face, not necessarily because the game is worth your time to begin with. In fact, he seems to have created it.
Me, I didn’t get into Farmville for the same reason I never took up smoking. My initial experience trying it out was horridly counter-intuitive to what I expect from a game. Managing but one cycle of a friends farm meant clicking each cell of a twenty by twenty grid individually, and then waiting for the little character to painstakingly visit them. Then, this procedure had to be repeated to actually plant crops, which would only condemn one to performing the same mind-numbing operation again when they were ready to be harvested. My first and only cigarette turned my respiratory painfully inside-out, an experience I was reminded of after fifteen minutes of this nonsense.
Is it a solid business model? Sure it is. Cocaine dealers have been proving it so for years.
Ja.