Stone age memes: The computer in my underpants

I always liked that scene in Mission Impossible ^[1] where Tom Cruise is lowered into the CIA computer. There’s all kinds of suspense ^[2] having to do with external constraints like being suspended from a cable while hacking into the computer and not being able to make any noise and so on. As any computer user knows, though, what’s amazing about the scene is that Cruise manages to get the computer to do what he wants. All those external plot-heightening devices are nothing compared to the mundane suspense of going to work and trying to do something with a computer at all. Think about the nature of the hacking in this movie: it’s not chaos-loving mischief making. It’s trying to get control of the bloody thing: we all know about this. Yesterday it did what you needed and today you’re there with Cruise, hanging from the wire, and trying to break in…

I’m actually leading up to talking about the new social game on Facebook called FarmVille ^[3], so bear with me while I wend my way from the classy spy thriller to the compost-free fields of my virtual farm.

In 1984, my university sponsored a lecture by one of the architects of the computer revolution, who predicted that our world would soon resemble the GE Carousel of Progress ^[4] that I had seen at the 1963 World’s Fair, but with personal computers everywhere, and we would all learn to program them, changing our lives for the better.

My dear colleague Jane Stellwagen fell asleep, snoring gently a few seats away. We had all heard this before, and computers looked different to those of us “in the trenches” of the computer revolution.

By then I had already been working for a couple of years to teach the use of PC’s to my colleagues; there was a strong core of “early adopters ^[5],” but most were resistant, even hostile. Computers were complicated and hard to use, and it was as difficult to get them to do what your really wanted as it was to want what they really did. As a writer of code and a teacher of documentation, I had struggled with the engineers who designed computers, so I knew that they weren’t really interested in solving these problems. Today these things are still true, though there are exceptions, and FarmVille may well point the way to their nature.

As we left that lecture in 1984, I said to the person next to me “People aren’t all going to embrace computers (as the learned speaker predicted), because they’re too hard to use. Instead, we’re going to put computers in everything. Your TV already is a computer. Soon your shoes will be computers ^[6]. Your child’s teddy bear will be a computer ^[7]. Your dog will be a computer ^[8]. And there’ll be a computer in your underpants ^[9]. And you’ll know how to use them because you already know how to use those things.”

It’s a big whoop how smart I was in 1984, but that’s not the reason I’m telling you this story. The point is what I wasn’t able to see then, even though all of my predictions have come true. Namely that, as a result of these changes, it’s pretty hard to tell which parts of our world are real any more, if you define “real” as not generated by a computer. When little Sluggo is hugging that computer-enhanced teddy Bear what is he reacting to? The ages-old maternal substitute or the clever interface?

There are actually name for the ideas I’m bringing up here. The field is called “ambient intelligence ^[10],” and refers to

… devices [that] work in concert to support people in carrying out their everyday life activities, tasks and rituals in easy, natural way … As these devices grow smaller, more connected and more integrated into our environment, the technology disappears into our surroundings until only the user interface remains perceivable by users.

The experience of using such a device is called VR Presence. The term was actually developed to task about how people interact with avatars ^[11], but I think the idea applies as well to (non-virtual) teddy bears. Here is how Matthew Lombard ^[12] defines it:

Presence is a psychological state or a subjective perception in which the participant, although working with an instrument, fails to understand the role of technology in his experience. Although the subject might assert (except in extreme cases) that he is using technology, up to a certain point, or a certain degree, the subject gets involved in the task, in objects, entities and event perception, as if technology was not present.

This meaning of presence is derived from telepresence ^[13], an idea first depicted in Robert Heinlein’s 1950 short story Waldo ^[14]. “Presence” was first used as a technical term by Marvin Minsky ^[15] in 1980 to refer to the illusion of being in a physically remote or simulated site.

Show of hands now. How many of you still believe this column is about FarmVille? How many of you remember that I asserted that 700 words or so ago? I always like to play with people’s expectations, so if you still have any, here goes.

FarmVille does not by itself have VRPresence, but I would venture to say that as a module embedded in the social network, it contributes to the “presence” of participants in Facebook. And here’s how.

If you are not familiar with it, FarmVille is a game you play on Facebook. You have a farm and you raise animals, grow crops, pull weeds, and so on. You invite your Facebook friends to be neighbors and you exchange gifts with them. You send each other items that will help build a farm, mostly livestock and trees.

As a virtual farm it’s kind of lame, though it does have some charming aspects. The crops are beautiful, and they grow. For my first couple of times on FarmVille, I was mesmerized by the metamorphoses of my strawberries and soybeans. Fully grown soybeans are especially beautiful, though if you leave your strawberries unharvested, they wither repulsively.

Weeds, crows and the graphic death of neglected crops is about all the bad that can happen to you in FarmVille, though. I kept expecting Oregon Trail ^[16]-like messages. I imagined “You failed to rotate your crops and so your fields are drained of nutrients. Your topsoil has blown away and you are now a character on the HBO series Carnivale. ^[17] Hope you’re good on your back or strong with your hands.” But no.

FarmVille is not a skill-based game. You have to check back regularly and spend minor amounts of time caring for your farm, mostly harvesting and planting crops. It’s about nurture, not learning, and certain aspects of the farm experience are sacrificed to that, though there are people who “really get into it.” Here’s a quote from one ^[18]:

avisatsuma ^[19]: its not easy being a farmer. I’ve lost so many crops because I thought it was okay to go to bed, but it’s fine, I’ve learnt not to plant things until the morning so I can harvest them before I go to bed. My cows nearly readyyy! :) I havent been to school in 3 days. I’m not getting into college. Back to my farms. Goodbyeee.

Actually, FarmVille is more like a kind of Tamagotchi ^[20], the little electronic gizmo kids carried around with them and took care of in the nineties. They still exist; now you can get them with a touchscreen ^[21]. In fact there has been a menagerie of programs to chose from if you want to nurture something: Nintendo Petz ^[22] is an adventure game you undertake with a pet you design. Another game called Nintendogs ^[23] allows you to train your pet and enter it into contests. In addition, there are web-based digital petsites ^[24] where you can breed your pets and transfer the resulting animals to other sites to play in story-based adventures. You also find a virtual community who share interest in these activities.

FarmVille does a bit better with crops than with critters – at least you have to plow the land and sow the seed. But with animals, there is no cost for raising them but time– you don’t feed or water them! And the same now suddenly ominous-looking sickle appears for “collecting” animals as for harvesting crops. Are we gathering truffles or makin’ bacon?

Another of the missing elements is animal breeding. If you want your critters to do it “like they do on the Discovery Channel ^[25]” you’re out of luck. As a result, you can’t have friendly veterinarian James Herriot ^[26] come to the farm and turn that breech-positioned calf around while delivering words of wisdom. (See, I know a lot about real farming!) There is a minister ^[27] on the web who has extracted moral lessons from FarmVille but these are more at the level of depth of All I really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten ^[28] than what Herriot would say.

As with any new-ish thing, there’s plenty of puzzlement on the Internet about FarmVille and whether it’s worthwhile. It seems easy to participate, but people are ambivalent about the results. There’s a lot of discussion ^[29] out there about the “premium” level, where you buy FarmVille money to acquire the best goods and the experience points that go with them.

The sale of “virtual products” may be unfamiliar to this community of more casual gamer, though it is well known in other groups, like those playing Sims, Warcraft and Second Life. It has also been a highly profitable area in Chinese gaming ^[30], which is reputed to be ahead of us in this kind of venture. On Facebook discussion pages, people seem pretty adamant that “its (sic) ridiculous that you have to pay with real money to get fake money!!” Yet the income of Zynga corporation suggests that there are many who do just that. As it says on mediahyperopia ^[31]:

Zynga systems are not just providing the system out of the goodness of their heart, they reported $2 Billion in virtual goods sales (VGS / where players spend real dollars to buy virtual currency or items in the game) across their gaming line in 2008. FarmVille only launched in June 30 and the game is theorised to have catalysed higher consumer involvement than any previous Zynga development ultimately leading to increased VGS.

It may be that this economic aspect of the game has annoyed people and turned them to hacking, or maybe it’s just that there are people who’ll hack anything. There is abundant discussion out there of how to hack FarmVille, but most of it seems to amount to lame tips. Facebook Hacker has a relatively good page ^[32] called “FarmVille Tips, Hints, Cheats and Hacks” and Wonderhowto has a page of tips and hacks ^[33] for the game, including videos on how to speed up the game ^[34], how to hack your money and experience ^[35]. Some of these methods require the purchase of “cheat” software.

I tried one ^[36] simple technique which involved trapping your farmer in an enclosure made of bales of hay so you could hoe, sow and harvest without her ambling over to each plot. It worked, but I kind of like watching her as she works, and I felt a little S&M locking her up like that. Zynga seems to patrol pretty regularly because a lot of the bugs people were exploiting have disappeared, and some of the (probably more successful) videos telling us how to hack things have been taken down because of a “copyright claim” by the corporation ^[37].

More interesting are the various analyses of profits per crop per hour. The best of these are “The Personal Economics of FarmVille ^[38],” “The Personal Economics of FarmVille, Part 2 ^[39],” and “Posh Daddy’s Guide ^[40]” (Excel required). Muskar also has a pretty good levelling guide ^[41].

The people why try to “achieve” in FarmVille miss the point, though. It’s a social network game, and the goal is to spend time with friends, not to reenact “he who dies with the most toys still dies.” These games in social networks are the up-and-coming thing ^[42], and they represent a changed model from the solitary gamer or even the band of Geeks giving up their lives to World of Warcraft. To explain the rise of these embedded games, Benedetti ^[43] quotes Mark Pincus, founder and CEO of fast-rising game company Zynga which makes FarmVille:

… games used to be inherently social things – back when board and card games existed in the real world and we gathered around a real table with real friends to play them. … with the rise of MyFace and Spacebook (sic), all your friends are now gathered online in one convenient place.

The point is to build an experience economy ^[44], where what you gain isn’t outside of you: it’s a series of inner, mental events. What I find so interesting about FarmVille hacks is not that they are so lame, even lamer than the game. The hacking is just a misguided attempt to play FarmVille as if were a real game, and it is not. Farmville is an overlay on Facebook. That is, Facebook itself is a metaphor of sorts – it’s a cross between a database and a messageboard, where you participate to gain strokes from others – and FarmVille is a layer of metaphor on top of that.

Virginia Heffernan’s column last Sunday ^[45] reported that people are getting fed up with Facebook, and FarmVille may be one of the attempts to correct the ennui arising from amassing hundreds of strangers who post stuff you mostly don’t care about, like my annoying constant updates that I won meaningless distinctions like the Treehugger ribbon in Farmville. (Annual report’s coming up: do you think I can put the ribbon in my resume?) I don’t know if social network games will revitalize an experience users are tired of, but it has to be better than turning Sims into zombies ^[46].

FarmVille reminds me of the old days where you stood around the water cooler on Monday morning talking about what happened on Bonanza the night before night. It was a chance to be part of a little community harmlessly swapping views and theories about what they saw. It didn’t change the dynamic between the participants, but it reinforced a small thing they had in common.

The burgeoning of cable TV channels means we don’t have that experience with TV any more, and maybe part of the allure of FarmVille is that it gives us a safe little community again. Lolfed has some similar musings in, “Measuring our GDP, in Sheep, on Facebook ^[47]“:

Are we, as Rousseau might have liked to think, coming to the realization that the best path to bliss is to explore our peaceful agrarian roots? …Has the desire for stability manifested itself in some kind of desire for radical self-sufficiency, consisting of a barn and herd of cows and government-stabilized milk prices?

There by the water cooler, though, maybe you watched The Judy Garland show on Sunday night, so you tried to fake a response to the events on the Ponderosa. And in fact some of the so-called “social interaction” in FarmVille is actually fake. Supposedly your neighbors “ask you for help” with their farming problems, but actually it’s just the game asking for them. They could be lying dead while you wander through their fields picking weeds.