An Idiomatic Guide to Play FarmVille

Guest post by Shilpa Garg

This post is a part of a challenge. A challenge to write a post using Idioms and Proverbs.

It needs no introduction. It is a virtual farming game which is played by over  73.8 million active users.

Even I am cut from the same cloth. Why? You may ask. Well the reasons are many and learnings are many too.

You may fall in love with it too!!

So, here’s a fun idiomatic guide to play FarmVille!!

It’s a very simple game and right from day 1, you take to farming like a duck to water.

And you find that you are not alone, there are soooo many like you, all on a lookout for a ….neighbor… well, birds of a feather flock together, on the farm!

It’s not a solitary game. But is a social game. You need neighbors who give you a hand in a lot of activities viz fertilizing your crops, feeding your chickens, sending gifts…

It trains you to race against the clock and attain mastery of exclusive crops in a given time frame example the Super Growth Pumpkins. 

The early bird catches the worm, that is so very true in FarmVille. Claiming the mystery eggs, or collectables or the lost animals early, gives you the advantage. So, finders keepers, losers weepers! 

You learn at FarmVille that procrastination is the thief of time. You delay harvesting your crop and it will wither soon.

At the end of the day, when you see your farm, with all the activities done(plouging land, planting seeds, harvesting crops, trees and animals, fertilizing crops, sending gifts etc), you truly feel like the cat that got the cream!

You visit your neighbors farm, see a decoration or the new design pattern at the farm, and you take a leaf out his/her book farm!

A picture is worth a thousand words… one look at a farm, and you get a glimpse of its owner. A well decorated farm or a shabby farm or a cluttered farm, each tells a story!

A friend in need is a friend indeed, and this you come to know especially during barn raising!!

Harvesting your crop is truly satisfying and you can’t stop but think “I am in for a penny, in for a pound.”

You start believing, “The bigger, the better!!”…Bigger farm, bigger number of trees and animals, bigger number of gifts, bigger number of neighbors…

You understand that, Rome was not built in a day and similarly it takes a lot of time and effort to gain XPs, FV Cash and Coins and mastery for various crops and move up on the game levels.

When you are on your farm, time flies. You are surprised to see that the minutes and hours have passed very quickly!

You might have loads of goodies on your farm, but even a small new different thing on your neighbor’s farm makes you yearn for it. It’s true, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence.

You learn that you should never look a gift horse in the mouth and instead accept a gift even if you do not want or need it.

So, all of you who are still not farmers, remember “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”. It is not healthy to spend all of your time working and never relaxing or playing…so come join us on FarmVille! Because, we believe, the more the merrier.

You say, never played a virtual game??

Come on, there is a first time for everything!!

FarmVille is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social networking website Facebook.

The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees, and livestock. Since its launch in June 2009, FarmVille has become the most popular game application on Facebook with 73.8 million active users in January 2010.

- Article written by Shilpa Garg. To visit Shilp’s blog, click here.