What I Learned From FarmVille - So You Don’t Have To Play It
I was considering writing one of these for Frontierville, since it was scarily effective at sucking me in.  I have been playing it for mental breaks during the coding for AR, and have spent... crikey... $140 on it.<p>One taste of this: they had a Thanksgiving mission, which required (as the fifth stage of the mission) you to gather 40 of item A, 40 Bs, 40 Cs, 40 Ds, and 40 Es.  ABCDE are all not available through gameplay : the only way to get them is to get your friends to give you one or to give one to a friend (gifts are symmetrical).  "Giving" means sending them a Facebook request.<p>Each of these items was available for 2 horseshoes (the scarce currency which can be bought for real money), plus there was a final item which cost something like 30 horseshoes.  So, if you didn't spend a few weeks spamming everyone you knew on Facebook, but you still wanted to complete your Thanksgiving quest, you just had to click the buy-for-Horseshoes button a few hundred times, and bam, quest complete.<p>I did that.  Only afterwards did I do the math: I had bought 1,000 horseshoes for $70.  350 horseshoes is... $24.50.  I just spent twenty five dollars <i>to close a dialog box</i> and get a brief flash of text on my screen inviting me to spam my friends with the fact that I had closed the dialog box successfully.<p>(The rewards for the quest are immaterial -- FrontierVille doesn't tell you what they are in advance.  It turn out to be stuff much, much less good than what you could otherwise acquire for 350 horseshoes.)<p>It isn't a good game.  But it is <i>compelling</i>.<p>Still, I have taken one lesson from Zynga that I am almost certainly going to use: they show a progress bar on the first screen, with progress totally based on taking actions which benefit Zynga.  (Installed app, get updates, bookmark app, Like app.)  Your reward for filling the bar is to have a full bar.  This is <i>brilliant</i>.  I'm stealing it to make my signup page shorter -- I'll just defer the non-critical parts until later and make successful completion a requirement for filling the bar.