What I Learned in Farmville

I'm just doing a little brainstorming here. What's up with this?

On Facebook there are lots of games that people can play, primarily aimed at socializing. Fine. One well-known game is Farmville. The concept is that you create your own farm and then work it. You plow fields and plant seeds and when they grow you harvest them and make money to do more. You can grow trees of all varieties and, when they are ready, you can harvest them and make money. There are all sorts of things that are on a farm. There are barns and animals and ... stuff, lots of stuff. Nice.

So, here you are with a nice farm. You grow stuff. You have chickens and get their eggs. You have cows and milk them. You have goats and you milk them. You have calves and you pet them. Oh, wait ... pet them? Um ... okay. You have pigs and you collect truffles from them. Okay, now wait a minute. How many farmers have pigs to collect truffles from them? You have turkeys and you collect feathers from them. Now that's just about enough of that!

You see, on a normal farm there are some animals that contribute by adding things (eggs, milk, dairy products) and there are other animals that contribute ... by dying (meat). There isn't a big market for turkey feathers or even horsehair (another product you can gather from horses). Gathering down feathers from geese or ducks is fine, but you typically gather them from dead geese or ducks, not live ones. In other words, Farmville is not presenting the operations of a real farm.

Now, of course it's a game, so who cares? Well, like I said, I'm just brainstorming here. Why do you suppose the makers of the game did not include the slaughter (and raising) of animals in the game? It wouldn't have to be graphic. They could even make the "ripe time" the time it takes to produce a replacement set of animals to slaughter, so it wouldn't be graphic at all. So why is it that they don't allow the slaughter of animals on a game intended to depict a farm?

I wonder if it could be the PETA effect. You know, who wants to face the rage of PETA for the artificial slaying of artificial animals in an artificial environment? I get it. And maybe that's it. I suspect, however, that it's not that at all. I suspect it's the general user who is in view. We civilized folk have become so accustomed to buying chickens and beef and turkey and such in the store that we've become disconnected with our own food source. We don't like the idea of killing ducks and chickens and such for food. What's wrong with you? We're almost baffled when PETA complains about Kentucky Fried Chicken serving chickens because, after all, don't they buy their meat from the store like everyone else? What's the big deal? And modern times have further removed us from the actual source by packaging it. Most of us don't buy whole chickens to cook. Nowadays you'll see advertisements from Swansons (the frozen meal folk) that say, "Don't eat out! Have a good, homecooked meal with Swansons!" So we have pretty packaged frozen food that resembles some sort of meat along with everything else and to actually think that stuff all the way through to a dead cow or chicken is just a long way to go.

Now, do I care about Farmville's depiction of a farm? No, not really. I just see it as a metaphor for life. The guy who says "I have never cheated on my wife" doesn't see the lust he had toward a woman he only saw a picture of in a sexual act he's never even considered on a computer monitor as adultery. It is, but he doesn't see it. To be fair, the "faithful" wife who never even looks at another man but lives out a fantasy life in her favorite Harlequin romance novels is just as guilty. Some couples even share the vices, watching pornographic images together without considering that they're watching someone else having sex. But who needs porn for that? We have scantily clad people parading in front of us on prime time TV doing things that would be vile if we did them and we call it "entertainment". Like Farmville, we allow the packaging to remove us so far from the reality that we don't even see it anymore. Then we wonder why our world is so confused about terms like "marriage" and "fidelity" and "sexual purity" and where we get our food ...