Farmville grows lazy crop of students

This is getting ridiculous.

I do not care how many lonely stray animals wander onto the farms of you Farmville users. I’m not going to help you rescue them. Please stop asking me to do so.

If you’re one of the hundreds of millions of people in this world that has a Facebook account, you know what I am talking about. If you are not, consider yourself lucky.

Since June of this year, 63.7 million people have added the Farmville application, a real-time simulation that allows players to own and operate their own virtual farm, to their Facebook accounts.

Unfortunately, those 63.7 million users have their in-game achievements published in their friend’s news feeds approximately every five minutes. I find this notification system to be a bit excessive.

Imagine if you were talking to your friends in real life and a group of them started playing handheld video games. You would probably become annoyed if they kept randomly shouting, “I found a black sheep!” or “I leveled up!” In fact, they probably would not be your friends for that much longer.

That is the situation in which I currently find myself.

My friends keep inviting me to play Farmville. I keep declining the invitations. If I wanted to spend my free time farming, I would plant a vegetable garden. That way, when it came time to harvest, I would have food that can actually be eaten.

I think that’s what gets to me the most about this game.

For the sake of argument, let us assume that each of the 63.7 million Farmville users spends just one minute per day playing the game. That is a total of 63.7 million minutes that are wasted worldwide, which converts to 121 years.

Think about that.  At the very minimum, society as a whole is wasting 121 years of manpower every day on this game.

That is in addition to the countless number of hours that people have to spend sifting through the countless notifications they receive in their Facebook news feed.

In a twenty-minute span last Sunday, I received four notifications from the same classmate about their exploits on their farm.

Conversely, I received no notifications from the Amish about their exploits on their farms – the ones with real crops and real animals that provide real people with real food.

You know, if I have a choice in farm-related notifications, I would prefer to receive notifications from the Amish.

I would like Facebook to inform me if there is going to be some sort of famine that will have an impact on the world’s food supply, not if a fictitious, abnormally colored cow is lost and needs my assistance.

But I digress.

Do 63.7 million people really have nothing better to do than play Farmville?

I would like to think that there are things that our society has discovered that would be more enjoyable and more productive than wasting time on this game.

Getting teeth pulled comes to mind.