As all Farmville-Lovers in my neighbourhood already know (because Farmville makes sure you socialize) – I am evaluating the great game Farmville now.
To learn how to get rid of it, once I want to in the future, I googled for “Quit Farmville”. Amanda Farrell posted some 10 rules there about how to quit. Quite interestingly, I already found the game mechanics to be seducing, and I reacted by looking for stuff that grows for many days and has a good return-of-invest (like peach trees…).
Amanda has similar observations, but it seems I found the keys after 60 minutes of gametime. Well, of course some years of real-time strategy gaming may help to learn a game.
And most important: this whole experiment reminds me a lot of my Ultima Online addiction which I nourished sometimes around 1997-2000 while I studied Information Science. Quitting Ultima was an amazing experience. Amanda’s blog post contains the same strategies I found back then for myself: learn the effectiveness of the game and the motivation and use it in the real world.
going back to help Ingrid’s farm…for science and to spend quality time on the couch together.