Farmville was created by a company called Zynga Mark Pincus is the founder and CEO of Zynga and he is from New York.
FarmVille is a farming social network game developed by Zynga. It is available on the social-networking website Facebook and as an App on the Apple iPhone. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by plowing land, planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, harvesting trees and bushes, and by raising livestock. FarmVille started as a clone of the popular Farm Town, which also featured on Facebook in June 2009, but has since grown to be the social network's most popular application, with over 62 million active users and over 24.6 million Facebook application fans as of September 2010. Ten percent of all Facebook users play it. Despite this, Farmville is still classed by Zynga as being in a "Beta Testing Stage", with "all of [their] players ... currently considered Testers."
On February 4, 2010, Microsoft's MSN Games also launched FarmVille on its website, requiring a Facebook account but not a Windows Live ID in order to play the game. On June 7, 2010, at Apple's WWDC, the CEO of Zynga announced that they were porting FarmVille for the Flash-less iOS platform. It was later released on June 23, 2010 for the iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad.
WHAT IS FARMVILLE ALL ABOUT?
Gameplay
Upon beginning a farm, the player first creates a customizable avatar which may be changed at any point. The player begins with an empty farm and a fixed starting amount of "farm coins", the primary currency in the game. Players also earn XP (experience points) for performing certain actions in the game such as plowing land or buying items. At certain XP benchmarks, the player's level rises. As the player obtains more items and progresses through levels, crops and animals become available to them via the "market" where items can be purchased using either farm coins or "farm cash". Farm cash is earned by leveling up, completing offers or microtransactions
Crops
The main way a player earns farm coins is through harvesting of crops. The player does this by paying coins for plowing a unit of land and for planting crops, such as tomatoes on it, finally harvesting them after a certain amount of time has elapsed. The amount of time it takes for it to mature and how much money it yields when harvested is dependent on the crop planted and is noted on its entry in the "market" dialog.They will wither,or they will be of no use when time has elapsed.to determine how much time,multiply the time with 2.5n (for eg-crops which take 8 hours to grow will wither after 20 hours as 2.5*8=20). However, a player can use farm cash to purchase an "unwither" to rejuvenate the crops or can use a biplane with "instant grow" to cause crops to be immediately available for harvest. Although the biplane can be purchased with coins, this special feature is only available for farm cash. As a player levels up more, crops with a higher payoff and economy will become available.
Livestock and other plants
A player may also buy or receive from friends livestock and trees or bushes, such as cherry trees or chickens, which do not wither but instead become ready for harvest for preset amounts of money a set amount of time from their last harvest.
Social interaction
Like most Zynga games, FarmVille incorporates the social networking aspect of Facebook into many areas of gameplay. Players may invite their friends to be their neighbors, allowing them to perform five actions on each other's farms per day by "visiting" it. Neighbors may also send gifts and supplies to each other, complete specialized tasks together for rewards, and join "co-ops" - joint efforts to grow a certain amount of certain crops.
Gifts
Neighbors may also send gifts to each other in the form of mystery gifts with expensive, but random items, special deliveries with building supplies, or by choosing a particular item to send. They cost the sending user nothing.
Decorations
Decorations can be purchased in the market for coins or cash or can be sent in the form of free gifts.Decorations include many items like buildings, hay bales, fences, nutcrackers, gnomes, flags, topiaries, etc. There are sometimes limited edition items depending on the theme such as a Valentine's Day theme, halloween theme, winter theme, etc. Decorations also give experience points (xp) depending on the cost.
Controversy
Accused scamming
FarmVille had offered users "farm cash" for completing various advertising surveys or signing up for services: for instance, the player would get some virtual currency for signing up for Netflix. However, FarmVille has been accused of scamming its users through misleading offers, such as filling in bogus survey or IQ tests which in fact subscribe the users to an unwanted service which appears on their phone bill or sending them advertisements through email. In a video posted November 9, 2009, Zynga CEO Mark Pincus says "I did every horrible thing in the book too, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this Zwinky toolbar which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it," in regard to criticism about business practices. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch accused Facebook of allowing Zynga's FarmVille to continue these practices because a great deal of the money it gets from such leads is reinvested in ads inside the Facebook network. In response to this negative publicity, Zynga removed all virtual cash offers on 8 November 2009 only on those pages on the main farmville.com website, but at least since July 12, 2010, farmville.com has still offered its virtual cash. Players accessing the game from within Facebook also may see these offers.
More recently, Zynga has been accused of sharing information with advertisers and other internet tracking companies about their users, however, Zynga had denied these accusations.
Originality
FarmVille has also been criticized for being "almost an exact duplicate" of its previously released competitor Farm Town.
Critical reception
In a December 2010 interview with Gamasutra, game designer Jonathan Blow criticized FarmVille for being designed to create an atmosphere of negativity, requiring an unprecedented commitment to the game, and encouraging users to exploit their friends.
Awards
FarmVille won an award at the Game Developer's Conference for the "Best New Social/Online Game" in 2010.
