Sustainable Thoughts and Ideas: Are Internet Video Games reflecting a pre-programed desire for a connection with the land in humans?

July 28, 2010 
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By Nathan Melson, MS Agricultural Sciences
Written for Living Natural First Magazine February 2010

On one the coldest January nights in recent memory while rendering some pork fat into lard (we wanted to try using or own source of cooking grease), I began pondering the connection it seems that people subconsciously have with the land, or creation in general. It seems to me that deep down most of us may be pre-programmed to have a desire to develop a direct connection with God’s natural world. You may ask, what got me to pondering this issue, and how does that have anything to do with food and farming? Well I started thinking about this last month when I heard on NPR, that the two most popular online video games are on Facebook, an internet based social networking site. Then imagine my surprise, when I learned that these games both have to do with virtual farming. They are Farm Town and Farm Ville. In my mind, the implications of this has everything to do with food and farming. This shows that even folks who are some of the most disconnected from the land are desiring to cultivate, at least virtually, a direct connection with the land. Let me explain.

A few months ago, I had heard about one of these games, Farm Town, through one of my customers who buys bulk grass-only beef. I went over to their house last fall to do a delivery, and while there she started telling me about her virtual farm. She explained how some of her crops had failed, but that she was growing her farm slowly and was focused on diversifying her virtual livestock, just like we do on our actual farm. She even volunteered to give me a demonstration of how the virtual farm game worked, and mentioned that some days she had spent hours virtually farming. I thought this concept was very intriguing especially since she had been spending hours a day playing this game along with talking about it to her Facebook friends, but I didn’t think a lot about this again until I heard the blurb on NPR. Once I heard these statistics on the radio, I had to actually research these video games myself. I wanted to find out what they were and why they were so appealing that some folks would spend quality time interacting with these virtual internet games.

The following is the information that I found about these sites from Wikipedia, which seems to be a decent source for information like this. I’m basically quoting the online encyclopedias summary of these games. “Farm Town is a free, Flash-based browser multiplayer game for the social network platforms Facebook and Myspace. It is social media developed by software company Slashkey and launched in June 2009. The game version number is undisclosed, however updates have been made available every few months, and the current version as of November 20, 2009 has over 60 levels. As of December 15, 2009, there were 18,260,247 monthly users of Farm Town on Facebook alone.”

This is how Wikipedia describes Farm Ville on Facebook. “Farm Ville is a real-time farm simulation game developed by Zynga, available as an application on the social networking website Facebook. The game allows members of Facebook to manage a virtual farm by planting, growing, and harvesting virtual crops, trees, and livestock. Since its launch in June 2009, Farm Ville has become the most popular game application on Facebook with 72,015,037 active users as of December 11, 2009. Farm Ville started as a duplicate of the popular Farm Town on Facebook.”

In both of these games you start out with a minimal farm of so many acres, and you can do virtually whatever you want to with your virtual farm from crops to livestock over time as you sell off your harvests and put your “FarmCash” to use. Some of these game users are actually spending real money via Paypal to advance levels and purchase virtual infrastructure and virtual inputs, instead of just playing the game out overtime and using virtual harvest sales to do these activities. If these folks are spending real money on this virtual farm world, I wonder how many of them we could get to come out to an actual farm to buy their food, work in a CSA program, volunteer their homes as local food distribution points, or become interns or employees of direct marketing, local, sustainable farms. Wouldn’t it be awesome if direct marketing farmers could just tap 10% of this virtual farming interest as customers or potential sources of farm labor and local food activism. That small percentage would be over 8 million people. That is over 4 times as many people (potential customers) as there are farmers in the United States today. Granted quite a few of these users are outside the US, but still imagine the impact this would have. The internet truly has become a boon for local food and farming. What is happening today probably could not have happened 20 years ago. Direct marketing farmers like me probably should be thanking Farm Town and Farm Ville for what they are doing for local, responsible food production whether these companies know it or not.

In my opinion, this says that our modern society has a great draw to be connected to creation, the land, the animals, the plants, and where their food is originating. This reflects almost directly with what we are seeing in the societies of most first-world countries. More and more educated folks want to know where their food is coming from, what is going into it, who is raising it, and whether or not it is being produced in a responsible and sustainable manner. I believe that these online virtual farming video games and their popularity are telling farmers like myself that the time is ripe for direct marketing farmers, healthy, responsible food, and natural systems agriculture to come to the forefront of food, fiber, and possibly fuel production. The people, potential customers, are waiting. After all, how can you argue with over 80 million online gamers. I’m not sure how to use this to my benefit, but you can bet I’m going to be trying to figure it out. If you’re a direct marketing farmer, I’d encourage you to do the same. If you’re one of these gamers (aka: a consumer) I would encourage you to get involved with a real farm as well and support your local direct marketing farmers and ranchers. As farmers/ranchers, policy makers, and consumers let’s not drop the ball on the potential for the truly sustainable “Next Green Revolution.” Research this yourselves, you will see that I didn’t just manufacture these statistics. Farm On!