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Has it really been a few years since FarmVille smashed Facebook's traffic records, peaking with a monthly audience of over 80 million active users worldwide? According to the analytics platform App Data, this most legendary and notorious of free-to-play games now ranks 92nd, light-years behind latter-day blights on our attention spans like Candy Crush Saga and Clash of Clans. How the mighty fall - and yet, if FarmVille's cereal box vistas of nodding crops and twinkly-eyed livestock seem laughably outmoded, its heart beats on in the shape of our unabated thirst for incremental virtual gain. Games that are actually about farming remain relatively few, for all Excalibur's efforts to infest the high street with combine harvester simulators, but games in which you "farm", gathering handfuls of XP or cash from slain opponents who conveniently respawn when out of view, are very much the norm.I enjoy a good old-fashioned resource run myself - it's a little like a warm-up jog, building muscle for a marathon boss encounter - but I think there are all sorts of problems with "farming". The superficial objection is that it's a bizarre choice of term. I mean, take a minute to think about what you're actually doing when you "farm". In Destiny, it's blasting a path to Crota's lair and hacking him apart, over and over, in hopes of that one Engram drop that yields a fancy rocket launcher (which will then marginally speed up the process of blasting a path to Crota's lair and hacking him apart, over and over). In Bloodborne, it's rampaging down from the Great Bridge to Central Yharnam, ripping into deformed yet recognisably human townsfolk for the sake of a few measly blood vials.
At the risk of conjuring up that dubious old bogeyman, the supposed "negative impact" of gaming on player behaviour, what does it say about us that repeatedly offing passable simulations of living things has come to seem so casual, so mundane? Wouldn't "slaughtering" cut a bit closer to the bone than "farming"? Or how about "massacring"?
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