Farmville is a real time simulation game developed for Facebook that allows users to grow virtual gardens and crops and harvest them; Farmville is also the most popular game on Facebook at the moment.
So, because Farmville is extremely popular with so many people does this mean that those people will actually make the effort to plant and maintain a real garden? The answer is most likely no, although so many people love growing a garden online it takes so little effort to do so, all they have to do is click a button and everything is done for them, so why go get dirty outside messing about with real dirt and plants.
There might be a few people though who have actually been inspired to go out and buy vegetable seeds to start a magnificent vegetable garden and that could be one instance of Farmville teaching people something useful, but otherwise Farmville seems to make people too lazy to go out and do the real thing.
Of course, any person who is naturally very curious about things will wonder what it would be like to harvest their own garden after having played Farmville. However, it is interesting to note that although the game may inspire interest in many people, it does not mean that it will inspire them to actually go out and do it for real. Some would try, perhaps, but will soon find that it just isn’t something they enjoy doing - it’s much harder in real life than it seems in the game.
The point is that although the game is very attractive and addictive, most of the people who play it know that it isn’t at all like the real thing - there are many factors that influence the success of growing a garden, and many of these factors are absent in the game. Perhaps the greatest attractive feature of the game is the fact that you can create the garden of your dreams without having to worry about all these “real-world” factors.
