Real-time. Yes, every time you play Farmville, you set yourself a task to do in a day, three days or one week. And when you harvest, you can plant again. It's just one of the many joyful ways Farmville controls your life.
Other tricks:
- The game NEVER FUCKING ENDS. You could level to level ten million if you cared to.
- Gauges and meters are constantly going up. You're always just about to win a level or gain a new pink pig or whatever the shit.
- Frontierville adds "energy" - you get an energy point every fifteen minutes and there's a cap of like 20 energy points. So, if you don't play every five hours, you are LOSING PRECIOUS POTENTIAL ENERGY POINTS.
- Frontierville also adds "sets" of five items that give prizes. The trick is, the four first items drop pretty easily. The fifth almost NEVER drops.
- The game ropes you into getting all your friends to play it, and ropes all your friends to keep reminding you to replay it to RECEIVE GIFTS and GIVE GIFTS in a neverending double-ended pyramid scheme.
The worse thing is all the game devs that think this is incredible genius and are rendering the whole thing into BOOKS to make as many games in the same style as possible because they're POPULAR and therefore GOOD. Nevermind that right now for each successful casual shovelware there are twenty games that are crappy AND unpopular.
Zynga has reduced game developers to fucking marketers. Or worse. Drug pushers.
