{"id":1275,"date":"2010-06-18T23:49:20","date_gmt":"2010-06-19T06:49:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1275"},"modified":"2010-06-18T23:49:20","modified_gmt":"2010-06-19T06:49:20","slug":"farmville-in-the-real-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/?p=1275","title":{"rendered":"FarmVille in the real world"},"content":{"rendered":"

FarmVille is, I hear, some kind of game one plays on Facebook. Well, not just one; the game has over 82 million active users as of May 2010<\/a>. I’ve never tried it myself, so I don’t really know what makes it so fun or addictive. And although I knew of it in passing, I thought it was confined to Facebook.<\/p>\n

Not so.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>FarmVille (and its sister games such as Mafia Wars) have entered the real world, the one that you and I live in, through (of all places) 7-11. I was driving along a week ago when I noticed this billboard. That’s right, if you buy a Slurpee, you get a “virtual gift” in the FarmVille world. The gift turns out to be 200 “FarmVille dollars.” Am I the only one who finds this utterly bizarre? I’m aware that people buy and sell virtual goods for real dollars in Second Life. I know that some MMORPG players pay others real dollars to generate game commodities like experience points or gold. But for these virtual objects and services to obtain a “real world” value, they have to reach a certain level of social dissemination and perceived value in a large real-world community. And certainly, 82 million people is a large community — I hadn’t realized just how many people were playing this game.<\/p>\n

I now wonder how much of an incentive 200 $FV is. What’s that worth to anyone? Is there an exchange rate with USD? To those of you who’ve played FarmVille: would the promise of 200 $FV be enough to persuade you to buy a Slurpee?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

FarmVille is, I hear, some kind of game one plays on Facebook. Well, not just one; the game has over 82 million active users as of May 2010. I’ve never tried it myself, so I don’t really know what makes it so fun or addictive. And although I knew of it in passing, I thought […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,14,10],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1275"}],"version-history":[{"count":8,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1283,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1275\/revisions\/1283"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1275"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1275"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wkiri.com\/today\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1275"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}