“Farmville” joins list of internet addictions
Add “Farmville” to the rapidly-growing list of habit-forming amusements. Psychologists and other healthcare professionals have collected enough anecdotal and case-study data to inspire their warning: Excessive use of Farmville signals a need for intervention and treatment. Farmville, the innocent. sometimes educational and often wonderfully social farming game, best known as a Facebook application, joins a dubiously distinguished list that also includes “World of WarCraft” and Facebook itself. Officials at Zynga, the San Francisco-based producers of the game, report twenty million people regularly tend their virtual farms, devoting an average of fifteen minutes per day to planting and harvesting crops and helping their “neighbors.”
All the signs and symptoms of addiction
Devotion to Farmville can, however, rage out of control. In the two cases that informed the Farmville warning, women showed all the signs and symptoms of addiction. They frequently went without regular meals and sleep, “working” on their farms for up to thirty-six hours at a time. The two women neglected their home and family responsibilities, and both abused their credit cards to purchase equipment and accessories for their virtual farms. Although Farmville costs nothing and users may accumulate virtual dollars for expanding and improving their farms, Zynga does allow users to pay cash for funds that rapidly accelerate the pace and intensity of play. In both cases, the women sought help for their habits only after their families intervened and forced them to acknowledge they had problems.
In the very early days, when the internet first evolved out of the University of Illinois’s “gopher” software, a handful of users joked, “Be careful. The stuff may be habit forming.” Now, healthcare professionals seriously predict “internet addiction” will appear in the next edition of The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Psychological Disorders. Industry experts estimate, every year, American corporations lose 500 million man-hours to internet play and social networking. Although businesses have a few tools for restricting and monitoring employees’ internet use, most have neither time nor resources to control workers’ misappropriation of time on their desktops. Business analysts caution would-be internet marketers and entrepreneurs, “The line between building your business and wasting your own time easily blurs,” and they advise, “Hire customer service representatives to manage your marketing, so that you remain well out of temptation’s reach.”
