• DOI:10.1093/ISLE/ISS007
• Corpus ID: 143814456

Back to the Virtual Farm: Gleaning the Agriculture-Management Game

@article{Chang2012BackTT,
  title={Back to the Virtual Farm: Gleaning the Agriculture-Management Game},
  author={Alenda Y. Chang},
  journal={Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment},
  year={2012},
  volume={19},
  pages={237-252}
}

• Alenda Y. Chang
• Published 1 September 2012
• Economics
• Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment

It is a cold and dreary winter morning, and raindrops are pattering away at the windows. But I drag myself out of a warm bed because I know I have wheat and onions to harvest, crops that will wither and die if I yield to the temptation to sleep a few more hours. Pausing only to slide my feet into slippers, I shuffle to my office, settle down at my desk, and press the button to start my computer. Just another day on the farm. Like millions of others across the globe, I have become a dedicated digital farmer in my spare minutes and hours. FarmVille, the game that eventually loads before me, has been touted as the most popular game in the world by the developers at Zynga and Facebook, and still it is far from the only example of virtual agricultural play. Beyond the dozens of “social” farm games like Farm Town, myFarm, Happy Farm, and Sunshine Ranch, there are also hosts of downloadable “casual” games like Farm Mania, Farm Craft, Farm Simulator, and Farmer Jane, and console-based farm games like the extremely popular Harvest Moon series for Nintendo and PlayStation platforms. A website like Big Fish Games hosts over 40 games just with the word “farm” in their titles, and that does not even count the less obvious but still clearly related productions like Country Harvest and Plant Tycoon. Meanwhile, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has reported that less than one percent of the 285-plus million people living in the United States claim farming as an occupation, with only about 960,000 listing farming as their principal occupation. Compare this with the available Facebook user data, which reveals that the