N. Cannon EDTECH 597 4/14/2013 For this weeks game, I selected the Facebook/Zynga game of Farmville 2.

Having played Zoo World several years earlier, I knew what to expect with these games. I knew that it would be engaging, colorful, semi-realistic, creative, collaborative and an addictive gaming experience. With this experience, I usually do my best to avoid playing these games since I know how time can just get away from you when playing. With my schedule, I knew that there is not a lot of time for these addicting games. However, as soon as I started playing, flashbacks of staying up late to get that extra reward were soon becoming reality once again. Farmville 2 is a semi-realistic game where you do (as far as I have unlocked at the writing of this paper) the following actions on a regular basis: Plot and harvest a variety of crops depending on what you want or need to grow (although you do not have to wait months for them.) Breed a variety of different animals who (unrealistically) then give you items to help make your farm successful. Structures that need to be built, some of which cannot be created unless you get help from friends. Food that needs to be prepared and then sold for gold coins to imaginary people. Visit other farms in order for your farm to be more successful.

The game brings you along gradually where you are not trying to create elaborate dishes or growing difficult crops until you have the experience to unlock these items. There is also a visually pleasing to the eye feature to the game where you can adjust your farm to look just right. The more you play the game, the more experience you get with these main features and the quicker you level up. Soon you are thrown into the world of mini missions where the local grocer asks you to grow certain items within a 24-hour period in order to help fill their store. With all this in mind, a key component to the game is the social networking that is necessary amongst the farmers. One example of this is the Baby Bottle that is required in order to help your baby animals grow into adult animals on your farm that contribute essential baking ingredients. There are two ways to get these Baby Bottles. Either ask your Facebook and/or Farmville 2 friends for Baby Bottles OR actually spend real money to purchase these bottles from the free-game designers. If I were playing this game for fun and

not because it was assigned, I would never even consider paying to get the rewards quicker. Since this is an assignment, I would be lying if I said I did not consider making a payment knowing that I would probably not play the game after the assignment was done. I was intrigued by what the prizes were that I could earn and what new levels I would reach. Hogle talked about something similar to this when they said, If a learner is not comfortable i n a given environment, it cannot be expected that he or she will learn as well there as in an environment which they prefer. I mentioned earlier how I chose Zoo World and Farmville 2 was the only game out of the four that somewhat intrigued me and I was not willing to lose another six months of my life recreating my Zoo World experience. Farmville 2 does do a good job of helping people keep to a schedule and making sure that the crops are harvested and the animals are fed on time. This part of everyday life is not knowledge I am missing, but I can see how for others it could be. According to Malones paper, the way to engage learners curiosity is to present just enough information to make their existing knowledge seem incomplete, inconsistent, or unparsimonious. Kline and Sujaee talked about this phenomenon when they wrote, Students come from varying background and experience and they should be allowed to progress their learning at their own pace. Farmville 2 is successful at this because if you want to spend all day playing or just once a day, the game adjusts for you! Malone stated that challenge, fantasy and curiosity are three essential categories for a successful gaming experience. Farmville 2, and many other games that I have enjoyed playing, have these three features successfully integrated throughout the game. Whether it is the challenge of finding certain items or crops, or the fantasy of growing blueberries in 2-minutes, or the curiosity of What would happen if I click here, Farmville 2 is another addicting game that will be around for a long time.

References
Hogle, J. G. (1996). Considering Games as Cognitive Tools: In Search of Effective Edutainment. Web site: ftp://twinpinefarm.com/pub/pdf. Khine, M., Sujaee, M. (2008). Core Attributes of Interactive Computer Games and Adaptive Use for Edutainment. In: Pan, Z., Cheok, D. A. D., Muller, W., El Rhalibi, A. (eds.) Transactions on Edutainment I. LNCS, vol. 5080, 191-205. Springer, Heidelberg. Malone, T. W. (1980). What makes things fun to learn? heuristics for designing instructional computer games. GSMALL '80 Proceedings of the 3rd ACM SIGSMALL symposium and the first SIGPC symposium on Small systems .