四海为家

A recent post on ChinaSMACK has the headline “‘Happy Farms’ Game Destroys Chinese Jobs, Relationships”. From the post:

Another story happened in Nanping, Guangzhou province. It is about a couple who had been together for 4 years. But after they started playing the game “Happy Farms”, their relationship was on the rocks. The boy called Xiao Ke had to work late, so he told his girlfriend to set the alarm and help him manage the farm while he was gone. But unfortunately, Ke’s girlfriend was pregnant, so one of the nights, the alarm didn’t wake her up. When the next day came, Ke found that not only did his girlfriend not harvest the crops, a lot of his crops were also stolen by other players. Ke got really angry and had a huge fight with the girl. In the end, they broke up and got rid of their baby.

Sounds pretty extreme. For those who haven’t yet been introduced to the game, it’s a pretty simple online game, where each player has their own farm plot on which to plant fruits and vegetables, kill weeds and insects, and harvest the fruits of their labor. That’s pretty much all there is to it — the more plants you grow and harvest, the more points and money you get, and as your points increase and you earn more money, you can expand your plot, choose from a larger variety of plants, decorate your farm, and sometimes buy farm animals to help you make even more money. You can also go over to visit your friends’ farms, and either help them to manage their plots by watering their plants and killing their weeds, or, if you prefer, you can steal a few of their vegetables (or both). The basic version of the game is free, and then if you’re willing to spend real money you can more powerful fertilizer, or dogs to guard your farm from thiefs.

The game is incredibly popular — when you walk around Wuhan, you’ll see it on random computer screens everywhere you go, from offices to milk tea shops. There are a few different version, but they all look pretty much the same. I started playing it a few months ago because my students told me it was the thing to do, and my farm is on 校内, a social networking site that looks suspiciously similar to facebook (it recently merged with 开心网 and 人人网, so now they all have the same version of the game). I actually have two games running, one on Happy Farm and one on Happy Farmer. Here’s a screenshot from Happy Farmer:

The game is pretty addictive for a week or two, especially if you already spend a lot of time in front of your computer and need a way to procrastinate. The story from ChinaSMACK about the game destroying a relationship is obviously extreme (maybe not even true), it’s not THAT addictive… but I guess I should watch out, I wouldn’t want to end up in a “Farmer seeks boyfriend” reality TV show. We’ll see what next month’s fad will be.

"I heard it was because he stole the boss's crops."