As I said somewhere buried in this thread, it's not fair to say Farmville isn't fun. It is only fair to say Farmville isn't fun for you. It is fun to many peopl

As I said somewhere buried in this thread, it's not fair to say Farmville isn't fun. It is only fair to say Farmville isn't fun for you. It is fun to many people. Not me FWIW (I live next to farms) but I've put a lot of time and effort into figuring out why, and I at least get it. There's more than strict compulsion, though compulsion is present in every fun game as well. Compulsion is simply operant conditioning, and this happens as surely in golf, chess, or Scrabble as it does Farmville. It is important to distinguish between Facebook games and social games. Social games are massive, innovative, and at least one is orders of magnitude more successful than Farmville. Facebook games have severe technological limitations (web and Flash are still, right now, quite limiting, making something as immersive as WoW far from possible). They have clear-cut incentives both coming down from Facebook (API, platform rules) and coming up from customers (as you mentioned, their attention span is low, largely because they're at work).