>"That was accomplished partly by drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither

>"That was accomplished partly by drawing players into loops that were hard to pull themselves from. If you didn’t check in every day, your crops would wither and die; some players would set alarms so they wouldn’t forget. If you needed help, you could spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends — a source of annoyance for nonplayers who were besieged with notifications and updates in their news feeds. Ian Bogost, a game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, said the behaviors FarmVille normalized had made it a pace car for the internet economy of the 2010s. He did not mean that as praise. The game encouraged people to draw in friends as resources to both themselves and the service they were using, Mr. Bogost said. It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now being imitated by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said." PDS: Random Thoughts: Sociologicially, We see the same patterns in MLM's and (possibly) some religious movements... Gamewise, we see the same patterns in Farmville as we do in games such as Minecraft, etc. An interesting mix, to be sure...