October 7, 2009

The popularity of social networking websites is growing. It has spawned many games, among those the farm games have become the favorite of the registered users. A farming wave has swept the Internet as users get up in the morning to steal crops and fruit from their friends' farms and become the kings of virtual farming.

Just like kaixin001 is the Chinese version of Facebook, its farm game is a copycat of Happy Harvest, designed in a cartoon style. Users can plant crops, and raise chickens and dogs, and the harvest can be sold and exchanged for points to increase the attraction. Players can log on and sneak into their friends' farms and steal vegetables and eggs. The more practiced a user gets in planting crops, the more virtual money he or she can make. That makes it much more fun than just fooling around on the Internet.

Increasingly more urban white collars, young office ladies in particular, are going online to live an agrarian existence. They have been immersed in the game, and some are so serious that they set the alarm for an early rise every day, when they boot up the computer and go farming. If they sleep too late, their fields would turn into a tourist farm where anyone takes whatever he or she wants. They can use a virtual network to plant, water crops, exterminate vermin, harvest and sell their crop, and they can raise chickens and cows, and buy dogs to guard the farm. The whole process is much more interesting than electronic chickens, and seeing the results of their own hard work accumulate in the storage offers some kind of satisfaction in an otherwise boring daily life.

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