Inside Social Games

Like many social games, the exploding “genre” of farming games has long been popular in China. However, while many US-based Facebook developers have been importing popular game concepts from China for a while now, we haven’t seen too many Chinese developers building on Facebook directly. However, one new game to hit Facebook from across the Pacific is Five Minutes’s Happy Farm, which is also one of the most popular applications on popular Chinese sites like Xiaonei, Kaixin, and Tencent’s QZone.

Currently, the game has approximately 1.7 million active users on Facebook, and has very fluid game play. When the player starts the game they are presented with a static screen, coupled with a “task.” Each task works like a simplified version of the quest system built into Playfish’s farming game, Country Story. Unlike the Playfish game, however, tasks only seem to be given one at a time, but with each one players are walked through the elements of the game, granting them experience and rewards. Combine this with the rewards you receive and you have something that becomes much more gratifying than a brief tutorial.

Of course, these tasks alone are not enough to create a quality game. Along with a colorful and visually pleasing art style, Happy Farm incorporates a number of the core features seen in similar applications. Players plow land, plant seeds, water them daily, and harvest them for gold when they ripen. For each action done, the user gains experience, and with more experience comes greater levels and greater rewards.

The player’s level has three impacts on game play. First, higher levels allow for more plots of land to be used for tilling. Second, they allow a greater variety of seeds and crops to be purchased. And perhaps most interesting, higher levels grant players new visual rewards for their farm.

Regrettably, these rewards are a bit of a double edged sword as players don’t actually customize how their farm looks beyond buying preset backgrounds. With new levels comes new elements that they can choose to display in their background, such as a fence or a dog house. This allows for a visual show of progress that looks pretty good but also takes away from player creativity and the freedom to create customized virtual spaces.

While it is fun and very easy to play, the fact that you cannot move around any sort of world or even customize your farm to your own unique look dramatically limits the replayability of the game. True, the game does have a few extra features such as weeding, fertilizing, and pest control, but as interesting as these play, they do little to mitigate the lack of gaming longevity.

Length of play is relative, however. By adding friends and giving gifts, players can actually make up for a lot of the game’s lost depth. Like the other farming titles, players can visit and take care of each others’ farms, but unlike them, can actually send bouquets of “home grown” flowers as gifts.

In fact, flowers are one of the more unique elements to Happy Farm. Rather than utilize bars that measure experience and stamina, the game utilizes something called “charisma.” At the moment, it doesn’t have a whole lot of functionality, but as you grow and send bouquets of flowers (which you can arrange yourself according to size and color) this stat increases and in turn grants players with a wider variety of aesthetic flora.

Overall, it is easy to see why Happy Farm is one of the most popular social games over in China. The game takes roughly two minutes to pick up, and with its very simple interface it is easy start making visible progress relatively quickly. The tasks create a context to everything the player is doing and help to guide them through new game elements without letting them flounder, and the rewards with every couple levels create a gratifying sense of progress – even if customization feels a bit lost. Despite being so new to Facebook, Five Minutes has shown how it has earned its keep on QZone, and if that popularity is any indication will likely not stop growing in western markets any time soon.