By DOUGLAS QUENQUA


At high schools and colleges across the United States, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables.

“It is clear this obsession with Farm- Ville is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote recently in The Quad News, a student newspaper at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut.

Adults, too, are blaming their problems on Farm Ville, an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms . On blogs like Farm Ville Freak , people share tips on fertilizer and complain about, for example, a spouse’s addiction. An anonymous blogger who said she was pregnant wrote: “I was starving ... and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES! ”

Farm Ville has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since its debut in June, and 22 million log on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought Farm Ville into the world.

Devotion to Farm Ville has moved beyond Facebook. Players gather online to share homemade spreadsheets showing which crops will provide the greatest return on investment. YouTube is rife with musical odes to the game . There is a “Farm Ville Art” movement, in which people arrange crops to resemble familiar images like the Mona Lisa . And many a promising dinner date has been cut short to harvest squash.

“I can’t hang out with any of my friends without talk of apple fields and rice paddies,” said Taylor Lee Sivils, a student at the University of California, Riverside, in an e-mail message. “I have to wait for my friends’ soybeans to grow, because we can’t chill until they’ve been harvested. All I want is to be able to go back to talking about anything tangible, but Farm Ville overcomes.”

The game starts off simply: You are given land and seeds that can be planted, harvested and sold for online coins. As you accrue currency, you can buy things, from basics like rice and pumpkin seeds to the truly superfluous, like elephants and hot-air balloons.

But like The Sims and Tamagotchi pets, Farm Ville soon becomes less of a game than a Sisyphean baby-sitting assignment. Crops must be harvested in a timely fashion, cows must be milked, and social obligations-like exchanging gifts and fertilizing your neighbor’s pumpkins-must be met.

Jil Wrinkle, a 40-year-old medical transcriber in the Philippines, sets his alarm every night for 1:30 a.m., when he wakes up, rolls over and harvests his blueberries. “I keep my laptop next to my bed,” he said by phone. “The first thing I do when I wake up in the morning is harvest, then I harvest again at 10 in the morning, then again in midafternoon, then in the evening, and then again right before going to bed.”

Farm Ville isn’t the only popular farm-theme game on Facebook. My- Farm and FarmTown, which are made by different companies, also have huge followings. Some academics suggest that their popularity points to a widespread yearning for the pastoral life.

“The whole concept of ‘I’m sick of this modern, urban lifestyle, I wish I could just grow plants and vegetables and watch them grow,’ there is something very therapeutic about that,” said Philip Tan, director of the Singapore- M.I.T. Gambit Game Lab, a joint venture between the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the government of Singapore to develop digital games.

Of course, real-life farming is quite a bit messier and more dangerous than Farm Ville-perhaps just one reason FarmVille players outnumber actual farmers in the United States by more than 60 to 1. Yet some of the game’s biggest fans are farmers. “

I was having all these deaths on the farm and hurting myself on a daily basis doing real farming,” said Donna Schoonover of Skagit County, Washington, who raises sheep, goats and Satin Angora rabbits. “This was a way to remind myself of the mythology of farming, and why I started farming in the first place.”


Players log on daily to manage crops and livestock for digital farms.