Basic Premise: Plant crops and harvest them to earn money and experience points which will allow you to develop your own personal farm complete with livestock, decorations, equipment, and a home of your choosing.
ABC's-Basic Premise: This farm game offers numerous rewards in order to overtly reinforce people into continuing to play the game for enjoyment purposes (it still makes money through advertisements). However, it also uses covert behavior modification to increase the likelihood that you will use your credit card to purchase "Farmville Cash" to purchase even cooler buildings, vehicles, and decorations for your farm. After you realize how long it takes to build a huge farm, why not spend a few bucks to greatly cut down on your time? After all, time is money...and they'd like some of yours.
Antecedent(s): Create a game with seemingly infinite number of reinforcing stimuli called Farmville, perfectly demonstrating basic principles of Behavior Modification.
Behavior: People play Farmville a lot (I know a woman who created a Farm for her Cat), and possibly spend real cash.
Consequence: Farmville creators make lots of money (directly from cash or indirectly through advertising).
Reinforcers:
1- Aesthetic
a. Visual appeal of the farm itself
b. Appealing graphic interface of the game (mechanical)
c. Catchy easy-listening/slow-country music
2- Social
a. Develop a network of people and watch their farms grow
b. Yet another way to interact with friends on Facebook
c. Every reinforcer received in the Farmville game gives you the option of publishing a certificate about it on Facebook ensuring all your friends know just how much time you have on your hands...I mean just how important you are.
3- Money for harvesting crops
a. Can determine your own schedule of reinforcement by selecting crops which reward with money and XP at various intervals (e.g. every 2, 4, 8, 12, or 18 hours; or every 1-4 days).
b. Neighbors will randomly "fertilize" your crops increasing the gold and XP value for harvesting that crop.
4- XP for harvesting crops leads to higher levels
a. As levels increase so do the options available on your farm (e.g. more crops to choose from, more livestock, gifts, vehicles, buildings, etc.)
5- Ribbons for achieving milestones
a. 25 kinds with 4 levels each, + more at higher levels.
b. Each ribbon gets progressively harder to achieve.
6- Random occurrences
a. Animals wonder onto your farm and you can choose to adopt them out to friends
b. Unique crops become available for a one week duration at various times
c. Neighbors may ask for help (e.g. for fertilization) on their farms.
7- Collections
a. At higher levels you are given clues to the location of 6 objects each, in 5 different collections. This is actually numerous reinforcers all in one, locating the actual object, then finishing the collection, and also receiving 'extras' at various times when you find certain objects.
8- Helping out the neighbors
a. You can visit your neighbors' farms and at least daily they will have a problem on their farm (e.g. gophers, foxes, weeds, etc., that does not in any way harm their farm if you ignore it) that you can receive money and XP for should you click to "Help" your neighbor.
Punishers:
1- Spoiled crops
a. A crop will remain harvestable for as long of a duration as it took to generate it. If you leave a 4 hour crop longer than 8 hours from the time you planted it, it will be no good.
Reinforcement:
Farmville utilizes primarily positive reinforcement, providing you with rewards, and other pleasurable stimuli (e.g. new options, prestige, greater versatility, etc.) in order to continuously reinforce your farming behaviors. They also allow you to customize your farm to create your own schedule of reinforcement, whichever one you find the most reinforcing. However, there is also more subtle, negative reinforcement being used. The higher your level the cheaper certain crops and products become. This is negative because they are taking away some of the "cost" you would have otherwise had to spend, and a reinforcer because it motivates you to quickly advance your Farmville level.
Punishment:
Only Negative Punishment is used in Farmville in my opinion. If you don't harvest your crops in time they will spoil, thus taking away (negative) the money you might have been reinforced with had you chosen to harvest them in a timely manner. Don't do that again (punishment). They could utilize positive punishment by presenting an aversive stimulus in order to decrease the likelihood of a behavior the creators do not want you to emit. For example, over-farming (maximizing the amount of money and XP you get per hour) will greatly decrease the amount of time it takes you to get to higher levels, thus you are not as motivated to purchase Farmville Bucks with real money. They could cap the amount of highly rewarding crops/day (or week, month, etc.) by causing those crops to grow more slowly once you hit a particular threshhold. Thus they would provide the aversive stimulus (positive) of a longer growing cycle in order to decrease (punish) your "money & XP maximization" behaviors.
Satiation:
Offering changes in the type of reinforcement you receive from harvesting crops at different levels, including the development of the "crop master" system, as well as random occurrences is Farmville's way of making sure that satiation does NOT happen. You are continuously being reinforced in subtle yet unique ways in the hopes of making sure that Farmville continues to be a reinforcing stimulus.
Deprivation:
Farmville teases you with unique items only available if you pay real money, get to a higher level, or wait for them to become available thus depriving you of a reinforceing stimuli in the hopes of increasing the reinforcing power of that stimuli when it becomes available, or to such an extent that you will be willing to pay real cash to get it.
I found this post to be really interesting because I, myself was a victim of farmville's appeal when it first came out and all of my facebook friends were playing it. I completely agree with all of it's different reinforcers and punishers throughout the game, which is why I stopped playing it because it got to the point where I was spending a LITTLE too much time playing.
I also found this post to be really interesting because just like Laura, I too was an avid Farmville player when it first came out. I eventually went through an extinction burst because I had to plant and harvest so many crops to get what I wanted without actually having to spend real money that I just gave up on the game and moved on. The company seems to come up with new reinforcers all the time to keep the players engrossed in the game and keep them interested.
This was pretty interesting post and its crazy that such an easy concept can make people rich. I have never played farmville but I played a game called Espn college town which had the same premise. In this game you would build up your college and make new buildings to try and get kids to come to your school. This game also offer the option to pay money to get things that will help speed up the game. The problem I had that lead to extinction was just keeping up with the game. I had to check it constantly so I could keep collecting money to make my students happy otherwise I wouldn't be able to make new things if my students are unhappy. Extinction also occurred when I couldn't do anything more with the game because I did everything you could with out buying things so I ended up just giving up on the game. I recently looked at the game and they must have seen people were not playing because they have all new things to reinforce the player now so they keep on playing.
I also found this article quite interesting. I was a victim as well to farmville for a little while. This game just caught my attention and kept attracting me. I wanted to do more and more so I could earn more money and make more friends. However when I started getting the goals where I would have to ask friends for things, that is where my reinforcement became diminished. My friends weren't helping me out much on things, so I just stopped playing the game because I couldn't complete the goals.