don't fence me in

It had to happen. A country with 700 million peasants now gets the appropriate computer game:

“Happy Farms” is a resource management game based on farms. In this game, players act as owners of the farms. They have to do all the work of cultivating, irrigating, fertilizing, spraying, harvesting and selling crops. Each action will add points to the player’s level. In the game, a player can not only act on his own farm, but also on his friends’ farms. Thus, people can be very kind players who help their friends manage [their farms], or they can be mischievous players that steal crops from other players. All these action help the players get bigger farms.

And they’re signing up at a rate of two million people a day:

Yi Bu said he grew up in a small village, and then he went to a city, becoming a successful businessman. But now he misses the life in the village and “Happy Farms” makes the country dream possible in his office. Yi Bu said every time he sees his crops, dogs, and grasses, he feels like he is in the village again. When he is working on his farm, he can feel the breath of nature, and get happiness from farming and harvesting.

Ah, the bucolic yearnings of a rapidly urbanizing population. It’s a parallel process to the way the British adopted wholesale rural fetishization as a consequence of the industrial revolution, expressed in many different forms: the whole rus in urbe fantasy of the suburbs, the semi-crazed nostalgia of the pro-foxhunting people, the rambling phenomenon, the commercial potency of the organic marketing scam, even the leftwing survivalism of the more militant crusties.

Urbanization in Britain embedded rural yearnings into the wider political economy in all sorts of ways. Interesting to see that in China the whole thing has been channeled online. And of course there is the additional advantage that in this environment “land” is potentially infinite.

Those less keen on vegetable oriented gaming, meanwhile, can sign up to play “Happy Acquaculture”.

Comments

[Martin Wisse]

You're obviously not a man who wakes up with Farming Today on Radio 4, or you would've known that this game is also being played in the UK, as they reported on some weeks back...

[jamie]

I have never woken up with a farmer in my life. The odd thing is that I only ever read about computer games these days through coverage of what's happening in China. An instance of tunnel globalisation I suppose.

[ejh]

Is this the game that was The Thing Clogging Up Facebook last week? Or maybe the week before, last week it was some zoo game.