Quote of the moment: My Farmville hobby

"Farmville isn't actually a computer game–it's a computer hobby. In his book Hobbies, Steven Gelber points out that "hobbies developed as a category of socially valued leisure activity in the nineteenth century because they bridged the worlds of work and home" (p. 2). He continues, "before about 1880 a hobby was a dangerous obsession. After that date it became a productive use of free time" (p. 3). ...

"Farmville is the ultimate hobby, the ultimate idealization of work. In Farmville, with a simple click, I can plant strawberries, wheat, or maybe a peach tree. The product of my near-effortless labor will be beautiful, and there for me to harvest in an equally effortless fashion–if I am merely attentive to return at the right time, like the good worker that I am. I can dream of building an empire, and with simple persistence it will be mine. And better yet, if I'm feeling impatient, for an amount of real dollars that is modest, I can have what I want without the wait or the work. ...

"I believe we can understand more about why people play games like Farmville by looking hard at stamp collections, sewing circles, and model railroads than by looking at the history of computer "games." Computer "hobby" is a better mental model."

-Social computing blogger Amy Bruckman ruminates on whether social games are more like hobbies.