ABSTRACT
FarmVille is nothing short of a phenomenon. Estimates have suggested that greater than 1% of the population of the entire world are playing FarmVille. Essentially a stripped-down, real-time farm simulation game, FarmVille was created by the San Francisco, California-based social games developer and publisher Zynga, and launched in June 2009 as an application on the social networking website Facebook. Microsoft's MSN Games launched FarmVille on its own site on February 4, 2010. As of this writing (spring 2010), more than 20% of all Facebook users play FarmVille, making it the most popular application on the service, with over 88 million monthly active users. The Facebook FarmVille fan page boasts over 22 million fans.
