Most of you probably have a Facebook account, and most probably know or play Pet Society, Treasure Island, Cafe World, Bowling Buddies, Tower Bloxx, Social Town, Poker or Farmville. All of them are strategy and social games, exclusively available on this networking utility. If you have tried at least one of them by now you are probably addicted, especially if you tried Farmville.

Farmville is a real-time simulation game developed by Zynga, launched in June 2009 and available exclusively as an application on the Facebook network. The game allows players to manage and develop a farm by planting, growing and harvesting virtual crops, trees and raising livestock. From its launching, Farmville has become the most popular online game, with users representing over 20% of the Facebook users and over 1% of the population of the world. Still, the company considers  Farmville to be in a Beta testing stage even if the game is actually a clone of the popular FarmTown.

Lately, Farmville has been in the middle of a very disputed controversy. Apart from the fact that in the second part of 2009 the game had 63 million active users, being surpassed at the begging of the 2010 by Texas Hold-em Poker with 14 million daily players (Farmville still has about 8 million daily active gamers), Zynga has given Farmville users virtual cash for various advertising offers. For instance, the players would get virtual currency for signing up certain sites, like Netflix. The company has been accused of cheating its users through misleading offers, such as filling up surveys or IQ tests which in fact subscribe the users to an unwanted service, most of the times appearing on their phone bill. Inspite of the accusations, Facebook continues this policy because an important part of the money obtained from such leads is being reinvested inside the Facebook network. Still, Zynga removed all virtual cash offers in November 2009 but only on the pages of farmville.com domain. Even though the users that actually spend real money to obtain certain advantages in the game are a small percent of the total users, authorities suspect that most of them are actually underage, even though children under the age of 14 are not allowed to have a Facebook account. But if they really exist, the network will verify and cancel them. Still, the developing company, Zynga had 150 million profit last year from these practices.

Beyond the existing controversy, Farmville continues to be a very interesting phenomenon. More than 40 million virtual farms being registered in the farmville.com domain, 20 times more than the actual U.S. farms and still growing, the game reflects the condition of postmodern virtual farmers, tired of their lives in urban jungles around the world. Farmville users are actually given the possibility to achieve goods, to develop and to have a certain lifestyle, currently not available in this restrictive times.