charmed life

Sustainability

Nov 30 2009, 8:12 am by Dave Thier

Image by sabrina.dent/Flickr CC

 

 

Farmville, a Facebook farming simulation, put a survey to its 60 million plus users the other week: "What kind of farmer are you?" Some farmers strive after aesthetics, some after accolades, and some are just about the bottom line. It might seem to mirror reality. I first found the game after a friend of mine gave me a horse, I clicked "accept," and all of a sudden I had a small farm with some strawberries growing. I wondered, what kind of virtual farmer would I be?

Farmville, the most popular game on Facebook, is in many ways a descendant of the classic Harvest Moon series, a still-running franchise begun on the Super Nintendo. In 1996, Harvest Moon boldly said, "Not very much is going to happen in this game. And you're going to be okay with that." The game consisted mostly of simple, repetitive tasks and a lot of waiting. For some reason, gamers really wanted to do this.

Maxis, the developer behind Sim City and The Sims tried their hand at farming with the more realistic Sim Farm a few years earlier, in 1993. In Sim Farm, players managed a large industrial farm with crop dusters, pestilence, nitrogen-based fertilizers and heavy machinery. It was more realistic, but realism is rarely why people play videogames. Nobody plays Call of Duty for the chance to get shot in the leg and spend six months in an army hospital.

Like most sim games, the principle product is satisfaction: Farmville gives you the chance to accumulate things--fields, buildings, animals, decorations, coins--then look at them and feel pleased with yourself.

Farmville is anything but realistic. The game is a farmer's dream: click on a field and it's plowed, never worry about weather, grow full heads of cabbage in two days. The little cartoon version of myself strolls around the fields with blue overalls and a self-satisfied smirk. Like most sim games, the principle product is satisfaction: Farmville gives you the chance to accumulate things--fields, buildings, animals, decorations, coins--then look at them and feel pleased with yourself.

When I began my farm, I put my training in small-scale organic gardening to use. I planted diverse crops, mixed livestock with vegetables and tried to design a place my avatar could be proud to call his home. Some of my neighbors made more money with massive, industrial expanses planted hedgerow to hedgerow, but that seemed to me improper, even on Facebook.

That didn't last so long. I soon fell victim to the glittering lure of making enough farm coins to afford the elusive, million-coin villa. I found myself planting fields to fit my machinery, cramming my cows into crowded barns, and eschewing my diverse fields for a few high-value cash crops. Finally, in a gesture more symbolic than practical, I echoed Chekhov and chopped down the neatly planted cherry orchard in the back of my farm.

Farmville does in fact, provide a good farm simulation in some ways--materials are expensive, profits are often razor thin, and the only surefire way to get ahead is by pulling out your wallet. This is Farmville's secret: the easiest way for a player to get virtual currency is forking over real currency. It seems unlikely that rational people would be wiling to pay real money for a small picture of a baby turkey, but the numbers tell a different story. Zynga reports that about a third of their annual income comes from such transactions.

When you log into the game, Farmville shows you a random picture of one idyllic farm or another--a bountiful field of pineapples, flowers, and wheat next to a little cottage, maybe, or perhaps an autumn scene of maple syrup and bright red trees. The reality, however, is that in order to afford such decorations you must either pay US dollars or plant endless fields of cash crops. Maybe I'm thinking about this too much, but for a simplistic videogame, Farmville offers a curious model for juxtaposing pastoral fantasy with the industrial realities of modern farming. The parallel isn't perfect: I'm pretty sure an alien cow on a real farm would fetch way more than 120 coins.

Permalink :: Comments (0) :: Share This

This whole phenomena totally baffles me.

Founded by Adaptive Path UI designer Alexa Andrzejewski and Get Satisfaction engineer Ted Grubb, Foodspotting lets users upload photos of their favorite dishes along with a restaurant address. In Posterous-style fashion, you can also email your finds to food@foodspotting.com. From here you can rate dishes and users, add additional details, earn reputation points and follow places, dishes and community members. The difference between Foodspotting and Yelp is that every review is a positive one. Instead of showcasing restaurant rants, Foodspotting offers a visual menu of customer favorites.

ReadWriteWeb got an early look at the duo's upcoming iPhone application. Set for release in early 2010, foodies will be awarded points for their uploads as well as the particular foods they've tried. In Foursquare, users become the "Mayor" of a particular establishment, but in Foodspotting users become the "Champion" of their favorite dishes. And because so many towns are famous for a particular dish, you're likely to see stiff competition for the "Champion" of Maine lobster or Chicago hot dogs. Users will also compete to collect dishes through scavenger hunts and a food passport system. In the future, as we begin to record more dishes, the system will amass our flavor profiles. These profiles will later form the basis for a dish-related recommendation system.

While the mobile application will not hit the market for at least a month, Foodspotting is well on its way to offering salivating diners a chance to discover nearby favorites on a per-dish basis. To register for the site's early alpha visit foodspotting.com/ilovefood.

Abroad

Nov 25 2009, 8:09 am by Lesley Riva

In Italy, Eating Gets Graded

The day my daughter's kindergarten teacher called me into her Italian classroom to tell me my child was failing lunch, I knew I had run up against the great continental culinary divide. As an American married to an Italian, I've lived off and on in Italy for years, in both Bologna and Venice. I'm an adventurous and enthusiastic cook, an impassioned eater, and one of those parents who throw their kids into the deep end of the culinary pool from birth. Sink or swim: eat your fava beans and grilled calamari or starve.

Yet the teacher's face was grave. Lunch, in this Bolognese classroom, was a subject, as important as any other, and though my apple-cheeked five-year-old sat still, said per favore and grazie, ate all her tortellini and strawberry yogurt, she was still failing. At issue, the teacher informed me, was the meat course. My kid was consistently skipping the bistecchina, and something had to be done.

I tried to make light of the situation: after all, the child was polishing off a heaping bowl of pasta (or risotto or soup), followed by salad, fruit, a yogurt and bread. To my mind, we were keeping malnourishment at bay. But this was clearly the wrong tactic. The teacher drew herself up and fixed me with a kindly, but infinitely superior gaze. "Signora," she declared, "the girl is as skinny as an anchovy. If I have to spoon-feed her every bite, she will learn to eat her ciccia."

Parent-teacher nights where 58 minutes are spent discussing the lunch menu, leaving the remaining two for math, science and spelling? Perhaps even Italians could stand to lighten up.

Let me share a secret from this land of olive oil, whole grains, red wine and local produce, this repository of culinary wisdom and common-sense eating: when it comes to kids and food, Italians get a little nutty.

I have no quarrel with teaching kids to eat sensibly and respectfully. On the contrary: it's a crucial life skill, one that offers more concrete rewards--and is certainly more pleasurable to master--than geometry. Would that our own noisy, smelly, industrialized, slop-it-on-the-tray school cafeterias came under such scrutiny. In my younger daughter's Venetian elementary school, children carried in a plate, bowl, cup, silverware, placemat and cloth napkin each day, set the table for lunch and spent a well-supervised hour over their three-course meal: pasta with speck and zucchini; rolled egg and veal loaf with spinach; cheese and apples. What more could you ask? But still: a flow chart for nursery-age children, detailing precisely what went in--and came out--during the course of each morning? Parent-teacher nights where 58 minutes are spent discussing the lunch menu, leaving the remaining two for math, science and spelling? Perhaps even Italians could stand to lighten up.

The obsessiveness starts at birth. Our Bolognese pediatrician advised me to march down to the local pharmacy and rent a scale, so I could weigh my three-month-old daughter after each feeding. When it was time to introduce solid food, he handed me a detailed booklet: I was to begin with cereal, then add olive oil and parmesan; then proceed to vials of freeze-dried, powdered rabbit meat, chopped veal, and puréed pear. Any deviation was considered an invitation to digestive collapse. My undisciplined, American nursing-on-demand habits were soundly denounced: the fresh milk would meet the half-digested milk in the stomach and cause colic. Huh?

By the time my second daughter was born, I knew the score. This nation of svelte, stylish food-lovers has everything to teach us about a healthy and pleasurable approach to the table, from the sensible portions and emphasis on seasonal fruits and vegetables to the customary post-prandial walk. Basic nutritional literacy is almost universal, and while well-fed paunches are often on display, morbid obesity is a rare sighting. But kids? They fatten them up like little Christmas geese. Italy is awash in pudgy kids, locked in battle with their mammas and nonnas over every spoonful, their intake and appetites monitored with laser-like focus. Total strangers feel free to comment on your child's eating habits, and being of good appetite is the ultimate virtue: "How well she eats!," old women will crow, as your kid inhales a cookie on the street. "How skinny she is!," they cluck disapprovingly, as she leaves a few strands of spaghetti in the bowl.

The result can be a concern that crosses the line into comedy. In second grade, one daughter was required to create a lunch chart for each day of the week, with columns representing the first, second and third course, and a fourth to report on table behavior. Each day she was required to rate her intake and manners. After a while, when I'd ask the perpetual parent question--"How'd it go at school today?"--she'd just reel off: "all, all, some, correct." What else could an adult want to know?

All those chubby kids do grow up eventually, of course, and morph into the attractive, unruly, brilliant, and quarrelsome adults that people this most infuriating and seductive of countries. They cook well, they eat well, they hound their own children about every bite they put in their mouths. They give the world gorgonzola di grotta and mozzarella di bufala, risotto al nero di seppia and hand-cut tagliatelle with shavings of fragrant white truffle.

So yes, maybe Italians could stand to lighten up. On second thought, maybe there's something to those flow charts, after all.

Permalink :: Comments (0) :: Share This

via food.theatlantic.com

 

I love this site and really can't wait to explore it! LOTS to see and gorgeous foodie pics...