In fact the only thing worse than being forced into indebted servitude as a gold farmer is...well, there's plenty of things worse than that. One particular irritant that will be familiar to gamers the world over, however, is checking in on your Facebook page and being confronted with endless invitations to help somebody out on their farm, or with their vampire mafia, or whatever. The rise of casual gaming has been a positive boon for the industry, bringing in a more diverse audience than was perhaps engaged in gaming beforehand, but boy has it made navigating your social media accounts difficult. The prime culprit through all of this has been Zynga's FarmVille, a simple farming sim which spent two years as the most popular game in Facebook. Except FarmVille was a total rip off of a Chinese game called Happy Farm that originated in 2008, listed amongst the influential games of the decade. It inspired dozens of Facebook clones usually all with either Happy or Farm in the title (sometimes both, which seems almost like goading), but the original remains the best.
Tom Baker is the Comics Editor at WhatCulture! He's heard all the Doctor Who jokes, but not many about Randall and Hopkirk. He also blogs at http://communibearsilostate.wordpress.com/
