FarmVille. Testing limits. Four years. Level 1446

he design of FarmVille is highly driven by its commercial background as a Free-To-Play SNG. Similar to ad-funded TV the player as a consumer is supplied with those game mechanics s/he prefers. The pervasive offerings to buy game progress can be ignored in the best case and are annoying in not so good cases. The used game mechanics as competition and interactions with fellow players and the open-ended game style tend to overburden some players. As delineated by Pixie (2010), who seems not be an isolated case, quitting the game is often related to frustration. Harmful effects of excessive play are not limited to FarmVille or SNGs in general, but in SNGs there is an easy possibility of regulation as there is always a connection to a central server. However, the positive traits of SNGs make them another part in the set of tools for learning. It has already been shown that SNGs foster learning processes and the development of meta skills (Söbke et al., 2013). Due to their format they acquire a group of people for gaming which have not played before. SNGs are accepted as a game genre. Development of SNGs can be done in parallel to their productive use with short feedback cycles. Also development costs tend to be lower than those spent on traditional video games. It is worthwhile investigating the game mechanics which are used now successfully to lure the player into becoming a paying customer: If and how they could be used in educational settings to guide player’s learning progress.