debtFacebook users of a certain age may remember a particularly lonely-looking farm animal that appeared in their feeds during the platform’s heyday. A lonely cow wandered into FarmVille players’ pastures with a frown on its face and tears in its eyes. “She’s very sad and needs a new home,” the caption read, urging players to adopt the cow or message a friend for help. Ignore the cow’s pleas and you’ll likely lose both your friend and your food. Message your friends about it and you’ll have fueled one of the biggest online crazes of the 2010s.

When FarmVille was released 15 years ago, it was a smash hit. Over 18,000 players played on the first day, and by the fourth day that number had risen to 1 million. At its peak in 2010, over 80 million users were logging in each month to plant crops, care for animals, and harvest to earn coins to spend on decorations. They made their obsession public.McDonald’s created farms for promotions long before artists were releasing music on Fortnite. Lady Gaga performs new song From her second album to a cartoon farm sim. Not bad for a game made in five weeks.

By 2009, developer Zynga had established itself as a pioneer in social media gaming, when four friends from the University of Illinois presented plans for a farming sim. It was a hastily reworked version of a failed browser game they’d made that copied The Sims, but Zynga was impressed enough to buy the technology, hire the four people, and pair them with some in-house developers. Zynga quickly released FarmVille.

“Facebook was exploding in popularity and engagement in a way that was novel at the time,” says John Tien, a former director of product at Zynga. Farm Town, a farming simulation game with a similar cartoony look and design made earlier by another studio, was already attracting 1 million daily active users on Facebook’s platform. Facebook had previously courted game studios and told Zynga it would soon give third-party developers access to user data, friends lists, and news feeds.

“By opening up its platform to app developers like Zynga, Facebook has been able to create an almost symbiotic relationship,” Tien says. “Facebook has given Zynga access to a large, engaged user base, and Zynga has given Facebook users more to do on the platform.”

Features like the lonely cow, which gently nudged players by requesting their friends to help grow their farm, became central to the experience, and Facebook was flooded with posts and notifications promoting FarmVille to the masses. These viral mechanics gave the game a “meme-like buzz,” says former Zynga vice president and general manager Roy Segal. “It’s this water cooler effect: you see your friends playing and you want to join in.”

And once you were in, it was hard to get out. For each crop you planted, you had to return at a set time, a few hours later, to harvest it. If you left it for too long, it would wither and die. “The idea is that the player makes their own schedule,” says Amitt Mahajan, co-creator and lead developer of FarmVille. “That’s what keeps people coming back every day.”

The result, Tien says, is a game that players feel they have to accomplish. “We all have growing lists of things we need to do and we’re struggling to get them done in the time we want,” Tien says. “Checking things off a list is viscerally satisfying, and playing FarmVille was a way for players to experience that satisfaction.”

New features and content were added several times a week to keep players interested, but the real magic happened behind the scenes with Zynga’s in-house data analytics tool, ZTrack. The tool could monitor the most detailed player behaviors, from what features players used to how long they spent on them to where they clicked on the screen, with the goal of building an ever-evolving, data-driven picture of player interests.

“At any given time, we had hundreds, maybe thousands, of dashboards and experiments running,” says Tien. “We could see core metrics every five minutes. We could see immediately after a new feature was released whether it was having an effective impact.”

Metrics-based design is standard today across social media platforms, apps, online retailers and digital services. Reliance on big data to predict consumer behavior is the foundation of everything from Google’s advertising empire to Cambridge Analytica’s political consulting. But back in 2009, no one was doing it quite like FarmVille.

“Zynga’s approach to game analytics inspired the entire digital analytics industry,” says Jeffrey Wang, co-founder and chief architect of analytics platform Amplitude. “One of Amplitude’s earliest customers was a former Zynga product manager who had started his own company and was looking for a tool comparable to ZTrack. There was nothing even close at the time.”

ZTrack became the backbone of FarmVille – features were repeatedly tested, analyzed and optimized, and the results determined what to deploy, monetization options and how to integrate to maximize player retention.

“Zynga’s dirty secret is that none of our five company values ​​are more important than our metrics,” the Zynga co-founder said. Andrew Trader Ken Rudin, former vice president of growth, analytics and platform technology at Zynga, went a step further: Quoted In 2010:[Zynga is] An analytics company disguised as a gaming company.”

Like most Facebook apps at the time, users could not play FarmVille without giving Zynga permission to collect their personal Facebook data. But the details of what data would be shared were written in small print on click-through screens that most users habitually ignored. “We as citizens, and government policymakers, didn’t really know the extent of it. [online data harvesting]”We’ve seen the harm that can come from unrestricted data extraction,” says Florence Chi, an associate professor of communication at Loyola University Chicago. But since then, she says, “we’ve seen the harm that can come from unrestricted data extraction.” Discovered in 2010 They share players’ personal data with advertisers and online data brokers.

FarmVille’s success, driven by data-driven design, was short-lived. Over the next few years, players abandoned the game, Zynga turned to unpopular sequels, and Facebook eventually revoked access to developers the game relied on for its early virality. In 2020, Adobe dropped support for Flash, the software that powers FarmVille. The game suddenly went offline.

But Zynga’s success continued. Words with friendsmobile racing game CSR Racing, Draw Something and a suite of slot machine games all use player data to maximise engagement. Zynga still makes data-driven, aggressively monetised games for mobile phones under Take-Two Interactive, which acquired the company in 2022 for $12.7bn (£9.4bn).

For Chee, FarmVille was a Silicon Valley entrepreneur’s dream, and very much a product of its time. “If you look at today, there’s not really a Facebook social phenomenon like there was in 2009,” she says. “It was a very special time for a game like FarmVille to come out, and the recommendation systems and algorithms were just in the right place.”