Saturday, October 31, 2009

Virtual cooking, home decorating and shopping and farming...I am exhausted!

Friends and readers, I apologize for such a long delay in posting but seems I have acquired a weird addiction to virtual cooking and apartment decorating in Cafe World and YoVille which are Zynga games that are played via Facebook. In between my real world stuff, I have been whipping up crabmeat souflees, cherry cheesecakes, Voodoo Chicken Salads, spaghetti and other culinary delights all with the click of my pointy finger. Oh if real-life cooking were so easy. This has been exhausting keeping up with the demand of customers coming into the cafe to eat, and not so easy to do. At first this appears to be a cute little children's game that six-year-olds can play, however they might be able to go through the process of choosing a dish and clicking to make it, however the planning of how much food to make and keeping it going to keep your buzz rating up requires calculators! My husband has been my "assistant chef" and he helps with the planning and managed to help me build up enough to expand three times now. It's getting ridiculous though that now I am starting to plan what I do according to when my crumpets will be done! So today, when we went out, I forgot about the buzz rating and just tossed on a few eight hour dishes and figured if I run out of food, oh well. But it wasn't so easy to get out of my mind. I was thinking about all those little cartoon avatars coming in and leaving because they didn't get served! And that affects my buzz rating. I am WAY to far into this crap!

Then there is YoVille. Virtual village with a condo where all 1, 700, 000 of us players live together, and some even have two, three, four or more houses in addition to their condos. This can get crazy out of control. I like it because I can decorate and costs me nothing except little coins I earn my working in the YoVille Sweets Factory...and by doing ridiculous clicking on "buddy's" profiles to get those hidden pots of gold, turning on lights and picking up left presents. I admit I am really too sucked into these games! But they are fun and once they have you, you must keep playing with it. The funniest way to earn coins is to play games. These games of tic-tac-toe or rock-paper-scissors can be quite time consuming but we all have figured a way around that. We "max" each other out, which means we lose on purpose so the other guy gets all the points they are allowed for the games, then they return the favor. It's sort of like virtual prostitution, however since when we all meet up in front of the condo building we type little messages to each other like "max for max?" or "will one of you max me?" Sounds kinky...virtual kinky.

Then there is FarmVille and Farm Town which I did join so my aunt who is almost 70 can have me as a neighbor to increase her ability to do things and to get more money. I can do without the farms. I am bored sick of them and don't care if I expand them or not. But the thing is now, even though I can block it on my FB profile, I can't quit! I am always there. I don't have to play but the farms will turn to weeds...which I really don't care anymore about either. There are people who are absolutely seriously into this stuff and need therapy. These are the ones who use their credit cards to purchase "YoVille dollars" and Cafe World "money" and FarmVille and Farm Town cash. You give them your credit card number and you can get thousands of coins for like $100. And insane people are doing this. And not just kids. These are grown people. I have asked them how they get the Godfather mansion in YoVille and they say they purchase YoVille dollars to get imaginary stuff. I pointed out to some of these people via our little chatting back and forth that they could go buy a REAL outfit or home furnishings for real cash and actually have something tangible. I just don't get it. I would never buy imaginary money with real money to buy imaginary crap in an online game. I really do need to get a grip though. Even though I don't go so far as to charge on my credit card to play these goofy little games, I am spending way too much time on them.Maybe someone will start virtual therapy sessions?

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