FarmVille has taken over Facebook. Now everything is FarmVille.

In early 2009, when Facebook was still nascent in its efforts to swallow up as much of the internet as possible, online gaming was not yet the monster it was to become.

Then this June came FarmVille. If you weren’t one of the tens of millions of people who take care of a comic book patch on Facebook every day, racking up an endless stream of cute collectibles, you would still get plenty of nudges from the community. share your friends to ask for help. The game has either drawn Facebook users into an obsession or has constantly reminded them that they are missing one.

The Zynga-created Flash game, designed to be played on Facebook, will stop on Thursday – yes, there were still people playing it – although its sequels which can be played through mobile apps will survive. But the original FarmVille lives on in the behaviors it instilled in everyday internet users, and the growth hacking techniques it perfected, now integrated into virtually every site, service, and application that competes for your attention.

At its peak, the game had 32 million daily active users and nearly 85 million players in total. It has helped turn Facebook from a place you’ve been to check for updates – mostly in text form – from friends and family into a time consuming destination.

“We saw it as this new dimension of your social network, not just a way to bring games to people,” said Mark Pincus, then CEO of Zynga and now chairman of its board of administration. “I thought: “People just hang out on these social media like Facebook, and I want to give them something to do together.” “

This was accomplished in part by pulling players into loops that were hard to get out of. If you did not show up every day, your crops would wither and die; some players set alarms so as not to forget. If you need help you can spend real money or send requests to your Facebook friends – a source of annoyance for non-gamers besieged by notifications and updates in their newsfeeds. .

Ian Bogost, game designer and professor at Georgia Tech, said FarmVille’s standardized behaviors made it a pace car for the internet economy of the 2010s.

He didn’t mean this as praise.

The game encouraged people to attract friends as a resource both for themselves and for the service they were using, Mr Bogost said. It gamified attention and encouraged interaction loops in a way that is now mimicked by everything from Instagram to QAnon, he said.

“The Internet itself is this mess of obsessive worlds where the point is to bring you back there in order to do what it offers, in order to get your attention and run advertisements against it or derive value from it. activity, ”he told me.

While other games had tried many of the same tactics – Mafia Wars was Zynga’s first hit at the time – FarmVille was the first to become a mainstream phenomenon. Mr Pincus said he used to dine frequently with Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and that in early 2009 he was told in advance that the platform would soon allow games to release. on a user’s news feed. He said Mr. Zuckerberg told him that Zynga should flood the area with new games and that Facebook will sort out those that resonate.

Although farming was far from a popular game genre at the time, Mr. Pincus saw it as a relaxing activity that would appeal to a wide audience, especially among adults and women who had never spent money. hundreds of dollars on a console like Xbox 360., PlayStation 3 or Nintendo Wii. This would be a preview of the soon to be exploding mobile gaming market, with casual gamers ditching desktops as smartphones take hold.

The gaming industry was always cold for FarmVille, despite its success. A Zynga executive was booed for accepting an award at the Game Developers Conference in 2010, and Mr. Pincus said he struggled to recruit developers, who thought their peers wouldn’t respect them to work on the Game.

In 2010, Time magazine named FarmVille one of the “50 Worst Inventions,” acknowledging how irresistible it was, but calling it “barely a game.”

For many, the game will be remembered more for its presence in people’s newsfeeds than for the game itself. Facebook was well aware of the complaints.

After hearing from non-gamers that the game was spam, Facebook restricted the number of games that can be posted to news feeds and send notifications. Facebook now aims to send fewer notifications only when they are more likely to have an impact, said Vivek Sharma, vice president of Facebook and head of games.

He credited FarmVille for much of the rise of social gaming and said the over-notification “saga” has taught Facebook some important lessons.

“I think people started to understand deeper behavioral elements that needed to be changed in order for these apps to be self-sustaining and healthy,” he said. “And I think part of that is this idea that people actually have a limit, and that limits change over time.”

Even though people were annoyed by the notifications, there’s no doubt they worked. Scott Koenigsberg, chief product officer at Zynga, noted that the requests were sent in by players who chose to send them.

“Everyone has seen a ‘lone cow’ notification at one point or another, but these were all shared by their friends who were playing the game,” he said.

Mia Consalvo, professor of game studies and design at Concordia University in Canada, was among those who saw FarmVille constantly in front of her.

“When you log into Facebook, it’s like, ‘Oh, 12 of my friends need help,’ she said.

She asked how social the game is, arguing that it doesn’t create deep or lasting interactions.

“The game itself does not promote a conversation between you and your friends, nor does it encourage you to spend time together in the play space,” she said. “It’s really just a button click mechanism.”

But those who returned there every day said it kept them in touch with friends and acquaintances, giving them something to talk about.

Maurie Sherman, 42, a radio producer from Toronto, said he and a receptionist had performed together and had gone to his office every day to discuss it. “She was telling me about the pink cow she had,” he said.

He enjoyed it as an escape, a virtual stress ball, and a calming activity that would let his mind wander. He said he spent over $ 1,000 – it’s real money – over the years to improve his farm or to save time.

And he was absolutely guilty of sending the notifications, he said – but they still managed to get him the help he wanted.

“There are people who would mute you or disapprove of you just because they were tired of hearing that you needed help with your cows,” he says.

Jaime Tracy, 59, of Lancaster, Pa., Said she was “one of those annoying people” who asked for help frequently until her friends and relatives told her to take it down. .

But she loved the game, which she considered a form of meditation, and played it for over five years. With her grown children and out of the house, “I had nothing else to do,” she says.

“You can just turn your mind away and plant carrots,” she says.