I tried to get addicted to Farmville and failed.

This is true. I spent a few hours with the game over a period of several days. I spent real money on the game to see if doing so would make me care more about it. Nothing worked. I just couldn’t get into it. I looked into the ROI of growing one crop vs. another to maximize my time spent playing but realized that it didn’t mean anything to me. It wasn’t fun. It was like pulling teeth. It was boring and a huge waste of time.

I was inspired to get addicted because I saw that a lot of my friends were. From my very unscientific observations, I noticed two main things.

1. People that have my gaming background hate Farmville (I was a big gamer growing up). Some also tried to get addicted but failed.
2. Playing these games is a lot like pushing a button, randomly, over and over again.

POINT1:

I grew up on console games and played a lot of them. My expectation of what is fun and what a game should be is pretty high. Farmville is not fun. It’s like pushing a button (see point 2). People that didn’t play a lot of games while they were growing up seem to like Farmville a lot more. This is because they have little or no expectations of what a game is or should be. They can’t be disappointed because they have no reference points.

POINT2 (thanks to Jim Young of Hot or Not and i/o ventures for this idea):

Farmville is a fancy way of setting up a button with a timer attached to it. I’m sure researchers have played this game with monkeys. Monkeys probably push the button over and over again. I’m not sure why but it is tempting for my human friends too. I believe there was also a popular iPhone app that was just a button that you had to push over and over at random intervals.