Farmville

Despite the addictive nature of Farmville (Tm) further outlined by popular and mainstream YouTuber Tobuscus, who expressed the extremely time consuming aspect of Farmville in his video entitled, "Farmville" with the infamous quote "where did the time go" in the voice of an 85 year old man who had spent an eternity harvesting his crops and tending to his chickens, FarmVille was a generational and monumental game that laid the groundworks for a seemingly endless chain of current mobile apps running the same game model. In terms of gameplay, what can I say; the incentive was to build and expand your farm. In fact, the game wanted you to fall in love with your farm and in love you sure did fall. But the true reason it was so addictive was not because of the actual gameplay - it was from the time spent away. You see, the very act of stepping away from the game as you waited for crops and trees to grow, cows to milk, and chickens to harvest, created a sense of anticipatory accomplishment and responsibility after a 24 hour cycle. As such, the game was centered around the joy of the subsequent anticipation of reward rather than the actual act of clicking "Q" on the keyboard to harvest a plant. Additionally, the sense of continued reward as brain pathways could reset between the breaks away from the computer screen, allowed for the same level of sustained chemical joy each time the game was opened. This combined with the leveling system which allowed you to be able to purchase even more unique features for your farm made it incredibly fun. But additionally, there was the social aspect that the game had to it. Your Facebook friends had farms too, which you could see at the bottom of the UI, and they had this amazing ability to send you gifts. Of course, you could only send one gift a day but, man, when I received a new sheep or new cow or some crop from a fellow boomer on my farm's friends list, it felt like the best day ever. Mind you I was in 5th grade bro, and no one had joined Facebook yet, so the only people I had were my dad's friends. Additionally, you had the ability to travel to their farms as well, and let me just say, when I'd travel to the friend of mine who had over 3000 hours, I became so damn envious and inspired at the same time. The mindset was like, damn, you have 50 green cows, 30 goats, and 20 golden sheep? I have to get my money up! I gotta progress! I gotta grind! I gotta play the shit out of this game! I have to farm! What am I doing eating and breathing! In all seriousness though, the feeling of community in addition to the motivation it instilled by wanting to catch up to your friends was yet another reason this game was S-tier. But I would say the cherry on top was the soundtrack. It sounded like elevator music and a farmer made a baby with the blues brothers. Yes, it was a single looped sound track, played on repeat, but it was both relaxing and extremely memorable. So overall this game was goated, no pun intended. In actuality it's a 10/10, but because it could consume your life and cause you to become an incel, I'm going to deduct one point. In fact, it was so overly consumed by me and the boomers I'd play with back in 2009, that my dad's friend who worked to set up the internet in our house back in the day, made our password "farmvillerules". We never forgot to check our farms again after that day.