Cities and suburbs, real and imaginary.

Saturday, November 27, 2010

Farmville is the end of the world.

Farmville is not a fun game. But, I can't stop playing it, if you could call it playing. In my mind I use the autumnal landscape because I am a lone survivor of a nuclear war. I am growing my irradiated vegetables to feed them to a food processed that will rip out all the toxins, leaving me with a nebulous golden pellet of foodstuff that I can either eat, or fashion into noxious kitsch to keep me company in the absence of life on earth. I grow radioactive rainbow apples, more bioengineering than biology, and harvest my mutant chickens that need to have the edible tumors cut from their bodies every few days.

Oh, the kitsch! Imagine the stylized vault dweller of Fallout fame placed upon a farm and there is no mental dissonance between the big-headed, cheerful farmer and the post-apocalyptic icon in a blue jump suit. Farmville is like one's own Garden of Eden Creation Kit Interface, as if I am learning all the secrets and possibilities of the astonishing technology that will make life popular after the bombs have fallen.

That is my farm. I struggle on, isolated and alone in a vast field of decay, urging my kitschy, radioactive plant matter out of the stark earth. With what is left of the power grids if the world, and the pipes, I push goo through the pipes to distant survivors, with no other means of contact but the pasted pulp matter we harvest for our survival against the fading light if humanity.

To me, Farmville is a symptom of the end times.

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