If you're on the internet at all (and you obviously are) you probably either play Farmville or get bombarded with invites from one of the 60 million people who do, and think less of them for it. You might have wondered how such a dumb Flash-based game can be hooking so many people. Are people so stupid? Or is Farmville smart? Both, probably, but we've got enough articles about the first thing. What doesn't get discussed much is how fiendishly clever Farmville's creators are.

Most video game companies spend their money on game quality, believing that game quality will lead to people wanting to play the game, which will lead to money. The philosophy behind Zynga (Farmville's creators) is: Why make the process so convoluted? Skip game quality and just focus on figuring out what you can do to make people want to play any game, no matter how bad it is. To that end, they've hired a full-time behavioral psychologist to figure out how to manipulate players like lab rats.



A cry for help from within the game.

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And as Zynga founder Mark Pincus freely admitted in this popular quote, he won't confine himself to using those powers scrupulously: "So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book to, just to get revenues right away. I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar which was like, I dont know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. *laughs*"



Pincus around the office.

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And it worked. Zynga is projected to rake in $1 billion in 2011 and Google has poured $100 million into the company in an attempt to get in on the action before it's too late.

Here's how they pull it off: