AT high schools and colleges across the country, students are hard at work, tilling their land and harvesting their vegetables.

“It is clear this obsession with FarmVille is an issue, especially since it is taking away time from studying and schoolwork,” Danielle Susi wrote this month in The Quad News, a student newspaper at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Conn.

Adults, too, are blaming their problems on FarmVille, an online game in which people must tend their virtual farms carefully. On blogs like FarmVille Freak (slogan: “I can’t stop watching my crops!”) and others, people share tips on fertilizer and complain about, for example, a spouse’s addiction. An anonymous blogger who said she was pregnant wrote: “I was starving ... and he told me I’d have to wait a few more minutes so he could HARVEST HIS RASPBERRIES! I waited ... in the car and waited for his stupid raspberries to be harvested.”

That there are actual farmers who spend less time on their crops is beside the point. FarmVille has quickly become the most popular application in the history of Facebook. More than 62 million people have signed up to play the game since it made its debut in June, with 22 million logging on at least once a day, according to Zynga, the company that brought FarmVille into the world.