Tomorrow, Zynga shuts down FarmVille on Facebook after 11 years. I wanted to share the story of how we created it and why it has played such an important role in the evolution of gaming. 1/x

The real innovation of FarmVille was in making games accessible to busy adults, giving them a place to invest and express themselves and be seen by people in their lives as creative. People thought of FarmVille as a sort of Etch-a-Sketch. 2/x
It was the first game at scale that leveraged big data, and almost everything inside the game was tested and optimized. FarmVille became a training ground for a generation of entrepreneurs and product managers. 3/x
In 2008, Happy Farm reached 20+ million daily active users, setting off a wave of competition from game developers, and numerous farming games began to hit the market. 4/x.
On February 6, 2009, FarmTown reached 1 million DAU on Facebook. Farm Town combined the moving maps from MyFarm with avatars in Zynga’s YoVille. I wrote the date on the wall, and said we need to count the days until we are in the market with our own game. 5/x
In May 2009, we acquired MyMiniLife, and pivoted its four brilliant engineers (Amitt Mahajan, Joel Poloney, Luke Rajlich, and Sizhao Zao Yang) to a farm game. Mark Skaggs, a longtime RTS game exec producer who was running Mafia Wars, lead the team along with David Gray 6/x
Together they invented so many things, but most importantly for Zynga and our industry was making surprise and delight the core product focus. 7/x
We had learned the importance of Facebook profile pictures from Zynga Poker. Players wanted to see their friends and do things together. We were also inspired by the friend bar in Playfish’s Restaurant City. 8/x
The team sat in an alcove by my office. I met w/ them daily and focused on building the next evolution of social farm simulation. We kept it simple: better crop art, math, and remove the stranger-danger marketplace. We also found subtle ways to make it easier to play. 9/x
The team engineered a nice feeling core loop of plow/plant/harvest and allowed players to visit and like each other’s farm designs. (We promoted some of our favorite designs in the game). 10/x
Facebook had just opened the feed to app developers, and Zuck asked me to send him all the content we had, saying FB would filter out what it didn’t want to show. FarmVille became the first major game to leverage the news feed as an extension of the core game. 11/x
On June 19, 2009 at 8pm, Zynga launched FarmVille. It was an immediate viral hit and reached 1m DAUs by the end of its first week. 12/x
FarmVille sparked a new category of “invest-and-express” games, where players could invest time and express themselves to friends and family. Busy adults, especially women, saw that games could have a valuable place in their lives and offer you more than empty calories. 13/x
FarmVille demonstrated that a game could be a living, always-on service that could deliver daily surprise and delight, similar to a favorite TV series. Games could also connect groups of people and bring them closer together. 14/x https://t.co/SA1jpfArHv
FarmVille tapped into the cultural zeitgeist in a way that few games had at the time. 15/x https://t.co/HC67WYcoPR.
I am so grateful for the amazing @zynga team behind #FarmVille, and the hundreds of millions of FarmVille players over the years. 16/x

More from Social media

As we wait for the transition of power from despot to democrat, Facebook (Zuckerberg) has taken it upon itself to aid in the obstruction of that power transfer, facilitation of an insurrection narrative and disregard for the will of the American electorate.


In other words, the Social Media monopoly Facebook commands globally has gone full fascist in an attempt to preserve the corrupt and criminal hold on power by Republicans and Trump Administration.

Aiding and abetting a coup d’état.

As if there weren’t enough other reasons to dismantle Facebook’s monopoly, Zuckerberg is playing his cards and revealing clearly that Cambridge Analytica election interference was not just a onetime anomaly, but is now a feature of Facebook’s business model.

Megalomaniac Marc has now revealed the true colours of Fascist Facebook.

Facebook is a weapon to manipulate the masses. A tool to carry out disinformation campaigns with impunity.

And the response of the left... is to delete their Facebook account.

As if the deletion of a Facebook account will do anything. It might send a message that your virtues are principled, your morality superior. But it enables the weapon to be continued to gaslight and manipulate the electorate.

An inherent flaw in the left’s critical thinking.
So let's check in on "Newsguard," one of the Orwellian groups (e.g., The Atlantic Council) that totally reliable sites like @voxdotcom and @axios use to decide what is "Unreliable" and "fight disinformation."

One example:

OK, so "The Daily Wire" and "
https://t.co/oEa89coNak" are unreliable. Fair enough, maybe they are (I don't use either one of them).

So let's look into one of our new official arbiters of "reliability," Newsguard!

What's their advisory board look like?

https://t.co/5N8op70VE1


OK, so maybe a few names jumped out at you immediately, like, oh I don't know, (Ret.) General Michael Hayden, former Director of the CIA AND former Director of the National Security Agency in the run-up to the Iraq War in 2003! Google him, he's famous!


Newsguard is all about "seeing who's behind each site," (like how Michael Hayden is behind Newsguard?)

All they want to do is fight "misinformation." That's laudable, right?

Also, Newsguard has a "24/7 rapid response SWAT TEAM!!"

So cool!
https://t.co/EDN3UXvBR9


Ok, I'm not a journalist or a former CIA director, so I have no idea what's true or not unless someone tells me, so hey, Columbia Journalism Review - what do you think of Newsguard Advisory Board Member Michael Hayden?

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THREAD: 12 Things Everyone Should Know About IQ

1. IQ is one of the most heritable psychological traits – that is, individual differences in IQ are strongly associated with individual differences in genes (at least in fairly typical modern environments). https://t.co/3XxzW9bxLE


2. The heritability of IQ *increases* from childhood to adulthood. Meanwhile, the effect of the shared environment largely fades away. In other words, when it comes to IQ, nature becomes more important as we get older, nurture less.
https://t.co/UqtS1lpw3n


3. IQ scores have been increasing for the last century or so, a phenomenon known as the Flynn effect. https://t.co/sCZvCst3hw (N ≈ 4 million)

(Note that the Flynn effect shows that IQ isn't 100% genetic; it doesn't show that it's 100% environmental.)


4. IQ predicts many important real world outcomes.

For example, though far from perfect, IQ is the single-best predictor of job performance we have – much better than Emotional Intelligence, the Big Five, Grit, etc. https://t.co/rKUgKDAAVx https://t.co/DWbVI8QSU3


5. Higher IQ is associated with a lower risk of death from most causes, including cardiovascular disease, respiratory disease, most forms of cancer, homicide, suicide, and accident. https://t.co/PJjGNyeQRA (N = 728,160)