My Trip to the Zoo

I’ve only been active on Facebook for a couple of months now, and I really like it so far. I’ve managed to reconnect with one friend from my high school years, and others from a decade ago and less… but one of the things that I hadn’t anticipated was the selection of games on FB.

Now, I like video games because I like computers and I like puzzles. Some games don’t appeal to me at all – specifically anything that involves killing or any sort of violence. As soon as I started my account on FB, I was sent a gift of Farkel chips from one of my friends. Cool. Farkel is a fun waste of time. Think Yahtzee with different rules and protocols.

What sucks you in about Farkel is that you can get more free chips each successive day that you visit the game. Obtaining 10,000 chips offers access to Pro status, and that allows you to play 1-on-1 tournaments with other FB folks, real-time. I tried that for a while one day, and found the chatbox intriguing: some folks would encourage me (“good roll!”), others would tease, self-criticize, and many would say only “good game” at the end. Eventually a fellow named Bill started a chat about my vacation habits, and asked me to visit his website if I needed any good travel deals. When I commented back that I found this an interesting way to market his business (I think I called it “Farkel-marketing”), he seemed a bit chagrined.

The future of internet commerce, indeed.

Now, my history with games is that I often use them to get lost in denial of a real-life change I am facing. Back in the 90s when Nintendo was big and I was taking Insurance industry exams, I would get into Super Mario Brothers when I was supposed to be studying for tests. My friend and study buddy at the time used Tetris. It was somewhat healthy in the long run, since I passed all the tests. But I could recognize this habit in myself.

A few weeks ago, one of my FB friends sent me a Zoo Animal gift. I was tempted to click “Ignore” in my choices of what to do with the gift, but since I do love animals, I just let it sit there for a while. I didn’t really want to get into this, but I also didn’t want to offend my friend, and so I literally ignored it, but let it sit there in my requests screen. After probably 3 weeks, I finally decided to check it out. I accepted the animal, installed the Birthday Cards application so I could access their Zoo game, and started to try to figure this thing out.

WOW! It combines the charms of cute animals, investing in and building a business, shopping and collecting, and social interaction. In addition to the “Zoo Dollars”, one would obtain “Wildlife Points”, and of course the Wildlife Points would enable one to obtain the most coveted, rare animals and trees. Every day, the trees are reloaded with coins, and when clicked, add more money to the Zoo Dollars total.

One needs to have more and more friends in order to assign “Zookeepers” to each animal pen. Players need to steadily increase the value of their zoo by increasing staff and animal varieties, and each player’s zoo will eventually expand across various island levels, up to a maximum of 5. My most accomplished zoo friend had a zoo value of over $550,000,000 at one point.

The zoo game has a chat window, too, and noobies can ask questions, highly devoted (addicted?) players can answer questions and one player actually created a help guide that begins, “okay, this is cause that chat on help is full of idiots, so yeah:”. Nice.

Upon realizing that the more friends you have who play the game, the more zoo $$$ you will earn, the more animals you can buy, and that you can also gift, receive and trade animals, many people begin to announce in chat that they want zoo-keeper friends. The application also gives you “lost animals” that show up in your zoo, and you can offer them out to the community for adoption. These are breeds that can’t be bought, only available through adoption.

Like Farkel, the Zoo game offers the opportunity to either earn points by successive days of play or by actually buying them via PayPal or other methods. This is where the game sponsors get their payoff from the addictive quality of the game.

Zoo players get 1 wildlife point with each “level” they achieve, and the levels require certain quantified thresholds to be reached: Breed 4 animals of medium difficulty, obtain 1500 zoo visitors each day, have $1,000,000 zoo dollars at one time, etc. Sometimes the level quests can be easily and quickly completed, and other times they take days and days – like in the breeding of animals.

Or, one can buy the Wildlife points for 25 cents per point, starting with $5 via PayPal for 20 points, and then on up in $10 increments. Heck, why not just spend $50 and get 200 points? Offers of points per action are also available, like taking a survey for 3 points, or downloading a game or application for 3 or 4 points. Some offers require a credit card for a “free trial”, or a movie club, Netflix, Video Professor, and the like.

My Experience

Now that you have the basics in mind, let me tell you how it went for me.

Upon accepting the animal gift, I was on my way. My zoo started with a value of $1,500 just from accepting the gifts alone. Then I learned what happened when I visited my friends’ zoos (more zoo $$$ for each visit), and next I started clicking on the trees and watching the coins pop out and my cash balance increase.

Next I started shopping. The animals’ price tags begin around $100 for a hippo, and at last look and at least 50 species later, have gone up to over half a million for an Asian Horse. Of course the prices vary by Zoo owner, depending upon your zoo value, daily revenue and # of visitors. But I found that each time I bought a few animals, I would then need to hire more staff – maintenance managers, kiosk managers, and more.

Parking lots, trash cans, rest rooms – it was all so realistic, and all so costly! I needed to visit more zoos and find more treasure. Oh yeah – every day, each and every zoo has a Treasure chest for each and every player, the value based on the value of the visitor’s zoo and the zoo being visited.

The animals are so cute! And it’s really fun watching the money flow in. With a systematic process, I found that I could keep expanding my zoo, accessing higher levels, adding friends, and on and on and on.

My trip to the zoo lasted almost a week.

One thing I didn’t realize initially was that every time I found a lost Fennec or Yellow Mongoose, if I wanted to offer it for adoption, it was posted in my feed. Every time I spoke in chat, it was posted on my feed. After 2 days playing steadily, I got a notification that my daughter had made a comment to one of my posts. One of my posts? I’d been too busy playing zoo to post anything! Well, there it was – “Joy Langtry has found a lost Yellow Mongoose in her zoo, and it needs a new home”. Under this, my daughter commented:

“Addict!”

Ugh. That was a bit too close to home. Had I really been spending that much time playing this? Not really, it just looked like it from all the lost animals plastered on my wall.

Or so I told myself. I was letting the zoo run in one tab while doing other work. All I had to do was go back to it every 10 to 15 minutes and click “Start Zoo Day” and let it go. Of course, I did need to go to my friends’ zoos and click trees for coins and animals for the daily Treasure Chest, and that was how I really built my cash flow.

It had a certain elegance about it – a system I could work, like real life only cuter. Hey – like real life? Maybe instead of spending all this time clicking animals, I should be clicking other blogs and networking? Maybe if I systematically repeat certain actions on a consistent and regular basis, my real-life cash flow can add up in ways similar to my Zoo dollars? What a concept!

But, I was having fun breeding animals, now that I had so many species, and had bought 2 of all the breeders. Some were easy, some hard, medium, and expert. They all had different gestation rates – some 4 hours, 8 hours, 12, 24, 72, and 120. One had to be available to feed the baby animal after birth, and depending on the species, be there at 1-hour intervals, or 4-hour intervals, or whatever was required for the breed.

So I had to be careful to schedule my breeding carefully, so I could be available to feed the baby. I started thinking about my baby animals at night and worrying that they might go hungry. I couldn’t stand the thought of a starving baby.

Wait a minute. I was obsessing over virtual baby animals. I was worried that bits of data would miss a feeding and starve to death.

This was not good.

I also began getting invitations to join every other game on Facebook. Mafia Wars, Farmville, Island Paradise, Drinks on Me, etc. I was invited to join groups and causes for which I had no interest or affinity. I began to feel a little creepy with all these unknown “friends” on my list, and then started getting more friend requests from people I had no knowledge of, except that they were also friends with other zoo friends I had picked up.

There were some nice people, don’t misunderstand. One new friend commented on my post about the Ft.Hood shooting, and I felt a connection with her. But, for the most part, these new friends had no interest in me at all, just my zoo. I began to feel a bit used and uncomfortable.

On the Zoo discussion front, there was unrest and discord. The Zoo application had been malfunctioning for hours, and many people who had used PayPal to buy points, get, gift and trade animals, and subsequently lost animals and points, were up in arms. “Someone should get busy fixing this and stop ripping people off!” Indeed.

Yesterday morning was Saturday and I got up and started planning my day. I had one baby due at 8:15 am, and it would need a feeding an hour later. Then I had 2 babies due at around 3:00 pm, so I had less than 6 hours to do all my Saturday errands. Gee, I wondered if I could fit it all in, and if my husband would be understanding if we needed to rush to get home in time.

That was it. That was when I went through my friends list, and deleted the 72 new friends, who really weren’t friends. I went through my feed and removed all the (dozens of) Zoo-related posts. I deleted the bookmark. I was done.

I felt light again, like a burden had been lifted. I knew that going forward, I would share real thoughts and feelings and experiences with my real friends, and I would not muck up anyone else’s wall with a bunch of obsession-based drivel.

I’m happy to say that I have been back to my zoo, it’s still there and my babies haven’t died. But, my obsession with it has. I will go back and enjoy it once in a while, like I do with Farkel – 5 minutes here and there.

I will take the “systematic application of routine actions” concept that hit home so hard, and apply it to my life and real business actions. As my husband reminded me yesterday, “Writers write”. He thought Hemingway said that. How simple, elegant and true.

My trip to the Zoo lasted about a week. It was great and now I’m back home to reality again.