When FarmVille Made Loneliness Visible

There was a particular kind of loneliness in the early social-web years: you could be connected to almost everyone you had ever known and still spend the evening entirely alone.

I noticed this one night in 2009 while playing FarmVille.

Nothing dramatic happened.

That was the point.

I planted crops, checked something on Facebook, returned to the farm, clicked through another small game and eventually looked at the clock.

Midnight.

The evening had disappeared without becoming an event.

The computer was very good at preventing emptiness from looking empty. There was always one more small action available: harvest, plant, refresh, check whether someone had written, visit another page.

The screen was never vacant.

The room could be.

Before the internet occupied so many idle minutes, boredom usually declared itself openly. There was nothing to do, and you knew there was nothing to do. That condition might send you outside, toward a book, to the telephone or simply into boredom itself.

The internet gave boredom activity.

You could feel busy without becoming engaged in anything large enough to remember.

FarmVille was excellent at this. Crops supplied schedules. Numbers increased. Small rewards arrived regularly. Progress was visible even if the progress vanished when the browser closed.

A virtual farm made time look productive.

Facebook made the loneliness stranger because other people were everywhere on the screen. Old classmates, colleagues, relatives, former neighbors. Photographs from dinners, parties, holidays and lives that seemed, for the duration of a status update, better organized than your own.

Then you closed the browser.

The room became audible again.

I remember making tea after midnight that night and realizing I had not spoken aloud for hours.

The realization did not make me tragic.

I was not especially unhappy.

That made it more interesting.

Loneliness does not always arrive as sadness. Sometimes it appears only as the discovery that nobody was expected to interrupt the evening.

Social comparison sharpened it. Other people uploaded evidence of events worth photographing. Almost nobody created an album called “Tuesday Night: Nothing Happened.”

Their lives were edited.

My evening was live.

The comparison could never be fair.

Fairness rarely prevents comparison.

FarmVille now looks innocent compared with the systems that followed. It was visibly a game. The tomatoes were pretending only to be tomatoes.

Modern screens mix work, friendship, news, entertainment, shopping, dating and learning so thoroughly that it is harder to know when a useful tool has become a way of preventing silence.

The old farm offered a simple metaphor.

I was alone in a room maintaining crops that did not exist.

Fields without soil.

Neighbors visited without leaving the chair.

Harvests without food.

Years later, the technology has changed and the question has not.

What am I doing with this evening?

Sometimes the answer is work, rest, conversation or wonderfully pointless entertainment.

And sometimes time turns quietly into clicks until the room becomes visible only when the screen goes dark.