Truly awful: Roblox's Grow a Garden reviewed
There's some scholarly research to be done, I fancy, on the strange psychological appeal of boringness in videogames. These gaudy things could be non-stop excitement, and yet many of the most successful are mega boring. 'Grinding' – repetitive tasks undertaken for incremental rewards – is a matter of pride and pleasure for serious gamers; and some games – I'm looking at you, interior-decorating Sims – really do offer a digital equivalent to watching paint dry.
Remember FarmVille, for instance? Here was a truly mind-numbing Facebook game where you managed a virtual plot of land and grew corn and tomatoes and whatnot, traded them for imaginary currency, bought seed to grow more crops, and so ad infinitum. It is what sometimes gets called a 'Skinner box'. It was awful. Everyone loved it. Your mum loved it. It was Facebook's most popular game by miles.
Anyway, the kids have now discovered FarmVille in a new form. It's called Grow a Garden, and it's on the Roblox platform, whose audience is pre-teen or tween, and the BBC reports that 16 million people are playing it. God help us. You buy some carrot seed, dump it in your blobby vegetable patch (the visuals are Minecraft meets Lego), harvest, sell, rinse, repeat. Your plants grow while you're offline, so even while you're at school your blocky virtual blueberries are growing.
I found the best place to play Grow a Garden was in my allotment, where the time I spent attending to my virtual crops was time I wasn't acquiring blood-blisters digging out couch grass and horsetails and bitterly lamenting the sin of Adam. I felt bad. There's probably a lesson in there somewhere.
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