"What does a re-imagination of virtual farming look like?"

Something of a silly question on its face, and yet one that Zynga vice president of games Tim LeTourneau is fond of asking. Then again, what does a re-imagination of virtual farming look like? Do you farm on the moon? Must you plant crops while defending against waves of onrushing zombies? Or maybe you have to keep your family from starving, despite the bad economy and impossible new farm legislation?

It is, I suppose, unrealistic to expect FarmVille 2 to actually look like a true re-imagination of virtual farming. And yet as I sat in a a boardroom at Zynga headquarters in San Francisco, LeTourneau asked the question several times. He was making his pitch for FarmVille 2, the newest of Zynga's famous (or infamous, depending on who you ask) Ville games. The more we explored the question, the more interested, if not entirely convinced, I became.

Keep Playing. Keep Playing.

Here's my thing with Zynga games: Imagine you're in a world where people only say "yes." Nothing ever goes wrong, nothing ever breaks, the worst thing that happens is you have to wait a little while for whatever next thing you've ordered to come to you. Would you like more food? Sure! Would you like to have a better house, or a more well-decorated lawn? Awesome, it's all yours!

A compulsively positive design is a hallmark of Zynga's Ville games, a lineup that in addition to FarmVille includes CityVille, CastleVille, FrontierVille and of course, the legally contested, possibly copyright-infringing The Ville. None of those games have ever been that exciting for me, because while they may feature minor setbacks (for example, if you don't harvest your crops in time, they'll wither and you'll have to plant more) but in general, a as I play them, I can feel the underlying pull: Keep playing. Keep playing. Please keep farming.

That vibe turns me right off. I know that most games are made with the hope that I'll want to keep playing, but something about how Zynga games remove challenge in order to foster continuous play strikes me as uninteresting, or even vaguely sinister. Here's your farm! It's sunny! Your crops are growing! It's all good!

And yet plenty of people obviously don't mind at all. Zynga's numbers are staggering: People play the pants off of Zynga's games. According to numbers the company sent out with their FarmVille 2 announcement, at the farming game's peak, more than 83 million people were playing every month. Appdata reports that the game still has 3.2 million daily players.

Keep playing. Keep playing. Keep playing.

The Zynga Complex

Let's back up. Zynga's building is a massive complex in San Francisco's SoMa area—you can see pictures of it in this profile by Stephen, and I shot this video of the cavernous main area while I was visiting for an earlier press event.

As I was escorted to the conference room where the FarmVille 2 demo would take place, my PR handler said that they employ thousands of people in the San Francisco office alone—he didn't have precise numbers. The massive building is a hive of activity and action, floors upon floors of desks, monitors and workers.

Zynga is the biggest video game operation I have ever seen. It's also one of the most disliked. When our boss Stephen Totilo recently took a closer look at the company's philosophies and practices and mostly let the company's employees speak for themselves, I was taken aback by the vitriolic reaction from readers and some members of the press. "I'm not retarded, Kotaku," wrote one commenter. "Zynga has a couple of massive PR bodyblows in the past couple of days, and then I come on here and see an article full of hilariously vile info in it with the headline 'Hey, not so bad!' I'm not buying it, even though they bought you."

In other words, this guy was convinced that Zynga had paid off our editor-in-chief in exchange for an article that was honest, fair, and if anything, critical of the company, their practices and their games.

It seems there is a subset of people so focused on hating Zynga that they won't settle for anything less than a polemic. I'm not here to write that polemic. I'm also not really here to write a straight-up preview of FarmVille 2—the game comes out today on Facebook, and you can play it for yourself and read about the new features here.

While I was at Zynga, I talked to two of their top guys: Tim LeTourneau, who used to work on The Sims for Electronic Arts, and director of design Wright Bagwell, who used to work on Dead Space, also for EA. I was there to talk about their newest game, to see if they could sell me on it, and to see if I could get them to assuage any of my skepticism about how they do what they do.

It's A Sequel. No It Isn't. Yes It Is.

An exchange from early in our conversation:

LeTourneau: "We made a decision really early on that these are two different games. We don't even really call FarmVille 2 a sequel."

Me: "Except that you call it FarmVille 2."

LeTourneau: [Laughs] "I know, that's a weird thing to say, and I agree with that… FarmVille is such an important franchise for the company and for social gaming in general. [FarmVille 2] was the name that resonated with people."

So: Yes. Definitely a sequel. Both LeTourneau and Bagwell were hot to talk about water, the most game-changing new mechanic in FarmVille 2. In the first FarmVille, irrigation wasn't a consideration—it was possible to grow crops simply from soil and fertilizer. In the sequel, crops will require water to grow, but you'll only have a finite amount of it.

When LeTourneau talks about the game, he keeps coming back to the way that it's a game like any other. "I think that when you play Farm 2 what you feel is, 'Wow, these are all these little systems that are bouncing against one another, and I've gotta figure out the best way to manage my farm, to get to the highest level, to win, to score, and that's no different than any game, right?"

But is that really true? I asked how you "win" FarmVille, and LeTourneau deferred to Bagwell. How do you win FarmVille?

"You don't," Bagwell said. "I think you can feel like you are winning—"

"That's what I meant to say," LeTourneau interjected, "was not that you win FarmVille, but that you feel like you're making progress."

"It's about feeling like you're sort of in a groove and making progress," Bagwell said, "it's not, obviously, these games aren't designed to have an end. You keep coming back."

A fun-sounding new mechanic is the fact that every time you hit a new level, your whole farm blooms. "Because we're all hardcore gamers," LeTourneau said, referring to the team at Zynga, "we definitely wanted to highlight reward, and working toward reward and giving you a payoff. So one of the things we added came late in the design, and it's turned into the thing that people absolutely love the most. And the thing that you strategize for the most, which is really funny. We added this thing where on level-up, everything on your farm will grow. So, everything blossoms. So it's almost like you set the table for level-up. Especially in the early levels, you're out of water, and you're like, 'Shit, I'm out of water,' because the stuff won't grow because it's not watered, and you're going to your friends' farm and harvesting their water so you can water your farm, and then you hit that level-up moment and have everything go [makes exploding sound]. It's such a rewarding moment, and we all sit and strategize against it. You totally get hooked on the adrenaline of having your whole board pop."

"A Nintendo-ish Vibe"

The new 3D graphics in FarmVille 2 are lovely, to be sure. Plants bounce and sway, animals roam around the farm, and a kite bobs in the breeze. (LeTourneau on the kite: "Do we need a kite that bounces around? Could the game exist without it? Absolutely. But is it super cool? Have I bought one for every one of my farms? Yes, I have.")

LeTourneau said that he and Bagwell are using their experience working on Wii games to infuse FarmVille 2 with some Nintendo magic. "One of the things that [Bagwell] and I talk a lot about, we've both made Wii games, and in terms of mainstream interactivity, the Wii did something where, it just allowed people to interact with the screen in a different way. We wanted to capture some of that; I think there's definitely a Nintendo-ish vibe to [FarmVille 2]. Just being really tactile, it feels good to touch it. It's fun to touch the board."

That may be something of a leap. Making games for the Wii does not make claims that your next game is "Nintendo-ish" sound any less hubristic. But FarmVille 2 is certainly a step up from the first game in terms of bounciness and tactile enjoyability.

The Pinch Is Time

In a FarmVille 2 farm, the philosophy is that "nothing falls from the sky." You'll need to create things on your farm in order to use them, or you'll need to rely on the help of your friends. In a change from past games, your Facebook friends' avatars can physically visit your farm to help you out.

"So one of the things that's really funny in social games is learning how social actually helps relieve challenges or pinches in the game," said LeTourneau. "Every game has a pinch, you know, Super Mario has a pinch, in that I only have so many lives." (Again with the Nintendo comparisons.)

Nintendo's famous platformers have a distinct pinch, as LeTourneau points out. If you make a mistake, you lose a life and progress, and if you run out of lives, you fail and lose the game. But what exactly is the pinch of a Ville game? As I mentioned before, one of my main criticisms of Zynga's games is that they're so positive that they feel meaningless. Compare FarmVille 2 to SimCity, where your city can turn on you, your people can go homeless, and a fire can burn down everything you've built. What are you up against in FarmVille 2?

"I'd say first and foremost, in most social games, what you're really combatting is time," LeTourneau said. "For example, that your crops wither if you don't come back and take care of them. So it is really positive, the pinch is really the speed at which we progress, or really, the loss of your effort. But I think that how these games are different is that in something like Sim City, I would continually be resetting the board. I wipe out my city and I start over. These [social games] are really different. I think they're much more almost MMO-like in that respect. Which is, how much would it suck if every time I came back to World of Warcraft, if you'd been away for a while, or if you died in a dungeon, and all of a sudden you reset to level 40. MMOs don't punish you that much either, for failure in the game. Because they want you to keep playing."

That's true, to a point. It's something I've noticed in my first foray into MMOs playing Guild Wars 2. And yet I fail all the time in that game—I go up against enemies I can't handle, I die, I fail instances, my armor is broken and I beat a shameful retreat. Can anything like that happen in FarmVille 2? Your crops can wither, but can your animals die? (Okay, yes, this is a silly suggestion.)

LeTourneau and Bagwell both laughed. "No, that would be dark," said LeTourneau. "You can't harvest [your animals] for food, either."

It's Not Art, It's Business

As I began to list the sorts of hardships that would make me more interested in a farming game, LeTourneau turned to games and art. "I think, you know, honestly, when you step back… I love the notion of games as art. I always have. But at the end of the day, most game-makers are making games to support an audience and support a business. That's ultimately what you're doing.

"Movie maker… I don't care what you do. If you make blockbusters, yeah, you have a vision of what you want to make, but you're also thinking about the audience, and you're thinking about 'How is this thing going to be successful?' These [games] are no different. And so, I think, what you have to look at is, 'What are the products in this space that have been the most mainstream? That have been the biggest? You know, take away the Kotaku audience and just think about it as an experience. If your girlfriend or your mom plays FarmVille, do you think she'd be psyched to come back to her farm and have all her animals be dead?

"So you kind of have to think about who you're going after. Could we make a really dark, harsh, brutal FarmVille? Absolutely. But not for the audience we're going after. You have to decide who your audience is, and you have to decide how you have the widest funnel, and then provide as much entertainment for the outliers as you possibly can. And that's how I think about that for any game design, not just these games.

"And you know what," he continued, "you should make crazy indie things, and you should find your audience, and like I said, I'm not a doubter of games as art, I just think games as art—as commercially successful—is a different business. There are breakouts, but in general, we're paid to create what I could call commercial art, and that's what these games are. And we try to put as much creativity, and ourselves, into them, but we also want to hit a big audience."

Keep Playing. Keep Playing.

So much of what Zynga does is governed by metrics—they have access to an insane amount of information about what their players do and for how long, and those metrics are invaluable for creating compelling games. "Specifically where Zynga is so powerful," LeTourneau said, "the analytics backend of this is the holy grail. Even for us, coming from traditional games, you can see what people are actually doing. We're guessing! We guess with any traditional game, what people are actually touching and playing with."

I asked if they ever worried about letting metrics dedicate game design to the point that the game was ruined. How do they, as designers, differentiate between the broadest possible appeal and the lowest common denominator? LeTourneau said that even though the game is very accessible, they still have conviction in what they want it to be. "Water's a great example. Water's a challenging system. It's challenging. There are going to be times where you might leave the game with nothing planted because you burned through all your water. And all you've left is just an open field."

Okay, but can't players just buy more water with real money? "Sure. You can always pay to progress. My point is, as a system, and as a lowest common denominator, it's something that you're going to have to work with. For us, it's such a foundational part of this idea of a working, living farm, you ask this question of 'You know, do you just end up with the lowest common denominator,' you still have to have a vision of what the game is, you have to have a fiction that you believe in. You're telling a story. I can't tell a story credibly about this working, thriving farm that you're trying to grow and develop and say, 'everything grows magically.' To a certain extent, you're still making decisions about the integrity of the system that you're designing, even if you're making decisions that 'the lowest common denominator' won't be happy with. I don't want people to think that we're designing for people to just click a button."

And yet often it does feel like Zynga games have been designed just for people to just click a button. If Zynga has numbers telling them that people like to just press a button, like a slot machine, what's to stop them from just making a game that's a slot machine? (Like, say, the mobile slot-machine game Zynga Slots?)

"Here's the secret in that," LeTourneau said. "It's not about somebody pushing the button. It's about somebody pushing the button again. And if slot machines weren't tuned and balanced in a way where you got a reward based on the number of coins that you put in, and the frequency, and all of those things, you wouldn't sit and push a slot machine button. So to a certain extent, it's understanding the backend, it's understanding what drives that behavior."

The Big Payback

Sequels tend to get us thinking about the future, about other sequels that we haven't seen yet, and about where the games we play are going. When I think about sequels to Zynga games, I can't help but picture the world four or five years in the future. People are on Facebook playing FarmVille 3, and CityVille 2, and The Ville 2. And suddenly, ten years after the rise of social gaming, they look at the number of hours they've sunk into these games, at the thousands of dollars and bottomless piles of Facebook spam, and think, "Oh, god."

LeTourneau and Bagwell are less pessimistic about it than I am, and make the fair point that the same shocking realization could be had for any game or pastime. "If I ever stopped to think about the hours that I've put into something like WoW," LeTourneau said, "thinking 'I've spent four weeks of my life, straight,' or whatever I've put into this game. If I stop and I rationalize it, I'm like 'Oh my god.' But I had such a great time. And I'm sitting here thinking, 'I can't wait for Mists of Pandaria. I lapsed out a while ago, but Mists is coming out, I'm gonna go check it out a little bit…'

"Do you look back and do you regret all of the time you spent playing your Super Nintendo as a kid? Absolutely not! I think there will be people who say, 'Oh my god, I can't believe I wasted all my time playing that,' but I think you could say that about anything that you do as an entertainment, that's a passion. Because as you grow older, you recognize the value of your time more. I think a lot of people will look back and go, 'That was really fun, I had a good time.'"

I'll certainly give FarmVille 2 a go now that it's launched. (In fact, I've already accidentally spammed my Facebook feed with some crap about my first crop. Whoops.) But as Zynga's stock hits trouble and its legal woes continue, it's clear that the company needs a big hit. Will FarmVille 2 be that hit? Put another way: Will I, and everyone else who tries the game this week, keep playing? That remains to be seen.

(Seriously, sorry about that, everyone.)

Minecraft has become an extraordinarily popular tool for gamers worldwide to create anything they can imagine, if in a blocky kind of way. Now, it's going to become a tool for the United Nations.

Mojang announced Block by Block today, a program they will be running in collaboration with UN Habitat. The idea is to use Minecraft as a kind of urban planning tool. Block by Block will allow UN Habitat to involve local youth in urban planning decisions, "by giving them the opportunity to show planners and decision makers how they would like to see their cities in the future."

In other words, before planners sweep in and decide how an area should be rebuilt, local kids get to have a go at rebuilding the digital version, to help show—not just tell—UN Habitat what they want and need.

The first project, in Nairobi, is already in planning. (The image at the top of this post shows the photo and Minecraft recreation of the area; full version here.) The goal is to have rehabilitated 300 public spaces by 2016.

Mojang and UN presents: Block by Block [Mojang]

New England's Rob Gronkowski is the "cover" star for Tecmo Super Bowl 2013 a fan-made, free mod of the NES all-time classic NFL game that puts the modern game and all of its stars and uniform colors into the old Tecmo Bowl structure.

The ROM is available for download now. Its rosters are current as of Sunday, "giving players the same great gameplay experience they've loved for years and years, with the added bonus of players who haven't actually been retired for years."

Features this year now include "enhanced passing accuracy and control." Also quickness, an attribute that had no meaning to defensive players in the past, now governs how fast they run if they intercept a pass or pick up a fumble.

"Tecmo Super Bowl 2013 is available for free," brags TecmoBowl.org. "You won't even need a Kickstarter account to get THIS reward." I can get behind that. The ROM can be found at the link.

TecmoBowl.org Presents Tecmo Super Bowl 2013 [TecmoBowl.org]

Pop quiz: name the video game company leader that said the following: "I have not green lit one game to be developed as a single-player experience. Today, all of our games include online applications and digital services that make them live 24/7/365."

That's EA Games President Frank Gibeau. His remarks—culled from promotional materials for an upcoming cloud gaming conference—caused a recent uproar. Many took it to mean that the company that publishes Mass Effect would be jamming multiplayer content into their titles, in an effort to try and stop folks from trading in a game when they've burned through the bulk of what it has to offer.

But, when I spoke to Gibeau today at the New York Games Conference, he said that wasn't what he meant.

"Let me clarify," Gibeau began. "What I said was [about not greenlighting] anything that [doesn't have] an online service. You can have a very deep single-player game but it has to have an ongoing content plan for keeping customers engaged beyond what's on the initial disc. I'm not saying deathmatch must come to Mirror's Edge."

Gibeau chuckled at his own example and continued to explain what the shape of EA's game-making approach will be moving forward. "What I'm saying is if you're going do it, do it with an open-world game that's a connected experience where you can actually see other players, you can co-operate, you can compete and it can be social. Everything that we do, we see the telemetry coming in telling us that's the best way to build our business and that's the best way to build these experiences and be differentiated from others. Yeah, I'm not suggesting deathmatch must be in Bejeweled. It's just… You need to have a connected social experience where you're part of a large community"

When I mentioned that a certain sort of player still wants an experience that can't be interrupted through social interaction, he stated that The Sims plays that way. "The new Sim City, you can play single-player," he continued. "Mass Effect 3, you can play single-player. FIFA, Madden…"

"I still passionately believe in single-player games and think we should build them. What I was trying to suggest with my comments was that as we move our company from being a packaged goods, fire-and-forget business to a digital business that has a service component to it. That's business-speak for ‘I want to have a business that's alive and evolves and changes over time'"

Gibeau's thoughts sync up with the vision that EA CEO Peter Moore imagines as the future of gaming. But he says that there's still room for single-player games in that vision, too.

"That was more where I was coming from," Gibeau explained. "That should not be misunderstood as the death of single-player games, or single-player experiences or telling stories. Narrative is what separates good games from bad games. Or great from good, even." So, don't worry about not getting a Campaign/Story Mode in the next Battlefield. It'll still be there, along with all the online elements that point at a more social, connected future.

Few video game series are as consistently delightful as Paper Mario, Nintendo's charming set of plumber-themed RPGs. Paper Mario: Sticker Star, out this fall for 3DS, looks to be no exception. It's funny, weird, and quite charming.

Now take my thoughts with a grain of salt, because the demo I played last weekend at PAX was short. Very short. Like, ten minutes short. It all took place in two small areas.

(There were some others I could see, but Nintendo rep Kit Ellis told me I wasn't allowed to go to them. Thinking back, if I'd snatched the demo unit and ran away, I probably would've been able to find a place to hide before he caught up. Next time, Kit. Next time.)

Here are some of the notes I jotted down as I played (expanded and turned into full sentences for your reading convenience):

• So the first thing I see is combat. Mario's facing off against a couple of goombas. It's turn-based (unlike the last Paper Mario, which was far more platformy). To attack, I select one of a number of stickers on my bottom screen—fire flowers, hammers, jumps. The usual.
• I can earn blocking and attacking bonuses based on timed button pushes, just like most of the other Mario RPG games. Press a button at the right time during an attack and I'll jump for more power; press a button at the right time when I'm attacked and I'll defend for less damage.
• There's a world map! Holy shit there's a world map!
• Although I only get to see a town (Decalburg, where I can go to buy stickers and turn objects into stickers) and a small field area, I can tell from the map (and the trailer above this post) that there are a hell of a lot cool things to see.
• No partners this time around. Mario goes solo. That's kind of a bummer: party members like Goombella and Bombette were lovely additions to the older games.
• Still, everything here feels just like Paper Mario. I reach a windmill-cottage thing whose blades are blocking its door. I need to find some way of moving the blades so I can get inside.
• Thoughts from our companion sticker Kersti:

  Talk about awful cottage design. "Gee guys, did we forget anything?" OH WAIT, THE FRONT DOOR ACCESS.

  
  

• The dialogue is weird and hilarious, as expected from a Paper Mario game. Those Nintendo of America translators do some tremendous work.
• To get into that door, by the way, I have to take the big fan in my inventory (obtained before this demo started) and take it to Decalburg, where a snarky young toad will turn it into a sticker. Then I have to peel that sticker and place it on the world, where it will turn into a big fan and blow the windmill blades out of my way.
• "Stay perky," one toad tells me. Thanks, toad. I will.

Sticker Star hits the U.S. on November 11.

Violinist Lindsey Stirling has gained a ton of well-earned renown for (among other things) her truly epic rendition of the Legend of Zelda music, a performance immortalized when Olympic gymnast Elsa Garcia Rodriguez Blancas used it during her floor routine.

Now, Stirling has teamed up with vocalist Peter Hollens (with whom she recently collaborated on a performance of the Skyrim theme) to do a duet performance of the theme music from Game of Thrones. Unfortunately, at no point does Hollins sing the amazing lyrics from Anamanaguchi's version. Shame.

You can buy the single on iTunes, if you're so inclined.

My adventures in Guild Wars 2 continue. I've logged in nearly every day for the past few weeks, if only for a few moments. I remain enamored of the art, and in my sessions I nearly always feel like I accomplished something.

I tend to like play sessions about 60 to 90 minutes long, it seems, before I feel fit to wander away. And yet in those hours, I have killed many a beast, earned many a heart, and explored many, many map markers. Still, though, the game offers much I haven't seen—and some things, I'm happy to find absent.

So two weeks in, here are some things I haven't experienced in Guild Wars 2, for good and bad both.

1.) I have not played in a formal group.

Grouping is still a little troubled, a week after launch, but the overflow server situation has improved rather dramatically overall. I'm getting the "you have been moved to overflow" message perhaps a third of the time, on zoning in, rather than seeing it always. Members of my guild have successfully been forming parties, but honestly I just haven't needed to yet. I've certainly fought monsters far too big to bring down on my own, but especially in these early days there are always dozens of people around to work with, and a tab of guild chat to keep me company. Eventually I will join dungeon groups, but that hasn't happened yet in large part because...

2.) I have not hit level 20 with any character.

I do have a favorite: my human thief. She's just barely shy of 16 (my others are all in the single digits) and I'm now ready to move on to the 15-25 maps, having completely finished the Queensdale 1-17 area. Her story quests can be surprisingly difficult, though. I waited until the back half of level 14 to take on her level 11 story instance ("Voices From the Past") and it was a brutal mess that I had to take multiple stabs at. I want to level up in order to see more of the world, but for the time being I'm happy to completely fill out every map as I go and take it all at a slower, somewhat less deadly pace. I'm not sure what end-game could have to offer me that mid-game does not.

3.) I have not completed the 13 daily achievements, ever.

I have come painfully close a number of times. But over the weekend, I finally realized that the "day" resets around 8:00 p.m. EDT. For someone like me, who does most of her playing between 7:00 and 10:00 in the evening, that means the day's accomplishments completely reset in the middle of the average play session. I know any hour would be inconvenient somewhere on earth but man that stinks for us US east coast players. In a game that so starkly quantifies every action the player takes—and issues rewards based on those counts—it feels unfair that I should be unable to make progress because the game's schedule doesn't recognize when my days are.

4.) I have not reported anyone for an offensive name or problem speech.

It's not that I wouldn't, if I had to; I'm not terribly shy about throwing up flags for the really gross stuff that ruins communities. It's that I haven't had to. Local area chat, on my server, is startlingly well-behaved. The only things I've ever seen in /say are strategies for an event, pleas for a rez, or thanks for a timely revive. It's the most polite multiplayer game I've played in a very long time.

5.) I have not yet tried crafting or using the trading post.

It's a little overwhelming, to be honest. After asking some NPCs about what I could learn to make, I settled on making my thief into a leatherworker. I figured, it never hurts to be able to make your own armor upgrades. But learning what needs to be broken down into what parts, or what I need to do to learn to craft useful things from the recipes I seem to magically have, is more complicated. On the one hand I want to take up crafting for both self-sufficiency and for spare income, but on the other hand the game makes it really easy to be lazy, ignore those systems, and just pop around through Asura gates and get credit for vista views and points of interest, instead.

Still, I'm beginning to reach the point of my adventures where freewhiling along is simply no longer going to work. The enemies are getting tougher, the world more wild. Guild Wars 2 spends surprisingly little time holding your hand at all, but even those shy first steps already lie long behind me. Clearly, the time has come to take more initiative. And if that initiative should take the form of learning to sew... well, sometimes, that's just what MMOs are for.

The PC's biggest asset, for users, is its amazing flexibility. The modern computer is both a tool and a toy, a generalist device customizable to nearly any needs. With the barest amount of prodding, comparatively speaking, it can be, and do, anything the user wants.

The PC's biggest liability, to games publishers, is its unpredictable flexibility. The modern computer, both a tool and a toy, is dangerously customizable to nearly any needs. With barely any prodding, it can unfortunately be, and do, anything the user wants.

The resulting tension between PC owners and PC publishers has created an awkward stalemate, a mad arms race to prevent a piracy problem that every new weapon just raises the stakes of. Publishers are well within their rights to want to protect themselves from theft, but old systems aren't working. And turning the PC into a console that also runs Word isn't the answer.

The PC itself is caught in a strange position just now, awkwardly transforming between the old and the new. Computers are now, of course, completely ubiquitous. Most of us carry one in our purse or pocket at nearly all times. They're just heavily specialized, designed to unify hardware and software in a way that prevents users from creating variation. The Xbox, the PlayStation, the iPhone... all are walled gardens, unifying hardware configurations with software that, on the whole, very few people will try to circumvent or customize. Deterrents (voided warranties, service bans, and so on) further prevent more users from trying to customize their own systems.

With Windows 8 on the horizon, the Xbox-style dashboard is coming to a PC near you. EA has Origin, Ubisoft has uPlay, and every major publisher wants you to connect your right to play your games to a social account. As login systems get less obtrusive, they still become thornier to navigate.

The result is a stare-down between companies and their customers that twists both sides into ever more awkward situations, as Rock, Paper, Shotgun's recent interview with Ubisoft highlights. Representatives from Ubisoft contort themselves to avoid giving any actual data on piracy rates, and they end up with the washed-out:

We've heard you. We've heard customers. We want to find a balanced way to protect our IPs and our games, and at the same time trade off frustrations or issues for PC gamers, and improve the policies of our games and services. But I guess the answer is, we're still discussing it.

Unfortunately, the industry has been "discussing" it since roughly the dawn of modern computing, and no satisfactory solution has yet been reached.

If PC gamers wanted to be using an iPad or a 360 for our gaming, we would be. (Many of us, in fact, use multiple platforms.) But PC gamers have chosen a platform explicitly for its flexibility—the ability to run everything from Assassin's Creed 3 to World of Warcraft to whatever new Flash game is out today—and publishers see that very flexibility as the enemy, guarding against the copies we might make or the systems we might crack before anyone even decides they want to.

Maybe the only winning move really is not to play. GOG's major selling point is that all its games, old and new alike, are sold DRM free. The Android-based Ouya has decided to embrace openness. Ubisoft is finally standing down from the worst of its unpopular policies, and yet the walls around our gaming gardens grow ever tighter.

Big developers are sure the future is free-to-play and multiplayer—not only because those make money, but because they force gamers to stay honest and to cough up cash if they want to participate. As a player, I'm not so sure.

Thieves will always steal, but a pirated game isn't the same as a lost sale. The rest of us just want to be left alone to use our computers as we will. Give us a reason to buy a game, and promise that it will work smoothly and not punish us for the purchase, and the system will more or less tick along.

This PC case mod is a few years old, but that doesn't make it any less gorgeous. It's been easy for me to miss, because I speak approximately ten total words of German, and two of them are extraordinarily impolite.

This PC, called Project Zen, was designed to emulate classic and subtle Japanese styles. If Google Translate and my banging about with a dictionary are accurate, the frame was made entirely of wood and rice paper. Even the internal motherboard mount and so on are wood, although the water cooling system is, wisely, made from Plexiglas instead. There's even a DVD drive hidden in there somewhere, covered up in rice paper but fully functional, and hidden is the operative word.

Its parts are now a few years old, and not terribly impressive, but the making-of gallery is, and speaks for itself in any language. Scroll down for a few more detail shots showing off how much painstaking, thoughtful work went into this beauty, or do like me and head over to the source to spend some time daydreaming about how nice it would be to have a PC case that pretty, if only the cat could be trusted not to destroy paper.

Project Zen [babetech.de]

FarmVille 2 will launch today on Facebook and adds a number of new wrinkles to the tried-and-true social game's formula.

Here's what's new in FarmVille 2:

• 3D Camera - Thanks to the power of Flash 11, Farmville 2 is in 3D. It's still an isometric game, and you can't manipulate the camera, but it looks much, much better than its predecessor.
• The Farm's An Ecosystem - Things on your farm are all connected with a new level of complexity—you can mill crops into feed, chop down trees to build new buildings, and the like.
• Water - Your farm will now require water to thrive, and water is easily the most complicated new strategic element in the game. You'll only have a finite amount of water for your farm (unless, of course, you decide to pay for more), and so you'll have to be smart about how you dole it out.
• The village - The village isn't operational yet, but the plan is that you'll eventually be able to take the produce from your farm to a centralized location.
• Friendly Visits - Your friends can still help your farm in FarmVille 2; in fact, they'll be the most powerful asset you've got. Your friends' avatars will come visit your farm and help out.
• Right-Clicking - Thanks to Flash 11, there will be right-clicking in FarmVille 2. Almost like a real PC game!
• No energy - FarmVille 2 will eschew the increasingly unpopular energy-based gameplay; resources will still run out (and you can still pay for more if they do), but you'll always be able to do things on your farm.
• Crafting - FarmVille 2 has a crafting mechanic similar to FrontierVille, in that you can use the things you grow on your farm as ingredients in other things you want to craft, which you can then sell in town or use for other purposes.
• Roadside Stand - The road running to your farm doesn't just bring your friends, it lets you set up a roadside stand and sell your crops. It's not functionally any different than selling crops in the first game, but it is actually neater looking and kinda fun.
• Not Much Love For FarmVille players - The game won't let you carry any of your junk over from the first FarmVille, though Zynga VP of games Tim LeTourneau said that they "talk about" founders gifts like in-game bonuses for people who have bought a lot of things in FarmVille.
• FarmVille won't go away - Zynga has no plans to stop supporting or releasing content for the first FarmVille. "We'll absolutely continue to create content and new game experiences for FarmVille for the foreseeable future," said LeTourneau. "There'd be no reason not to."

The game will be out on Facebook sometime today, so you'll be able to get a good look at what's new when you play it for yourself.

I had a lengthy and edifying conversation with LeTourneau and director of design Wright Bagwell about how the game reflects Zynga's core design ideologies. I was and remain skeptical about a lot of their underlying philosophies, but, er, I also think FarmVille 2 looks shiny and I want to see what it's all about. Sue me!

Anyway, look for my interview later today on Kotaku.

Here are some farm-tastic images for you: