The highlight of my day Friday came when I completed the last goal thus far in Frontierville, a silly little game I’ve come to love on Facebook. Yes, Friday afternoon, I watched my “bank” closely knowing that I didn’t need much more to have one million coins and thus completing the lone goal staring at me in the upper hand corner on my screen.
And when the window popped up, proclaiming that I was a true pioneer, or what ever it said, I smiled.
I did it.
That goal sat there for many weeks.
Then reality set in. There were no more goals. I finished it. Suddenly, the reason to return to the game when I got a few spare minutes later in the day vanished. The purpose, completing goals and the satisfaction that came with it, was gone.
I contemplated over this much of Friday afternoon and Saturday. Three hours on a lawn mower with nothing but your thoughts and your “satan suck it” playlist, coupled with a husband laid up on the couch with a fever drifting in and out of consciousness produces quite the thought process.
I found myself angry that I allowed myself to get to wrapped up in this game. I hated the feeling of not having additional goals to complete. I enjoyed playing and now? With no goals? What’s the point of even logging on?
Somewhere amidst my thought process it occurred to me that Frontierville is much like life. (Now, if you aren’t addicted don’t play, you might not understand fully where I’m going with this, but try to follow along. Huge eye opener for me.)
Life is like Frontierville.
Allow me to explain.
Apart from the obvious correlation in that you need to work on your frontier to earn money to buy things and for food… that’s pretty much like life. And you have to work to get a spouse. Yup. That’s much like life too. And when I finally got hitched, I made the hubs look just like he did in real life. Then up popped the goal to have another child which is probably the closest the hubs and I will come to birthing another baby. Not wanting any of the children to feel left out, I appropriately named my Frontierville child “thing 5.” Heh.
Oh and just like in real life, your frontierville child won’t work on their own. You have to physically click on them and MAKE them do things.
So there’s the obvious.
On a deeper level (or as deep as you can go when relating a silly little game on Facebook to life) what struck me is that like Frontierville, life is full of goals. Some of them are very simple and take no time to accomplish. They’re easy to knock out. Like clear 10 grass. That was a simple goal to complete, provided I possessed enough energy. There are simple goals in my life right now that would be easy to complete… provided I have enough energy. (Can we say laundry anyone?)
Other goals are simple, but you know they will take time. Like preparing for the school marm. That goal required nothing short of collecting seven daily bonuses from the school house, but since you can only collect one each day. It doesn’t matter how much energy I have – completion is at least a week out. When completing those goals, taking the “waiting it out” stance is about all you can do.
Then there are the goals in Frontierville that require you to collect things to complete. Like the apple pie goal in which I needed four apple pies to complete the goal. This required not only energy, but persistence as well. I can’t tell you how many apple trees I harvested, or how many friends I BEGGED to send me one, it took awhile to complete. But I just kept on harvesting apple trees and eventually? I found all four pies and completed the goal.
Just in time for a new goal to come into play.
But that peanut goal? Oh.my.word.
Planting and harvesting 1500 peanuts. Peanuts that take four days to ripen. And no way that you could possibly plant them all at one time. I felt like all I did was plant and harvest peanuts. And while I was waiting, there were little goals to work on, but that peanut goal. It was about to kill me. I cleared all of the frontier that I could for the maximum planting space and it still took me well over three weeks to complete.
In the end, the reward was great, not only in the amount of money and food collected from the harvest, but it set me up to where I wanted for nothing as the other goals came into play. (Unless I needed to find eggplants or unready chickens on a neighbor’s farm… that was darn near impossible.)
Many of the goals required the help of your neighbors and the more neighbors you had opened eligibility for special things. Just like in life. To go through life we need the help of others. It may be that they need something we have or that we need something they have. Sometimes it was nothing than to just go and help out on their frontier, so they didn’t have to use all of their own energy.
And my neighbors? They weren’t working on the same goals that I was, so we helped each other with a heads up — trying to navigate through the game — just like we would in real life. If I’ve already completed the goal they why wouldn’t I help those behind me with frontier advice?
But the kicker as I worked through how Frontierville emulated life? The realization that with out the goals, the game had no purpose.
Just like life.
The goals we have in life give us a purpose. What would our lives be like if we didn’t have things to work towards and accomplishments to make? Yes, life hands us goals that are easy peasy. We have challenges in life that take energy, ones that take persistence, and ones that seem like we’ll never find all the pieces we need or that they’ll never end. But, they keep us moving, the keep us alive and coming back for more.
And we keep coming back and we push ahead because we want to know what the next goal is. Sometimes the goal appears and we’re not happy with it. Other times, we complete it and say, “well that was easy!” But the fact of the matter is, the challenges and goals give us something to work toward… life.
And along the way we take what we’ve learned and help others.
Zynga is working on adding new goals to the game and rather than quit, I imagine I’ll log on still and make my own goal to help my neighbors — after all, they aren’t finished yet. And maybe, they’ll add a few new goals soon.
Until next time…
