Why use multitouch when you can use a tractor?
But isn't the FarmVille business model supposed to make planting etc really tedious - tedious enough to make you poney up for the fuel for your machinery?
How else do they make money?
Day in and day out here I write articles spanning all kinds of relatively boring topics to the untrained eye. Today, after my previous article analysing the business model (yawn) of online game phenomenon, FarmVille, I discovered a rather interesting twist to the gameplay.
FarmVille is grid based, similar to SImCity in the way that every item uses up a number of squares on the canvas you have. A chicken will take up one square, a plantation patch will take up 4×4 squares, and buildings take up far more.
Considering the game is so hefty on the computer’s resources through Flash consumption and CPU usage, even with scaling the graphics down a notch, even moving the mouse can be laggy, slow and sluggish.
But throw in the multi-touch capabilities of my laptop, I can simply tap away using multiple fingers at a time and plough, plant and harvest my entire canvas of crops in a fraction of the time simply by not using the mouse cursor.
Flash doesn’t support multi-touch just yet, but perhaps with the help of the iPhone popularity, it will soon be around the corner. But for gaming purposes, a single finger at a time is still far quicker than the mouse.
Is this the only practical use I have found for multi-touch computing? Perhaps so, yes.
