Hundreds of sentences are spoken about the differences, similarities, effectiveness of the two types of mailing system we have but have you ever thought about the advantage of not changing the e-mail address, though you are shifting your residential or official address.
Over the last few years I have changed my address several times, traveled between cities and kept on changing address. Every time I changed my dwelling, I had to inform my bank, cooking gas office, insurance office and a lot more. On every occasion correspondence is made with appropriate address proof with a request to change the same. From office to office the nature and provision of evidence of address also varies and it’s a boring and irritating job to go to all of these offices on working days and complete all the formalities. Of late once again I am into the process of writing letters and making all efforts to change my address.
In the course of action I realized, I haven’t changed my virtual address for so long and all these years my movement across the country have not held back my connectivity with any of my acquaintances.
Uff!! What a relief!
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Sunday, November 29, 2009
Crops That Do Virtually Nothing
It’s a quarter to midnight, the teacher haven’t completed her answer script correction which she is supposed to submit next day morning and she is stressed beyond anything the word “STRESSED” can describe with an additional pressure to harvest her virtual firm or they blacken into wilted stalks!!
Over the years as a teacher and as a social being I saw the teenagers delay all their work to sit in front of the console of their virtual world of respective games. I had seen boys spending all their free time in playing football or fighting battles on the computer and making the worst use of valuable time. But there is an obvious lack of logical thinking when adults especially professionals mostly defer their work and assignments to harvest virtual crops that do virtually nothing, except earn a well deserved “XP”. The parents and guardians, especially moms who all these years have scolded their wards for wasting time on the consoles are a victim of the latest threat. Most interestingly FarmVille is mostly played among the age group of 24-45. This section of the populace was never in gaming and 2/3rd of them are the women who were never in virtual games before. The farm brought the women folk across the globe to the huge virtual gaming world.
Funny thing is, with all its detrimental effects, people just can’t stop playing FarmVille. With a membership of 11 million daily players, this game has become an epidemic that is even worse than the swine-flu hype. Predictably, I find FarmVille as a killer: it brutally kills all free time, social life and devastates the success of professionals & scholars everywhere. It takes an unprecedented amount of time to harvest, plow, sow and repeat and repeat and repeat. The worst of all is the stress the player takes all through the day behind their mind of successfully managing time and the worries of its failure.
But what this popular Facebook application has done is actually pretty smart. It has managed to tap into the potential inherent in our constant procrastination to bring this trait called “TIME MANAGEMENT” back into our daily lives (and subsequently addict the player and destroy all hope of a social life and make the worst use of time). The way FarmVille forces the player to calculate their time so that crops will always be grown the next day, plan into the future so there will always be a computer around when the cabbages are grown and commit to a specific time is innovative and even somewhat useful. Even another significant change that I noticed among the addicts (they call themselves as “dedicated”) is their perspective towards the plants in and around has changed. They are more caring and considerate with the flora now. The developers at San Francisco's Zynga team definitely deserves applaud for the attitude change they brought among their users.
Not only does the strategy of time management force FarmVille players to stick to a mental schedule, in order to succeed, but maybe these skills can be improved in real life through habit and association. FarmVille is the way to a bright future, but it’s not just a dark abyss of wasted time. It could actually have beneficial effects.
The churn rate for social games is high — two to three months for most titles. A good chunk of players — 25% to 33% — play a particular game two to three months before moving on. By comparison, only about 5% are defined as active users who play a title for more than a year but it will be really beneficial if any percentage of the huge 60 million monthly crowd is benefited in any way, though I only find the STRESS involved in it, but the players claim it to be an escape from city life; it's their relaxation but at the same time the majority admit that “I lose sleep at night, worrying about my farm.”
Hey folks, we have a lot more good to do other than harvest virtual crops that do virtually nothing.
Over the years as a teacher and as a social being I saw the teenagers delay all their work to sit in front of the console of their virtual world of respective games. I had seen boys spending all their free time in playing football or fighting battles on the computer and making the worst use of valuable time. But there is an obvious lack of logical thinking when adults especially professionals mostly defer their work and assignments to harvest virtual crops that do virtually nothing, except earn a well deserved “XP”. The parents and guardians, especially moms who all these years have scolded their wards for wasting time on the consoles are a victim of the latest threat. Most interestingly FarmVille is mostly played among the age group of 24-45. This section of the populace was never in gaming and 2/3rd of them are the women who were never in virtual games before. The farm brought the women folk across the globe to the huge virtual gaming world.
Funny thing is, with all its detrimental effects, people just can’t stop playing FarmVille. With a membership of 11 million daily players, this game has become an epidemic that is even worse than the swine-flu hype. Predictably, I find FarmVille as a killer: it brutally kills all free time, social life and devastates the success of professionals & scholars everywhere. It takes an unprecedented amount of time to harvest, plow, sow and repeat and repeat and repeat. The worst of all is the stress the player takes all through the day behind their mind of successfully managing time and the worries of its failure.
But what this popular Facebook application has done is actually pretty smart. It has managed to tap into the potential inherent in our constant procrastination to bring this trait called “TIME MANAGEMENT” back into our daily lives (and subsequently addict the player and destroy all hope of a social life and make the worst use of time). The way FarmVille forces the player to calculate their time so that crops will always be grown the next day, plan into the future so there will always be a computer around when the cabbages are grown and commit to a specific time is innovative and even somewhat useful. Even another significant change that I noticed among the addicts (they call themselves as “dedicated”) is their perspective towards the plants in and around has changed. They are more caring and considerate with the flora now. The developers at San Francisco's Zynga team definitely deserves applaud for the attitude change they brought among their users.
Not only does the strategy of time management force FarmVille players to stick to a mental schedule, in order to succeed, but maybe these skills can be improved in real life through habit and association. FarmVille is the way to a bright future, but it’s not just a dark abyss of wasted time. It could actually have beneficial effects.
The churn rate for social games is high — two to three months for most titles. A good chunk of players — 25% to 33% — play a particular game two to three months before moving on. By comparison, only about 5% are defined as active users who play a title for more than a year but it will be really beneficial if any percentage of the huge 60 million monthly crowd is benefited in any way, though I only find the STRESS involved in it, but the players claim it to be an escape from city life; it's their relaxation but at the same time the majority admit that “I lose sleep at night, worrying about my farm.”
Hey folks, we have a lot more good to do other than harvest virtual crops that do virtually nothing.
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