At its peak in March 2010, FarmVille had over 83 million monthly active users begging friends to water virtual strawberries. This episode traces how a four-person team from the University of Illinois pitched Zynga a Sims-like browser game and shipped FarmVille in about five weeks in June 2009, with a plow-plant-wait-harvest loop simple enough that anyone who could click a mouse could play.

The hosts unpack the calculated psychology underneath: crops that withered at 2.5 times their grow time, loss aversion that had adults setting 3 a.m. alarms, the two-tier farm coins and farm cash economy, and Facebook API integration that turned every player into an unpaid recruiter. They cover brand tie-ins from McDonald's balloons to Gagaville, the Hasbro board games including Hungry Hungry Herd, the backlash from Time magazine, Jonathan Blow and Ian Bo ...