From FarmVille to HolyTown

No party is perfect, and neither is Facebook. 500 million users, that virtually guarantees a large Christian contingent. And just as Facebook is a wet dream for advertisers, where else would you get names and personal details from 500 million potential customers in one place, it is increasingly a wet dream also for Christian (or any other religions’) proselytisers. So I’m not surprised that after the success of FarmVille (10% of FB users play it, thereby clicking on advertising links and having their names entered into advertisers’ and data collectors’ databases), there is now a Christian analogue to FarmVille out on Facebook, called HolyTown, a roughly hacked together copy of FarmVille, where your FB friends are listed as “Heathens” until they install the game, to which you as a player are asked to invite them. Once they install it, they become your “Holy Friends”. The idea of the game seems to be to work towards creating a “church” by earning coins through preaching. Read: Annoying your FB friends. Here’s a screenshot :

Clearly the omnipotent creator of the multiverse feels the need to crank up her PR efforts on this particular remote planet, in one of 100 billion star systems that are contained in 100 billion galaxies. And plenty of mindless godbot drones will no doubt take up the good fight for world dominion on social networking sites, because that’s the arena where the question whether supernatural beings exist will finally be decided !

*eyeroll*

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