Farmers’ Insurance has made an appearance in yet another Zynga game. In the past, they have appeared in Farmville. Today, the insurer has been added to the Cafe World game, for a limited time. Players who include the Farmers’ Insurance statue into their game get “Spoil Insurance”.
If you are on Facebook, then you probably are familiar with at least some of the games made by Zynga. If you play one of their games, it is impossible to remain unaware of the other fine games that this very successful game company has created. Little “reminders” appear in each of their games, (often disrupting game play), that suggest that a player should go try out the other Zynga games, too.
If you don’t play any games on Facebook, odds are that you have at least heard of most of the Zynga games. All of their games make use of the social network that Facebook offers. Players are encouraged to send “free gifts” to their Facebook friends, that they can use when they start playing one of the Zynga games.
It is a way to get more people hooked on the highly addictive games that the company makes. Players have to ask other players to send them certain items, in order to complete quests. These two techniques are what has caused the Zynga games to spread across Facebook like kudzu, cluttering up people’s pages.
In the past, Farmers’ Insurance appeared in the super popular Farmville game. Players could choose to put a Farmers Insurance Zeppelin somewhere on their virtual farms. In return, the player got virtual “crop insurance” for a certain amount of time. This is helpful to the players of Farmville, and it gives some interesting publicity to Farmers Insurance.
Farmville and Cafe World are games that run on “real time”. This means that if you plant a crop of strawberries, it will ripen in four hours. If you don’t return to the game in four hours time, your crop will “wither”. The virtual crop insurance from Farmers’ Insurance prevented that by keeping a player’s strawberries ripe until whenever the player was able to return to the game.
Today, Farmers’ Insurance has made its appearance in another Zynga game, called Cafe World. For those that are unaware, Cafe World is a game where a player runs their very own restaurant. You can decorate it however you want to. The majority of gameplay consists of cooking virtual food, for your virtual customers to come in and eat.
Cafe World also runs on “real time”. This means that if you decide to cook bacon cheeseburgers on all the stoves in your cafe, you better return to the game in five minutes and serve them. Arrive late, and your virtual food spoils, and has to be thrown away, (instead of served to virtual customers).
Farmers’ Insurance has been added to Cafe World in the form of a golden “Professor Burke Statue”. The text in the game says “Professor Nathaniel Burke, insurance professor at the University of Farmers, has you covered. Placing Professor Burke grants you no spoil on all dishes until October 2nd”. In short, this statue gives players “spoil insurance”, for a limited time.
On a side note, it seems that Professor Burke is the advertisement icon for Farmers’ Insurance. Remember those commercials that included Beast from the latest X-Men movie? Beast was an exchange student attending Farmers University, and Professor Burke was the person teaching his insurance class.
Image by Queenofhaiku on Flickr