HOBART 13 bonus: Ashley Farmer

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Digital Pastoral:
How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Earth After I Saw It On My iPhone
by Ashley Farmer

I landed—sans boxes, belongings—at the John Wayne airport two years ago. Although I was born here in Southern California (and logged a brief L.A. stint in my mid-twenties), the change felt colossal. After all, I’d been snowbound and cozy in upstate New York, and I claim both Kentucky and rural Nevada as home.

I’d mostly lived in towns with distinct edges, with scraps of land nobody had staked as their own, with seasons and certain Small Town prototypes: Bank, Inn, Funeral Home.

But L.A. was a city thronged with other cities, a place that stretched into places stretching beyond it, tangled into them, lit them up. Here were seventy-three degrees and Birds of Paradise and cascades of freeway noise so consistent that I doubted their authenticity—and daunting was the prospect of “making it” in such a pauseless, expe(a)nsive place with its only edge the Pacific.

Light Brown Plain Land (XP Gained: +5; Cost: 100 Coins)

During those first weeks, I’d rise each morning to strap on secretary shoes, press the lucky green dress my sister had gifted me, program the GPS (with his soothing robot monotone), and travel across L.A. county to deposit copies of my CV onto desks that hadn’t asked for them. I stewed in an air condition-less Isuzu and slogged through hours of 405 traffic in hopes of arriving home before sharking hour (just past dusk when late drivers loop our neighborhood for thirty minutes in search of parking). I was stuck—often, literally—and waiting for who-knew-what-exactly and just a bit homesick for a landscape that looked familiar, easier. Separated from most folks I knew and loved, I submitted to Facebook and technologies like instant messaging in an attempt to (re)connect. I—accidentally, at first—played a game called Farm Town.

Cat (XP Gained: +9; Cost: 600 Coins)

You’ve played it? (Or at least been tormented by vague agricultural requests in your News Feed)? In case you haven’t, the game operates just as you’d imagine: easily. You’re a farmer and you’re handed a farm. You click scrubby brown squares to “plow” and “plant” seeds, wait a few days, then “harvest” by clicking those squares again. You buy animals, build fences, hire farmhands. The game is logistically straightforward. Aesthetically, it’s a contradiction—both delicious and stilted, both lame and pretty.

But it’s not just about organizing orange trees or purchasing sheep: you’re a farmer who makes money. This translates into larger land, fancier plants, or indulgences like statuary, waterfalls, Hollywoodish party pads and Modern Mansions with swimming pools. You're a farmer with ambition and a social circle: should you click toward the Inn or the Marketplace you might mingle with strangers behind their similar large-headed avatars.

And: should you feel real-life committed and not just Farm Town committed: you might choose to toss real cash from your real wallet toward “farm money.”

Chicken Coop [Harvest animals in 1 day]

(I didn’t play the game for long, didn’t go crazy with it. My jilted livestock have likely split and any watermelons I planted—my favorite crop of all—have long rotted).

Big Dead Tree (XP Gained: +6; Cost: 1000 Coins)

I started writing Farm Town, the project, at around this same time, although it’s not a response to the game in any legitimate way. It’s true that I’m enamored with the objects of that world (Swan Hedge, Log Truck with Chain Saw, Pink Merry-Go-Round, Snow Pine). And the repetition, the rote click-clicking, holds its own weird meditative appeal after a long day (ditto the lushness of so much organized green on one’s laptop screen). Mostly the Farm Town project became a place—both outside and inside this new city—for me to revel in and better understand nostalgia and ambition and technology.

Big Playground (LOCKED Level 73 Required)

As a kid, I grew up with farm moments, farmish scenery. My house faced a dairy farm and fields that alternated between soybean and corn depending on the season. I’ve awoken to my own family’s assembly-line neck-wringing/plucking of chickens. I ate green beans from vines in a dirt road yard, went trick-or-treating or caroling on horseback a few times. But despite our surname, we were farm dabblers and never farmers.

Strangely, it is only in the past few years—since I’ve lived here in an apartment with a single pot of soil—that my family has moved closer toward embracing its roots. My brother and his wife raise goats, harvested turkeys last fall. My mother’s garden yielded hundreds of ears of corn and fed people she’s never met.

Love Doves (XP Gained: +362; Cost: $12)

In snapping photos during my travels home, I realize that we have ways of visually translating the present into something we’ll miss (or already do miss in the very instant we’ve captured it and find it saved on a screen). A childhood garage becomes an Instagram love letter. The immortalized chickens appear permanent fixtures, monuments. No longer is a photo of my nephew a quick picture of a very cute kid: it is Hipstamatic’d and immediately sentimental in ways that echo Polaroids my parents snapped in the seventies. It casts him into the past, or perhaps into a future where he’s grown and I’m reminiscing about the little boy version of him.

These photos: they’re simultaneously deadpan and cartoonish through the lens of an iPhone. They’re romantic and trivial, seductive and flat. Video game-ish and easily deleted. They’re less Farm Anything, more Farm Town.

Red Round Barn (XP Gained: +751; Cost: $25)

So too might be my yearning for the farm I never knew, the profession I’ll never have. And yet my longing to connect in even the most superficial of ways with something agrarian isn’t unique: cursory Google searches suggest that millions of users play games like Farmville and Farm Town each day.

Swings (LOCKED Level 45 Required)

I’ve been thinking about these lines from a Nazim Hikmet poem:

I didn't know I loved the earth
can someone who hasn't worked the earth love it
I've never worked the earth
it must be my only Platonic love

River S Shape (XP Gained: +33; Cost 3,000 Coins)

Perhaps Farm Town trivializes and makes precious a difficult, undervalued profession—I doubt the dairy farmers who lived across the street from us would find the two-dimensional rendering of their world particularly resonant. But maybe we’re recognizing the importance of a lifestyle in which many of us will never partake, one that’s diminishing.

Maybe a game like this mirrors our desire for solitude and simplicity and self-reliance within a landscape that, paradoxically, we can only find online.

Maybe we’re sick of sitting in cars, tired of sharking, and recognize how we might find more than parking on a farm.

Or maybe it’s just in-advance-sentimental: we intuit the end of a something important—the Town Square and Inn, the romance of capitalism—before it expires and becomes a mist-covered dream.

At any rate, it’s ideal and sweet: there is nothing hard about Farm Town. It’s easy to profit and succeed. Time spilled equals money earned. Nothing dies, not really.

It never rains. The grass remains optimistic and green.

Darker Land Path (LOCKED Level 80 Required)

Folks joke that my new city—in all of its Farm Town brightness, with its premise of Farm Town-ish upward mobility—might crack into the Pacific. It does, at times, feel like a possibility: earthquake predictions, a doomsday economy, swarms of people, years of concrete. I’ve joined a collective insanity, a buzzy dream in which we’ve agreed that this city can exist without fresh air or space, where we can prosper and be productive without any actual dirt on our skin. Yet, I’ve found my place here in a different game, and it is a kind of life/living that I’ve now embraced. There is no farm in my Farm Town, but tomorrow I’m likely to glance backward/forward and miss its image just the same.

After all, it never rains here. The grass remains optimistic and green.

Big Sea Coast [203 Fish, 10 Types of Fish] (XP Gained: 960; Cost: $32)

(read Ashley's series of "Farm Town" shorts in Hobart 13)

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All February, Hobart will update every weekday with new bonus material —
photo essays, deleted scenes, interviews, extra short-shorts, movies, excerpts, and other Hobart 13: LUCK.