In FarmVille, you were a farmer. Click a button, plant a crop. Click the button again, milk a cow. Send requests to your Facebook friends for help tending your farm. They clicked along, making your farm bigger and filling one another's Facebook feeds with FarmVille activity updates. Sell your crops for in-game currency to buy in-game luxury goods. Or, if you were impatient, you could convert real dollars into in-game currency and buy that FarmVille villa you craved. It was, in many ways, the forerunner to the mobile games that would flood the Apple and Android app stores in the decade that followed