Four years ago, a couple in Zhejiang province almost divorced because a 66-year-old man was too tired to wake up his wife at midnight so she could harvest her crops for an online game called “Happy Farm.”
The addictive social game, which the People’s Daily said has attracted more than 100 million Chinese users since 2008, was shut by its earliest platform Renren.com on Tuesday due to “strategy adjustment and costs.”
The death of the game resulted in more than 500,000 posts on Weibo, Sina’s popular Twitter-like microblogging service, as users waxed nostalgic over “stealing crops,” a tactic of the game that became ingrained in the memory of the Chinese Internet generation. Read More »