Dear Zynga:

You don’t need me to tell you how successful Farmville is. After all, you already know that it’s the most successful application on Facebook with over 82 million users and over 22 million fans. Farmville users represent more than a fifth of all Facebook users and (at least per The Guardian) one percent of the (real) world’s population. That’s huge.

So huge, in fact, that it can be hard to put a human face on it. Let me help by giving you one: my sixty-something year old mother is a woman who previously left all of her computing to her assistant until she retired, at which point she used her old, slow computer (on dial-up, no less) primarily to look up airfares. Until she discovered online casual gaming, at which point she promptly bought a shiny new computer with all the bells and whistles, signed up for Facebook and started adding apps.

She now calls me on a regular basis to remind me to harvest my crops.