Online game results in an offline solution

I am always interested in seeing how digital trends and emerging technologies manifest themselves in the real world. I love the idea of taking the online world offline and the offline world online. This is already happening in city-wide scavenger hunts using tools like Foursquare and Twitter to pass on clues and through billboards like GranataPet dog food billboard in Germany.




Now, we have another interesting idea coming out of the UK - "Real Life Farmville." According to an article today in PSFK, "a large working farm will be taken over for the first time by web users across the world on Wednesday, who will vote on every key decision taken on its cattle, pigs, sheep and crops. The MyFarm experiment hands over power at the National Trust’s 2,500-acre Wimpole Estate farm in Cambridgeshire, UK. Up to 10,000 farming novices will choose which bull to buy, which crop to plant and whether to spilt fields to resurrect lost hedgerows."

MyFarm experiment capitalizes on the existing popularity of Farmville, which currently has 47 million players a month and is the second most popular game on Facebook, to help people understand where their food comes from.

As stated in the article: "'The National Trust is the UK’s biggest farmer,' said Fiona Reynolds, its director-general. 'This is all about reconnecting people to where their food comes from. Our TNS poll showed that only 8% of mothers feel confident talking to their children about where their food comes from. That’s really poignant.'"

It will definitely be interesting to see how the MyFarm experiment shapes up. Personally, I would love to see it succeed.