Here's an idyllic scene: a hamlet where the sun always shines, crops always grow and your friends drop by to sweep your yard to the sound of guitar music. Animals do what they are told, there is no disease, and lendin' folks a helpin' hand makes you richer and wiser. Welcome to FarmVille - current population 69m and rising fast.
"It reminds me of my childhood," says one player, Lia Curran, 37, a pharmacist from London. "Right now I'm growing wheat and poinsettia, I've got a small orchard, and I'm rearing some chickens and some cows. I like having the animals. It's soothing."
Curran's fledgling herd, however, is nothing more than a collection of computer-generated cartoons. FarmVille is an online computer game built into the social networking site Facebook and is described by its players as "addictive". Launched last June by Zynga Game Network, FarmVille now has more players than Twitter's entire user base - or more than the population of the UK. The players are largely women over the age of 35.
Jenny Glyn, 33, a London housewife, started playing in September. "I had a look at a friend's farm and was hooked," she says. "My first incentive was to overtake her, but I did that pretty quickly. Now there's something satisfying about growing crops."
FarmVille cunningly unites the worlds of social networking and gaming. Players are given a patch of ground with six fields, "cash", a few seeds and a plough and have to build up wealth, skills and neighbours to create bigger, better, richer farms.
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Inviting your online friends to play means you earn more and get free gifts; you rise rapidly through the first levels but, once hooked, have to work harder and harder with no final level or goal in sight.
"It's very more-ish," says Curran. She hasn't yet paid real-world money to advance in the game, but her friends do. One buys extra virtual currency at the exchange rate of $240 (£145) in FarmVille for $40 (£24) in the real world.
"I'd expanded on FarmVille as much as I could, but I just wanted a pond and some hedges," says the woman, who is too embarrassed to be named. "I didn't tell my husband I'd paid real money because he'd think I'm mad. But then he did keep me waiting in the car outside our house while he harvested his raspberries."
Brian Dudley, chief executive at Broadway Lodge, an addiction treatment centre, warns that this sort of obsessive play can lead to an addiction as severe as gambling.
"Games like this draw people into a fantasy world that's separate from real life where there are no issues, and where things are simple and controllable," he says. In November, he opened the UK's first computer games addiction clinic, treating online gamers who stayed at the keyboard for up to eight hours a day - "the tip of the iceberg", he says.
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Indeed, FarmVille addicts have already faced their first big scandal. On the site, players can take advantage of special offers on ads that promise more virtual cash and points for taking free trials or entering competitions.
Last month, however, TechCrunch, a US website, revealed the scams behind these freebies: the product come-ons often click through to trial services or quizzes that ask for credit card details or mobile phone numbers. Small print warns that their accounts will be debited for months to come.
"I clicked on an ad that offered a free IQ test in exchange for points in the game, took the test and punched in my mobile number so they could text me the result," says one victim, Momar Jahihti. "When I checked my statement, they were surreptitiously billing me $30 [£18] per month."
TechCrunch even posted a video of the Zynga chief executive, Mark Pincus, admitting at a presentation this spring that, "I knew that I wanted to control my destiny, so I knew I needed revenues, right f****** now. So I funded the company myself but I did every horrible thing in the book too, just to get revenues right away.
"I mean we gave our users poker chips if they downloaded this zwinky toolbar, which was like, I don't know, I downloaded it once and couldn't get rid of it. We did anything possible just to just get revenues."
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Two weeks ago, a group of US players launched a class action against Zynga and Facebook. "Most, if not all, of the online advertisements presented through Zynga are scams," the lawsuit alleges. "The advertisements are highly misleading and often result in users subscribing to goods or services that they do not want or need."
Zynga failed to return calls or emails. Last week, Facebook told The Sunday Times: "The ads in question appeared in third-party applications, were not from Facebook, and provided no benefit to Facebook.
"However, we are concerned about any potential threat to our users' experience. As a result, we have, and will continue to, take action against both the ad networks and developers who violate our principles or policies. We do not see any merit in this suit and we will fight it vigorously."
According to Nick O'Neill from the social media site All Facebook, Zynga is making $500,000 (£304,000) a day from its Facebook games, in turn spending some $50m (£30m) a year on Facebook ads.
Zynga has an extremely tight relationship with Facebook through committing to large ad buys, although Facebook refuses to release details of its advertising revenue, insisting that as a private company it has no obligation to do so.
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If all that weren't enough, FarmVille doesn't even function like a proper farm: in FarmVille, wheat grows in two days - in real life, it takes months. But play continues nevertheless.