It can’t have escaped the attention of the many British fans of FarmVille, the Facebook game where players run a virtual farm, that their smallholdings have an anonymous, industrial look — all polytunnels and combine harvesters.
But no longer: reach the 20th level in the game and you can now opt into the English Countryside mini-game.
In it, you travel with a duke in a hot-air balloon to his English country estate and start to restore a village that’s fallen into disrepair, growing crops such as redcurrants and king edward spuds, helping out with the lambing, enjoying new sights such as a police telephone box, and dressing up in-game characters as the Dashing Aviator or the English Lady.
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No stereotypes there, then. Not yet available is a busload of Romanians who’ve arrived to pick strawberries, but it’s surely only a matter of time.
FarmVille is free to play on Facebook, Android phones and the iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch.