Campaign Consultant Plans To Add Political Campaigning To FarmVille

A political consultant is reportedly planning to bring real-world presidential campaigning in to the virtual world of Zynga's FarmVille. Starting later this year, players of Zynga's popular FarmVille will be able to place candidate signs on their farms and go "door to door" to campaign for candidates at their neighbors' virtual homesteads, according to a report from the San Francisco Chronicle (via the Games.com blog). The idea for the new type of in-game campaign ad is credited to consultant Michael Hendrix, a campaign consultant working out of Dallas on Republican Michelle Bachmann's presidential campaign. It's currently unclear whether the planned campaign features would be available to other candidates as well. Hendrix and representatives from Zynga were not immediately available for comment. Hendrix told the Chronicle that the older women that make up the majority of social game players could prove key to winning over the coveted "soccer mom" demographic in the campaign. Once the most popular game on Facebook with over 87 million monthly players, FarmVille has recently fallen to 37 million monthly players, according to AppData. [UPDATE: An earlier version of this story cited the San Francisco Chronicle in saying that Hendrix was working with consulting firm Campaign Solutions. That organization has told Gamasutra that Hendrix does not work with them and that they in fact have never heard of him.]