Farmville and human nature

I confess to anyone reading this that I play Farmville on Facebook. It's a little embarrassing, but I don't have too many vices. I do it as much for the interaction with others as I do for the game itself. But I've learned or affirmed a few things in the process.
For example, when I first started playing, it was really hard to get started. You don't get a lot of "coins" to play around with, and it would take every coin I had to buy seeds to plant crops (by hand, via avatar). I gained a few friends, and some of them helped me by pointing out ways I could improve the bottom line and begin to build a nicer farm. Farmville encourages its farmers to help each other by raking leaves, pullling weeds, fertilizing other people's crops and sharing things. But it places limits on sharing, and while it encourages gift-giving, too, it limits how many items you can give each day and how many you can give to any one individual.
People visit each other's farms, they share gifts and unexpected bonuses, they are pretty much all positive, uplifting, encouraging and helpful.
When the farm got bigger and my coin stash began to grow, it got to be a lot of trouble to wait while that slow avatar plowed and harvested each little square, or harvested animals and trees. So Farmville provided, helpfully, plows, seeders and harvesters for those who could "afford" them. Farmville was learning, too, I think, because things that were once difficult to get became easier. Like fuel for the machinery. They wanted you to buy things from sponsors to get cash to spend. I suspect people resisted this. I know I did not spend real money on virtual cash. And I did not sign up for offers that wanted my credit card number in return for farm cash.
Some people play aggressively, snatching up whatever is shared before other people can get them. In response, some people began to make special "lists" of friends they knew were playing farmville and were not greedy; they only made certain things available to these special friends. I got into that habit, partly to give my good friends a better chance to get things, but also to prevent my other friends from having to see all the posts that farmville generates. I still do this. I don't want to annoy people who don't play the game.
The more money I amassed in this virtual world, the bigger my farm got and the longer it takes to load the game and manage the farm. And the less I cared about spending coins. I now have close to 2 million coins; I can buy pretty much anything that's available for coins (as opposed to cash, which I have very little of).
In real life, I've never had more coins than I knew what to do with.
The virtual world is not real, and I know that. But it is an interesting way to watch human behavior. I love the way most farmers (and most people on Facebook, for that matter) are so helpful and encouraging to each other. Perhaps it's because there's really nothing at stake -- nothing of substance to gain or lose except friendship and companionship, even if it's not face-to-face presence.
Would we all be so generous, so giving, so encouraging, so helpful in the real world, if we were sharing real treasures? I would like to think so. But I'm not so sure we would.
After all, we do live in the real world. If the persona we present on facebook and in farmville is genuine, why aren't we already behaving that way?