Cityville

This is my first ever public blog post. A strange way to start it on the first day of the new year 2011, writing about Cityville, but gotta start somehow.

According to Wikipedia: CityVille is a browser based casual social city-building simulation game developed by Zynga as an application for the social-networking website FACEBOOK. It was announced on November 18, 2010, but the launch date was delayed to December to allow Zynga to make adjustments to the game. The game attracted 290,000 players on its launch day making it Zynga\’s largest launch ever at the time of its release. The game allows FACEBOOK members to become the mayor of a virtual city and to oversee its development into a large metropolis… The player can also visit their neighbor\’s city and perform 5 jobs.

For those who have not seen Cityville, below is a photo of my own city, Angel\’s Peak, in its current state.

I\’m not big for games, esp online games and Facebook games. What is interesting for me about Cityville is the way that the game pretty much forces you to EITHER spend real-world money buying virtual credits OR aggressively communicate with Facebook friends, to advance. In other words, actively engaging with or making new friends who will join you in Cityville and work together with you can move your city forward quickly; in lieu of that you have to buy the things you would otherwise get from this friendly interaction. Without either, the barriers to expansion and even survival are almost impossible to surmount.

I guess it\’s just the onward extension of earlier games like Farmville, Second Life, etc – but as Cityville is the newest of these games it has mastered better than any other up until now the art of extracting either money or contacts from the user as smoothly and gently as possible.

Personally I have always had trouble with things on Facebook that coerce you to send junk to friends, from throwing snowballs to informing your friends about every move you make in a game like Mafia Wars. Mainly it\’s cause I have never much liked receiving these endless unrequested updates that clog up the FB page and interfere with the important information, like when a friend or celebrity changes their relationship status, for instance. For me it violates some sacred rules of etiquette about the self-inflicted invasion of privacy that is Facebook.

Cityville, however, by allowing you to restrict your communication to Zynga-using friends, Cityville-using friends, or even cross-pollinating with Farmville-using friends (as Farmville is apparently the most popular Facebook game ever), limits the negative impact of using your friend base to advance your game.

What I also find interesting about Cityville is what it has taught me in just a few days about myself and my thinking processes, in addition to, oddly enough, what it actually takes to grow an entity – in this case a city, but it could be a business, . Cityville forces you to make choices like building more housing, which increases population and thus rental income, but at the same time takes more energy to collect rent, and decorating an area with flowers, animals, etc, which increases the rent of adjoining buildings, thus bringing income up without costing extra energy. In general, Cityville demands a constant choice between growth and consolidation, farming and commerce, business and personal buildings, and similar things that seem trivial on a gaming level but actually do a lot to teach about resource management without even noticing that the player is learning this.

What is also great about Cityville is that it allows you with no cost in money, energy, or otherwise, to move existing objects anywhere that you have space for it. That\’s pretty