I never intended to start playing CityVille. In fact, the reason I started playing it at all is a bit of a long story. Let’s just say, research.
Truth is I kind of like it – it’s been my mild game distraction this week, while I haven’t been picking up any of the more recent core titles that cost $60 new. There’s just something happy and cheerful about the busy little visual of my growing city, with its teddy bear store and the smiling cactus on the Mexican restaurant.
When most gaming blogs direct attention toward a Zynga title, it’s (not always, but) usually to mention how bad they are, or how they are not really games. Game designers whose work I respect and admire have basically flat-out declared games in this sphere as bad-wrong. The two main complaints about Zynga’s tycoon-lite structure are that the games are manipulative, and, that they require too much busywork that is not challenging play. Another very common complaint is that one shouldn’t call them “social games” because they are not very social.
Now that I think I’ve played CityVille long enough to find the fun in it, I think I’d like to talk about that a little.
At GDC this year Chris Trottier did a talk called “Designing Games for the 43-year Old Woman” that was given to a basically full room. (Slideshare available here.) The slides are interesting as they examine the design philosophies of the games. “When I game,” Trottier says, “I don’t want to be bothered – hassled – challenged.” To paraphrase a few of her points, busy-mom gamers want to click things that are shiny and make pleasant noises. Busy-mom gamers don’t want to have to think or make hard decisions. The thought that ran through my brain after walking out of that talk this year was “…Entire team is babies.” These gamers don’t actually want to be talked down to… but, yet, you kind of have to talk down to them, while maintaining a careful tightrope of pretending you aren’t talking down to them.
So along this vein CityVille is not a challenging game. You get goals to put down buildings. You put down buildings. Some of them increase your money, some increase your population, some allow you to fuel resources to other buildings, etc. If you don’t put down the “right” building, no worries, since it still chugs merrily along.
On Being Manipulative
The people in my city were very sad when I took this screenshot. I know because there is a little blue sad-face in the corner of my screen. It stays there, even if the people walking around within the city are smiling bright and happy. If I roll over the blue face, it reminds me. “Your people are very sad.”
Why are they sad? Well, my city is too close to reaching its population cap. I have to increase my city’s population cap by placing Community Buildings. I have several under construction, but they aren’t complete because Community Buildings can only be totally complete if they are staffed by people who are your friends. So, unless I want to pay in-game cash in order to bypass this requirement, I have to bug my friends.
I always have the option to pay in-game cash, by which I mean, the kind purchased with real-world, folding-money cash, to bypass anything. That too, would make the sad-face go away temporarily. For now, it sits, until I manage to complete a Community Building to raise the cap and make my city less “overcrowded.”
That’s only a temporary measure, of course. If I manage to raise the cap to the point where my people are really happy, as indicated by the green smiley face, new people might start moving in. Then, as they do, the gap between the cap and the total population will close again, causing blue unhappy faces until I either put down more Community Buildings or just start bulldozing crowded apartments.
So, to summarize: unhappy-face, always there looming on the HUD, unless you pay or get your friends’ help to make it go away, and then, only for a little while. My husband laughed and laughed when I explained how the little sad-face worked. It’s kind of genius. And that still isn’t as manipulative as the sad-faced little black sheep that used to show up on my Facebook feed courtesy Farmville players. They’re sneaky tactics. I like to think that I’m a little above them and analyzing them from a great height, but I really just succumb to another human pressure. I don’t want to increase my population because a frowny face appeared; I want to increase it for the pure sake of increasing it, just as one might in SimCity. It is its own reward… mostly because human animals like seeing bars fill and little numbers that start out as small and then grow in to bigger numbers.
I would just keep on increasing those numbers, rapid-fire, but the game creates a lot of different obstacles to this. I can’t just put down buildings forever. Maybe the in-game money goes down, the energy bar goes down, or my population cap is reached (causing frowny faces), and I have to wait. One might interpret this as manipulation, but it also is where the game has its challenge. I know challenge is a dirty word where it comes to a game that’s clearly so unchallenging, but the personal challenge you may set for yourself is “how big can I grow my city without spending real-world money on it?” And that becomes a challenge of planning, placement and patience.
On Busywork
But how much of that is just busywork? The What Games Are blog discussed this matter recently, specifically discussing the “harvesting” mechanic in CityVille, FarmVille etc as an example of needless work. So, yeah, when I get my city open, I have to click on stuff to make stuff pop out and then I click on the stuff that just popped out.
Look, when I clicked on my toy shop a toy robot popped out of the toy shop and now I have to click the toy robot.
…Okay, so, that’s not really the most fun thing to do.
I used to be fairly enamored with Zoo Kingdom, but now I only visit my zoo every once in a while, and this kind of upkeep is basically the reason. Building my zoo was fun. Maintaining it involves a lot of clicking on stuff, so when I boot up my zoo now I see this:
Lots of little things to do. My American Bison is really upset that I haven’t clicked on it in a while, and it’s making something way beyond a frowny face. And I gotta water the plants and collect the money from food stalls and muck out the restrooms. I can pay money in-game to make many of those tasks go away, but since doing the tasks is my main source of in-game money, I have to do them eventually. Also, sometimes, my reward for clicking on an animal is that it dies, which is really quite depressing. Maybe best just to let it live in limbo, angry-face or no.
In CityVille, this sort of activity is in fact busywork. But… not entirely. Since I have a limited amount of “energy meter” when I fire up the game, I have to prioritize what’s best to do first before it runs out and gets a chance to recharge. This doesn’t involve a lot of thought. Obviously, anything with a small window, such as harvesting crops before they wilt, is important to prioritize, while collecting “rent” on a large building can wait a few hours. But there’s a small amount of thought involved here that makes it not just mindless clicking on stuff. My 4 PM low-blood-sugar brain will happily confuse that for strategy.
Also, there is a certain pleasant friction to clicking on stuff (and having stuff pop out of it). Trottier likened these little click actions to popping bubble wrap. It could also be referred to as a “Skinner Box Conditioning” type of response, but I think there is something inside of any human that enjoys the simple act of Clicking a Cow and having it make a cheerful noise. Like it or not, that’s probably one reason why these games succeed as much as they do, especially with audiences that don’t really want significant challenge. When people say things like “these games are only successful because they manipulate you,” they may be half-right, but it kind of ignores the fact that clicking on something and having it make happy noises and bright colors is appealing. Building a little world that you made on your own in the process of those hundred little clicks is also appealing.
But It’s Not Social
So now I come to the actual topic I titled this post about, which is, the “social” aspect of a “social” game. The category of “social games” basically refers to “Facebook games” or games on a social network, and more specifically it usually means little bar-filling tycoon games like this one. And a lot of blogs argue that it’s not social, so it’s silly to call them social games.
But, you know, it’s social enough.
You see your friends as “neighbors” at the bottom of your city. You can visit their cities and help them, and you often must entreat them to help out with yours. You may get a message that you were made foreman of your friend’s factory, or you might see a little icon that represents your friend hopping around sending tour buses to your businesses. Each time this happens there is a small moment of delight, that you are helping that person, or that person is helping you. You are friends being friendly with each other.
And best of all, you’re not in much competition. Maybe you’re jealous that your friend was able to get a bigger apartment building or is a higher city level, but it’s not the highly competitive real-time interaction of shooting at one another or throwing punches at one another. It’s also not stressful and time-sensitive social pressure like running a “raid,” and it’s engineered to be very difficult to cause any undue social drama. (Though, it probably has to someone, because, just about anything that involves more than one person can.)
About the worst you can do is annoy your friends with your wall posts and alerts. Which I might have done this week a little.
But if you’ll now excuse me I think it’s time to collect the daily moneys from my City Hall. You should stop by and visit some time. It’s kind of blissfully dull there, but probably not as outright evil as it’s sometimes made out to be.
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