Dear Farmville....

Please develop an issue that causes you to be "down for maintenance" for a week so I can get some work done.
Thank you.
An addict

Swiss bison?

One of the perks of obsessing over Farmville is that every once in awhile, one learns some odd new fact about international flora and fauna. For example, if not for Farmville I would not know that daikon is a Japanese radish. This might be important information, in some unfathomable context.

Today's farming knowledge nugget is that bison are (supposedly) native to Switzerland. I live in the American West so that was news to me. Naturally I googled for confirmation. Sure enough, there is a town called Bison over there. Switzerland is also home to the Bison Ranch, whose page at the website myswitzerland.com proudly boasts under a photo of these large and familiar looking beasts "An exotic experience, almost the same as zipping across the Atlantic: what you see here is in fact a splendid herd of American bison!"

So do bison more naturally belong amid Alps or Rockies? I am confused.

overdue update

I had meant to be a bit more regular in updating this blog....
My current fairly new favorite game: Frontierville. It has farming, animal tending, and friend-helping. And interesting verbs. Players "clobber" snakes and "whack" buildings.

One thing I do not like about it is clearing the land. My misplaced-in-time hippie self wants to xenoscape and treehug, not chop down all the pines and oaks while digging up the tall grass and wildflowers. Players also have to clobber or scare "vermin," including bears. I rather like bears. Granted, if I was setting up a frontier homestead, I would likely feel differently.

Developing a family is also part of this game. One receives "love" letters from one's future spouse and the spouse supposedly arrives after a number of missions have been completed. In other words, my prairie Prince Charming is still back East. In all likelihood he is consuming large quantities of the early nineteenth century version of hot wings at the early nineteenth century version of Hooters while waiting until I have cleared, clobbered, and whacked our dream spread into shape. Not to worry, though. There will always be seeds to plant, crops to harvest, and livestock to feed. He will get his turn.

Hunting treasure, opening a hotel

I am getting used to the pace at Treasure Isle. You use your energy in a few minutes then move on to other things. There is not as great a temptation to linger, as with some other games. Also the game's developers heard complaints about the energy issue and added a lot more hidden fruit (which gives the avatar energy) within the game.

My latest social app foray is Hotel City. Players build and decorate rooms which then fill with guests who pay based on size of room. Hoteliers also have to decorate their rooms to attract guests and earn stars. My establishment is currently a four-star one. The highest is five-star. Like a general. It is fun to watch the figures working, working out in the gym, resting, and rising.

Acquiring funds and guests is not always, shall we say, genteel. Bags of cash sit in friends' hotel lobbies, which players take. We do not have to do anything helpful on the properties we visit, as in island or farm games where players shoo away crows, rake up leaves, clear away washed up jellyfish, etc. Just grab the dough and go. If our own hotel is not filling up fast enough, we can literally grab passersby and put them by our elevator. Usually they take the hint and decide to check in for a nap, maybe thinking that otherwise they might end up sleeping with the fishes. The shakedown may continue after that, though. One odd way of gaining geld is to randomly roust guests from their slumber. Usually they do a couple of jumping jacks and then dive back under the covers for more ZZZZs. One has money and gives it over. Perhaps the game's creators have an affinity for the gangster genre.

Treasure Isle

Zynga, creators of the Villes (PetVille, YoVille, FarmVille)is getting their feet wet in the treasure genre with Treasure Isle. It just became available today, for me anyway.
It has elements of several different types of games. Players have a home island where they rest, garden, and decorate. The home island also has a gem tree, with jewels of a particular color. Mine is blue. It looks like players want to befriend neighbors with different color gems as different treasure chests require varying colors of gems to open.
Resting is an important element in this game, as energy is a limited commodity. I ran out after just a few minutes of digging for gold and treasure chests. Rather like the real world, in that respect, where I also run out of steam after a short period of exertion. This is different, though, from games like PetVille and YoVille where one can play for much longer without energy becoming an issue. One gains energy by resting, eating fruit (which you can grow on your home island or find on islands you visit), or buying energy packs. This is somewhat similar to the leisure principle at Social City, another fairly new game I play. There players have to build in a certain percentage of leisure options such as water parks and museums to keep the population happy and growing. New citizens will refuse to move into your town when the work/leisure ratio is off and you need the population to keep growing in order to build new factories to earn more money.
I do see a downside for nature-lovers in this island paradise game. Treasure hunters down tropical foliage with machetes to get at the treasure buried beneath. Perhaps a future update will allow those of us who are overly sensitive to environmental ethics to plant seedlings to replace what we dig up. :)

April Fools on the Farm and Ranch

Farmville has a few fun things going on for April Fools Day. You can grow nachos as a crop, earning one experience point and doubling your modest investment of 25 coins in just two hours. The "seed" is a spilled bag of tortilla chips. Farmers can also digitally TP their neighbors' barns or buy - for FarmCash - some truly odd creatures.

SPP Ranchers meanwhile are finding that animals bought today appear to all be named "Ha." The store also features 100-coin animals that mature in a matter of seconds for ... 100 coins!

I do not see any April Foolishness happening in Yoville or Petville. Both, however, along with Farmville are going all out for Easter, "egging" players on to request, gather, and redeem eggs for collectible items. I also just checked to see whether Social City was getting on the silly action. Perhaps a whoopie cushion factory contract for today only? No such luck.

In short, some social app games are getting into the spirit of the day, others not so much. These games are by their nature whimsical. Hopefully next year we will see more whimsy on top of whimsy.

Branching out

Even while attempting to rein in the amount of time I spend on social app games, I find myself taking new (to me) ones for a test run. Recently I tried games involving the Mafia, vampires, and sororities. What does it say about me that of these three, I found the last one the most disturbing and alien to my experience?

Spring baskets??

I appreciate efforts to be inclusive, non-sectarian, etc. Really, I do. But "spring baskets?" That is the latest collecting game-in-game at Farmville. We are all collecting lovely pastel spring eggs in our spring baskets. I suppose next December we will collect goodies for our winter stockings.
People, it is Easter, a cultural holiday of chocolate, rabbits, eggs, ham, and other icons of indulgence after a long, cold, dark winter. Yes, it is also the most significant day of the Christian liturgical calendar. Many people who do not celebrate the religious element still enjoy the cultural one. In either case, it is Easter.

yet more social city

I am still playing Social City, despite the connection issues. Right now I am saving up for the newspaper building, being an old newshound myself. It is 300,000, which takes awhile to accumulate. I did splurge today on another new leisure building that just became available - a bookstore. Every town has to have a bookstore. Or several.

When I am not playing social app. games or grading papers, I am often working with my own online bookstore, Hazelnut Books, at Amazon.com

Another thing I am saving up for is a church, which requires game cash, a lot, and players only get one per level-up, so it will be awhile yet before my town gets religion. If this was the Gilded Age, they could read sermons in the newspaper. Maybe my townsfolk will opt to get Joel Olsteen books at the town's newly constructed bookstore. Being a progressive, I would prefer they went with Jim Wallis, but I am not an autocrat.

Still in Social City

I spoke too soon, as I often do, when I said was emigrating from the city and heading back to the farm. I gave Social City another chance. I still sometimes get the message about the Internet being "a little broken." But I play on. In fact, I am gentrifying my neighborhood, knocking down the little worker cottages with their yards with tiny figures mowing, resting in hammocks, and playing ball. In their place are going apartment buildings and now, (I just got this in the latest level-up) condos. Oh, I will keep the green space and fields of flowers. Or some of them anyway. I am guessing that less animation will mean less Internet brokenness. We shall see.

Moving out of Social City

Sadly, I have to move out of Social City. All those fun eye-candy visuals slow down loading to an insufferable degree and freeze up my browser several times per play session. I guess there is such as thing as too much bling. Sigh.
Back to the farm (ville).

Moving in to Social City

I swore I was not going to add another social application game. My list of cyber pets and farms was already too long.

Then I checked out Social City and was hooked. Instantly. The graphics are great, though they do take awhile to load. Each home's yard has people mowing, playing, or relaxing. The tennis and basketball courts have animated players. Those courts raise an economic and sociological question for me, though. Why do basketball courts cost 3,000 coins to build and tennis courts 40,000. Is it a class issue? The factories have workers in hard hats loading crates and operating forklifts. When a factory is left idle for any amount of time, these little workers seem to get frustrated. It looks like they are even banging their heads against the wall. Perhaps they are anxious about possible layoffs?

Leisure is a big part of this game, despite the aforementioned restless factory people. Players have to build in lots of leisure opportunities for the town to grow. More people equals opportunity to build more factories to make more coin. Each house and hotel "yields" x number of new people in a given time span. Population growth ceases, however, if you do not have enough leisure. Then you have to add fast food joints, parks, gas stations, coffee shops, etc. There is even a farmers market. Nice touch. Churches, by the way, are costly and come a bit later in the game. Yes, even more costly than the tennis courts. Since I teach religions of the world, I would like my town to have a mosque and a synagogue, perhaps a Buddhist meditation center. Maybe in the next upgrade.

Some of the "leisure" building opportunities do not seem to quite fit. The game lumps municipal services such as police, fire department, and schools in as "leisure." Likewise with office buildings. Oh well. I have made a game of creatively placing my leisure buildings, such as putting a bowling alley right next to an art gallery, just to mix things up classwise. Speaking of class, I put a pub next to the school. Inspiration for that, which would not be allowed in a "real" city, I teach. 'Nuff said. I am also an LOLcat fan so I made sure to place a hot dog stand and a burger joint on either side of the pet shop. That way the "kittehs" and "goggies" can "haz" cheezeburgers and hot dogs whenever they want.

More later. Right now I better go tend to my mayoral duties, such as ensuring the factory workers are kept occupied.