The genre doesn’t offer gorgeous graphics or complex gameplay. And I think that’s why casual gaming has taken off, both with people who don’t call themselves “gamers” and hardened gaming vets.
#CITYVILLE GAME ONLINE FREE#
That’s not the case anymore, which is not to say I don’t have free time, I just don’t have as much as I used to. When I was a teen, I could devote chunks of time to playing the latest console release, and thanks to block scheduling in college, I had equally long stretches during the day to dedicate to games like Grand Theft Auto. I don’t have the same free time and patience. Without my knowing it, my priorities had changed. Yet, here I am a CityVille player while my once-beloved game consoles - a Wii, Playstation 3, and Xbox 360 - rest under my flat screen gathering dust. I’ve logged thousands of hours doing what we gamers call “grinding,” engaging in redundant gameplay mechanics like boss battles or driving on the same courses over and over to up our stats, unlock features, and make ourselves more competitive.Īs a gaming purist, I wanted high performance hardware spitting out zillions of anti-aliased polygons (the building blocks of 3-D graphics) for impressive eye candy and vibrating controllers with 15 buttons all hooked up to a big flat screen. Growing up a hardcore traditional gamer, I’ve owned almost every gaming console released stateside since the first Game Boy in 1989. It’s all sorts of embarrassing because I swore to myself this day would never come. Granted, it wasn’t much, but that’s like a lapsed drug addict saying he only had one gram of narcotics as opposed to five. When it first started, I went through fugue-like gaming sessions, seemingly struck by this inflated, screwed up sense of manifest destiny - it was my god-given right to build the largest self-sustaining virtual community possible one corn crop at a time!Īnd not long after, dissatisfied with the relatively slow progress enabled by the game’s free mode, I broke another self-imposed cardinal rule and bought $5 worth of virtual goods to speed things up. To better understand Chan’s achievements, it only made sense to give his work a spin - of course, the problem is I never stopped.Īltogether, I spend at least an hour a day on my virtual city. That’s when I wrote a story about Yick Kai-Chan, the game’s resident architect who spent over 12 years designing buildings in the real world but now designs all the virtual buildings in CityVille. A CityVille architectural design, by Yick Kai Chan. Oh, sure, I wrote about it, and even respected it to an extent - any kind of gaming that brings in new players is a good thing - but I never really got it until my first chance encounter with CityVille a few weeks ago. As a hardcore traditional console gamer, I used to avoid casual gaming. Reactions from some colleagues were similar, from blank stares to silent judgment, followed by something like, “Oh, good for you.” (Translation: “freak.”) She said this with a smile, but I got the sense she wasn’t joking. For instance, a park increases surrounding real estate by 16%, a flowerbed increases it by 1%, a tree by 1%, so forth.“If you ask me to join, I’ll block you,” my best friend mused. To be fair, there are certain aesthetically pleasing things that can increase the value of your real estate. For instance, given the high price of real estate (it takes a lot of money and effort to expand your city) leaving a space empty is almost a stupid thing to do. I keep on emphasizing “quantitative” because elements that create quality to life do not add incentive. In a nutshell, everything is about quantitative growth. I don’t want to have apartment buildings, but I have to because I need to have a certain population. I can’t “unlock” certain buildings unless I have a certain level, so I have to keep building. So if you are a person like me, who wants to build a rural paradise, the game won’t allow it. The houses attract people, the businesses generate money, and roads provide access to the houses and businesses.
This creates an inevitable bias so that people, in order to increase their level in the game, build more houses, more businesses, more roads, etc. A crowded city maximizes profit given the high cost of real estate
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